How chicken nuggets are made
A Cornell professor figured out in the 1950s how to make breading stick to ground chicken.
- stations
- 7
- things upstream
- 34
- raw sources
- 15
- steps from the ground
- 9
The short version
Chicken is deboned, and the meat is cut or ground and shaped into bite-sized pieces. The pieces pass through a rotating drum that coats them in batter and breading, then through a fryer that sets the coating. They are frozen and packaged, and finished by baking or frying in the home or restaurant.
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Debone the chickens
Chicken is deboned by hand or by automatic blades. The softer parts of the carcass can also be forced through a mesh in a grinding step, leaving the harder pieces behind.
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Grind and season
Meat is ground and mixed with salt, water and seasoning until the proteins bind it into a sticky paste. The paste holds together without any skin around it, which was the first problem the meat industry had to solve.
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Shape into nuggets
The paste is pressed into molds or cut into pieces of uniform size. Shapes can be cut into dinosaurs, as Perdue Farms first trademarked in 1991.
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Dust and batter
A first coat of flour or starch gives the batter something to grip. A thin outer layer of corn starch also helps the nuggets absorb oil and crisp up in the later stages of frying.
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Bread in a drum
The pieces tumble in a large rotating cylinder that evenly coats them in spiced breading. This is where the crumb sticks, which Robert C. Baker worked out at Cornell.
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Fry to set the coating
Nuggets are carried through hot oil until the batter sets and the outside reaches the desired color. The inside is only part-cooked or fully cooked, depending on the plant.
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Freeze and pack
The fried nuggets are frozen, packaged and stored cold for shipping. At home they are baked, or fried again, until they are hot through.
Worth repeating
- The chicken nugget was developed in the 1950s by Cornell food science professor Robert C. Baker, and he published it as unpatented academic work.
- The largest recorded chicken nugget weighed 51.1 pounds and was unveiled in Secaucus, New Jersey in 2013.
Back to the ground
Follow every input upstream and chicken nuggets starts as these 15 raw sources.
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Sources
Cite this page: "How chicken nuggets are made." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/chicken-nuggets