CHICAGO (NEXSTAR) — McDonald’s already confirmed it’s bringing back a beloved menu item in 2025 but now company officials another “new” option will also be available this year.
In December, Joe Erlinger, president of McDonald’s, told “Good Morning America” that Snack Wraps “will be back in 2025.”
Last week, McDonald’s hinted that another chicken-related offering is coming soon: chicken tenders.
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Chris Kempczinski, McDonald’s president and CEO, didn’t reveal much about it during a call with investors, saying simply, “This year, there is incredible energy for the return of Snack Wraps in the U.S., along with a few other markets. And the U.S. will also launch a new chicken strip offering.”
He added that another recent chicken addition, the Chicken Big Mac, helped to fuel the company’s “chicken market share growth” in the U.S. and France.
When asked for additional details about the chicken tenders and Snack Wraps, Kempczinski said his “U.S. team would kill me if I gave any more details about the when and the exact specifics of how we’re going to plan on doing that, but certainly expect that to come online later in the year.”
It’s been several years since Snack Wraps were available in the U.S. The wraps — variations of which can still be found internationally — contained chicken, lettuce, and cheese all wrapped in a warm tortilla. They launched in 2006 and were later followed by an Angus offering. The latter was dropped in 2013 as McDonald’s made menu changes, while the original Snack Wrap was removed in 2016 over complaints that it took too long to make.
UNITED STATES – JUNE 08: A chicken snack wrap combo meal is seen at a McDonald’s restaurant in New York, Friday, June 8, 2007. McDonald’s Corp., the world’s largest restaurant company, said sales at locations open more than 13 months increased 5.7 percent in January, spurred by growth in Europe and Asia. (Photo by Chip East/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Some individual franchises held onto the Snack Wraps, but in 2020, the offerings were removed from all U.S. McDonald’s restaurants. In the years since, there have been petitions, social media campaigns, and even failed attempts to use celebrity endorsements of the Snack Wraps as leverage to bring them back.
McDonald’s did tease a new iteration of the Snack Wraps in 2023, announcing that it would expand its chicken meals to meet consumers’ demands. That included expanding the McCrispy “to nearly all markets across the world by the end of 2025 and expand McCrispy into wraps and tenders.”
That means Kempczinski’s announcement isn’t exactly the first we’ve heard tenders were planned for the Golden Arches.
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Food influencers who were able to try the McCrispy Chicken Strips — tested in Hickory, North Carolina last year — described the tenders as crispier than the McCrispy Chicken Sandwich with different breading than the buttermilk chicken tenders previously sold by McDonald’s, Southern Living reports.
The Buttermilk Crispy Tenders were released in 2017 following a two-year tender hiatus (earlier in the 2010s, you could find Chicken Select Tenders on McDonald’s menus, which were added in the early 2000s). In 2020, the Buttermilk Crispy Tenders were pulled from U.S. McDonald’s restaurants.
McDonald’s new Chicken Selects are shown Tuesday, July 27, 2004, outside one of the restaurants in downtown Chicago. McDonald’s Corp. added the new chicken strips to the menu of its U.S. restaurants starting Tuesday, hoping to carve out a bigger piece of a growing chicken market. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
Like the Snack Wraps, international McDonald’s restaurants already have chicken strips. They’re described as “a succulent chicken breast, rolled into a crispy batter and fried to golden perfection, together with a sauce of your choice,” in Malta, for example.
It’s unclear when the Snack Wraps and the chicken tenders will be available nationwide.
