The Creator of Chicken Nuggets

A widely known fast food staple and kid's snack, chicken nuggets are a crowd favorite. However, it is broadly debated on who really was the mastermind and creator behind this fried, tasty snack. While many believe McDonald’s was behind its invention, its origin story actually started and is back by many sources to be Robert C. Baker, a food science and poultry professor at Cornell University. 

During World War II, the United States and the United Kingdom designed a rationing system. Outside of things like nylon, coal, and fuel, the US also instituted the rationing of beef, pork, sugar, and canned meats. This poultry and dairy became a household dinner meal more typical in American homes. However, after the war, Americans found chicken more cumbersome to make because the chicken was sold as whole birds and sales saw a steep decline. It was rare to find a butcher who would cut the chicken into pieces; yet, there was Robert Baker who wanted to simplify the process altogether. 

Robert Baker also had a reputation for being a household name in food inventions. He was known for making frozen French toast and chicken hot dogs. He saw the value in chickens once they were no longer able to produce or lay eggs. Getting to the chicken nugget was an interesting process. He first started by creating the “chicken stick” which was ground up chicken breaded in egg and then frozen. Baker saw that removing the skin and allowing the chicken to be fried after being frozen may solve the inconvenience that a whole chicken presents. He tested the chicken sticks at local grocery stores and they were immediately popular!

Regardless of the success, Baker saw in the chicken sticks, he felt that the snack needed to be tweaked and he didn’t feel like patenting the snack was important. He wanted other inventors to come up with ideas too. Baker decided to publish his process and sent it out to other food scientists and poultry experts and companies throughout the United States. Seeing an inventor focus on the greater good to deliver and drive change is an incredible quality of Baker’s and it was evident that furthering the process of chicken would make the meat more accessible. 

It was a perfect time to focus on chicken too. In the 1970s, reports of high cholesterol and health problems were associated with eating too much red meat. The United States advocated for more consumption of chicken which was a healthier alternative. To capitalize on this newfound review, McDonald’s jumped into the game. While there is no record of McDonald’s reading the report Baker distributed to food companies, they wanted to offer customers a convenient boneless piece of chicken. With this notion, Ray Crock the founder of McDonald’s went to work. 

The executive chef of McDonald’s, René Arend, played a big role in creating new recipes and hired Keystone Foods to create a way to automate the chicken grinding process. Chef Arend also worked with Gorton, the company who was instrumental in the development of McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. Gorton was helpful in terms of the batter needed for the bite-sized nuggets. Finally, in 1981, McDonald’s launched what is still known today as the Chicken McNugget which is considered one of the greatest products in the fast food industry. Today, nuggets account for nearly 10 percent of the company’s sales. 

So what happened to the innovator who catapulted the chicken nugget sensation? Robert Baker moved on to be the founder and first director of Cornell’s Institute for Food Science and Marketing. He was also part of the creation behind the machine that led to deboning chicken. While he didn’t receive any fortune from the creation of the chicken nugget, Baker is known in history as the “George Washington Carver of Chicken.”