Blind Taste Test – Fried Chicken

I would have to say this was one of my favorite challenges so far. Any challenge involving fried chicken is a GREAT challenge in my book.
By the look and sound of it, everyone enjoyed themselves.

This challenge came about because of the new Bojangles in Leesburg, FL. Without naming names, one of our employees was front and center on grand opening day. He ranted and raved about how GREAT their chicken is. Ken Knorr, our CEO, tried it out for lunch and he wasn’t as impressed as our no name employee – it wasn’t great and it wasn’t bad – it was just there. The nameless employee could not believe…Bojangles is better than all the rest he proclaimed. ***Lightbulb***

 

For the challenge Ken ordered chicken from Bojangles’ Famous Chicken ‘n Biscuits, Publix Fried Chicken, Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen and Maryland Fried Chicken. He also ordered biscuits where available. You will notice I didn’t mention KFC – everyone was in agreement they did not belong on the list.

 

For the challenge we had 24 participants, however not everyone answered all of the four questions:

 

1. Which chicken was your favorite?

2. Which biscuit was your favorite?

3. Identify the chicken

4. Identify the biscuit

As Ken and I went through the results, we were pretty amazed at the answers.

Considering we have Publix fried chicken on a pretty regular basis, it was the least favorite. The nameless employee corrected his selections before handing in his final answers and it’s a good thing he did, otherwise he would have been wrong. If he didn’t correctly identify Bojangles chicken and biscuit it would have been very difficult for him to come to work everyday. We threw a curveball into the mix by only offering 3 biscuits but supplying all four names. By the way, Maryland Fried Chicken does not have “biscuits” they have dinner rolls.

As we tallied up the answers we were all surprised to know, our own in house non red meat eating, only eats hormone, steroid free chicken graphics guru participated in the taste testing and correctly identified all of the chicken. Guess he knows his chicken.

 

The highlights:

There was a tie between Popeye’s and Maryland for favorite chicken

Popeye’s blew away the competition to take the reign of favorite biscuit

Only 2 company employees correctly identified the chicken – Izaak and Melanie. Lavonne and Elliott (our mobile car wash guys) get a honorable mention as they also correctly identified the chicken – however they did it t by just looking at them.

There was a 4 way tie on correctly identifying the biscuits; Doyle, Jeff, Cheri and Virginia


Thanks Ken and Tina for another great team building exercise.