- Taco Bell is adding chicken nuggets to the menu, an offering that steers it away from its Mexican food roots, but could bring in a new type of customer.
Taco Bell is rolling out a new menu item that wouldn’t seem a natural fit for the chain at first glance: Chicken nuggets.
The Mexican fast-food giant will debut chicken nuggets on Dec. 19, a field that even the company admits “loyalty runs deep” among competitors. Taco Bell nuggets will come with their own spin, though. Breaded with tortilla chips and served with the choice of three sauces, including Hidden Valley Fire Ranch Sauce, the nuggets are also marinated in jalapeño buttermilk to give them a little more zing.
“In a world dominated by chicken cravings, it was time to show the world how Taco Bell does chicken nuggets,” Taylor Montgomery, the restaurant’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement.
Taco Bell first tested nuggets at locations in Minneapolis in 2023 and Houston earlier this year. But this is hardly the company’s first entry into the fast-food chicken wars.
In 2021, two years after Popeye’s decided to take on Chick-Fil-A (and started a national craze), Taco Bell introduced its own take on the chicken sandwich called the Crispy Chicken Sandwich Taco. The two varieties (semi-spicy and actual spicy) sold, at the time, for just $2.49.
Like the nuggets, that sandwich/taco hybrid featured an all-white piece of chicken marinated in jalapeño buttermilk and fried with a crunchy tortilla chip coating. It was served in a taco-shaped piece of puffy bread and topped with a creamy chipotle sauce.
A five-piece order of nuggets will run you $3.99 (or $6.99 for a 10-piece order). Combination meals start at $5.99 and run as high as $10.49.