We track the brands, operators, real estate and consumer trends shaping America's chicken restaurant industry
| # | Brand | Read | CSW Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chick-fil-A | Category leader | 74 |
| 2 | Dave's Hot Chicken | Hypergrowth | 71 |
| 3 | Raising Cane's | Compounding | 65 |
| 4 | Layne's Chicken Fingers | Hypergrowth | 65 |
| 5 | El Pollo Loco | Steady | 59 |
| 6 | Slim Chickens | Expanding | 54 |
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Scores are calculated from published unit growth, systemwide sales growth, same-store sales, average unit volume and net-lease cap rates. Brands with fewer than three available components are left unrated rather than guessed at — 7 brands currently sit in that bucket, which is itself a finding.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: The decline moderated from -6.5% in Q1, which management will present as progress. It isn't recovery. Six consecutive negative quarters at ~$235K of restaurant-level profit is a franchisee solvency timeline, not a marketing problem — and the Sailormen bankruptcy already showed what the end of that timeline looks like.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: Wingstop opened 102 restaurants in the same quarter its comps fell 7.5%. That is the definition of a development machine outrunning its demand curve. With AUV already down from $2.1M to $2.0M, every new urban unit is now splitting a shrinking digital order base — and franchisee-credit Wingstop net-lease product should be underwritten on that math, not on WING's balance sheet.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: 312 closures between July 2025 and July 2026 — 7.64% of the American footprint. Read it as inventory, not obituary: three hundred freestanding, drive-thru-equipped boxes in trade areas that have supported chicken for decades just came back to the market, most of them controlled by legacy franchisees with no interest in redevelopment.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: $2.77M for a 6,008 SF relocation store on 1.74 acres in Hixson, on a 15-year corporate absolute-NNN ground lease with 10% bumps. The lowest cap rate ever recorded for a single-tenant Chick-fil-A drive-thru in Tennessee, per CoStar — and it was achieved on a shorter-than-standard term. Chick-fil-A ground leases are now priced closer to bonds than to restaurants.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: The 100 basis point spread between corporate and franchisee QSR is the single most important number in chicken real estate. It is the market pricing exactly what CSW tracks: who actually operates the restaurant. In a year with a major Popeyes franchisee bankruptcy, expect that spread to widen — and to widen most for brands with negative comps.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: A Southeast chicken brand with a 3,500 SF suburban dine-in DNA is now operating in the Bronx, with a 2,800 SF, 16-seat Upper East Side unit behind it. If the small-format Northeast box clears anywhere near the $2.71M system AUV, Zaxby's franchise recruiting stops being a regional pitch.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: Three consecutive quarters of positive comps after seven negative ones, on the back of spicy wings and returning potato wedges. KFC is finally competing on the parts of the bird the market actually wants instead of defending the bucket. The turnaround is real — it is just happening across 3,523 restaurants instead of 3,669.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: Three UK locations in 2026 and 50 over three years — but the structure is the story. Partnering with an established operator platform rather than recruiting franchisees is how a 25-unit American brand gets international scale without international infrastructure.
Units, systemwide sales, AUV, franchise structure, real estate profile and development pipeline — brand by brand.
Who actually owns the restaurants: unit counts, geography, development agreements, acquisitions and distress.
Brand-level cap rates, lease structures, verified transactions and the second-generation inventory closures are creating.
AUV, unit counts, unit growth, comps, cap rates, commodity costs and per-capita consumption — all sourced.
Category growth has halved in two years. Growth is no longer being created; it is being redistributed.
A 100 basis point spread now separates corporate from franchisee credit. That spread is the whole business.
One operator controls a quarter of the KFC system. Another 136-unit operator ceased to exist in eleven months.
More than 4,000 chicken restaurants are under some form of announced commitment. Not all of them will open.
Every figure on this page is attributed. CSW does not publish estimates as facts — where a number is unavailable it is shown as “—”, and where a figure is derived arithmetically from two published figures it is marked as derived.