What Happens To Chick-Fil-A's Leftover Chicken?

As America's most successful chicken chain, Chick-fil-A sells a huge amount of poultry every day. But that also means there are a lot of unsold sandwiches, nuggets, and other prepared foods left at closing that it can no longer offer to customers. Instead of throwing them away and letting them go to waste, Chick-fil-A has a program called Shared Table that donates the leftovers to organizations that provide meals for people who need them.

Restaurant workers pack the excess food at the end of each shift, including non-chicken items like biscuits, and the groups receiving it pick it up. The chain works with an organization called Food Donation Connection, which connects donor companies with local nonprofit and charitable organizations like shelters, soup kitchens, Salvation Army branches, and YMCA afterschool programs. These organizations make new dishes with the food, like breakfast casseroles and stir-fries. More than 2,500 Chick-fil-A restaurants take part, and together they have distributed some 42 million meals in the U.S. and Canada since Shared Table was officially instituted in 2012 (per Chick-fil-A).

The chain's initiative also works to reduce waste by having restaurants cook and prepare everything in smaller amounts throughout the day, so less has to be removed from sale after sitting for too long. Chick-fil-A also released a free online cookbook to help people waste less food at home called "Extra Helpings." It contains 26 recipes, such as chicken enchiladas and apple cobbler, that reuse its food along with everyday ingredients, as well as a few menu favorites, like its discontinued (but beloved) coleslaw and chicken salad.

Chick-fil-A's Shared Table program began with the owner of a single Knoxville, Tennessee, location who started giving leftovers to a local rescue ministries group in the 1980s. About a decade later, he hired three workers whose father worked for Food Donation Connection, and he began donating with its help. Many other locations eventually followed suit nationwide until the company made it an official initiative as Shared Table in 2012.

One of Chick-fil-A's competitors, KFC, also works with Food Donation Connection to provide surplus food through the KFC Foundation's Harvest program. It aids many other restaurant chains with their prepared-food donations as well, including McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Chipotle, Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, LongHorn Steakhouse, and Papa John's. However, Popeyes, another major chicken chain, mostly gives money instead to organizations that provide needed meals. Food Donation Connection also connects non-restaurant donors to nonprofits, such as universities, hospitals, airports, and grocery stores.

As part of its other corporate social responsibility efforts against hunger, Chick-fil-A gives $25,000 to a food bank in the area whenever it opens a new restaurant. It also has a small number of Mobile Kitchens that can be dispatched to help provide food when there has been a disaster.