The Best-Selling Grocery Brand That's Actually Behind McDonald's McNuggets

The Big Mac is arguably McDonald's most famous hamburger, and fries are the best-selling item on the chain's menu, but Chicken McNuggets have become equally iconic in McDonald's history. But who exactly is behind McDonald's famous nuggets? While fast food suppliers aren't always easy to identify since restaurants don't always publicize that information, McDonald's does offer some transparency. In the early 1980s, the chain worked with Keystone Foods to help develop and produce Chicken McNuggets. Today, Keystone Foods continues to produce chicken for McDonald's, though it was acquired by food production giant Tyson Foods in 2018.

The original Chicken McNugget recipe was developed in 1979 by René Arend, McDonald's first executive chef. Keystone Foods later helped the company figure out how to produce them on a large scale. It took six months to perfect the McNugget, and the result was essentially what exists on the menu today. By 1983, Chicken McNuggets were ready to debut nationally. With that said, the fact that Tyson Foods owns the company that supplies McDonald's with Chicken McNuggets doesn't mean that the Tyson-brand chicken nuggets at your local grocery store are real McNuggets. When we ranked Tyson frozen chicken products, the nuggets were fine, but they were not standouts, and they definitely weren't McNuggets. Some fans feel like Tyson's Restaurant Style Crispy Nuggets are similar, but even those have been described as "slight soggy McNuggets" by some unhappy customers on Reddit.

Keystone Foods still produces 300 million pounds of chicken for McDonald's every year. Its parent company, Tyson Foods, now claims to make nine of the top 10 best-selling frozen chicken products in America. Though the company doesn't specify what those nine products are, It's probably safe to assume that Tyson brand nuggets are among them since its website currently lists 17 different types of nuggets.  Some of these are branded tie-ins with NFL teams, while others come in different shapes like dinosaurs, hearts, and stars. The Washington Post said Tyson "indisputably rules the roost" in the nugget category by selling more than $2.2 billion in processed chicken products in 2021 — more than double all other store brands combined. Tyson Foods also owns several other well-known brands including Jimmy Dean, State Fair, and Ball Park.

Ironically, when customers look for a Chicken McNugget dupe in stores, one of the brands fans recommend most isn't Tyson at all. Many fans feel that Country Pride Tempura Chicken Nuggets are the closest you'll get to McDonald's at home. In side-by-side reviews, the Country Pride brand appeared almost identical to McNuggets, and fans have called the taste a near-perfect match, too. What makes this brand a closer dupe than Tyson's own nuggets? It's hard to say for sure. But Country Pride is a Tyson Foods competitor, so unlike Tyson, the brand can market its nuggets without having to consider its corporate relationship with McDonald's.