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The chicken biscuit, a piece of fried chicken split inside a baked biscuit, has no recorded inventor. What the record does show is three Southern chains adding biscuit sandwiches to their breakfast menus within about a decade: Hardee’s in the 1970s, Bojangles in 1977 and Chick-fil-A in 1985 and 1986. Each chain’s own history is clear about its dates and silent on whether anyone beat it to the idea.

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The biscuit came first

Fried chicken on bread is a small idea. The biscuit underneath it carries a longer history. StyleBlueprint’s history of Southern biscuits traces the word to the Latin bis coctus, “twice baked,” and says early biscuits were dried in the oven so they would keep for weeks as army rations, closer to hardtack than to anything fluffy. Sailors’ “sea biscuits” and beaten biscuits, worked with a rolling pin or hammer to add air, came next. One saying quoted on the page held that the dough needed “200 beats for family and 500 for company.”

The soft, tall biscuit tied to the South arrived with industrial-era flour mills and chemical leaveners. The same article names baking soda, baking powder and all-purpose flour as the changes that made a fluffy biscuit possible without heavy beating, and says soft winter wheat grown in the southern half of the country, with its lower protein content, makes the best biscuit flour. It gives White Lily, milled in Knoxville, Tennessee, as a benchmark since 1883. The page is a lifestyle publication rather than a food-history journal, so its history is best treated as a summary and not a primary account.

Where biscuits sat on the table matters for the sandwich. The same source calls them a Southern breakfast staple, often served with preserves or sausage gravy.

A tray of golden buttermilk biscuits with one broken open to show flaky layers.

Hardee’s and the scratch biscuit

Hardee’s opened its first restaurant in Greenville, North Carolina, on September 3, 1960, the company says, founded by Wilber Hardee. It adds that the chain brought in its Made From Scratch biscuits in the 1970s, along with a roast beef sandwich, and that biscuit makers still bake a new batch every 15 minutes.

Mashed gives a more detailed account of the biscuit’s start. It says the biscuits debuted in the mid-1970s at a Virginia Beach, Virginia, location, aimed at the local military population, and reached stores nationwide in 1977. It also reports that, according to The Virginian-Pilot, Mayo Boddie of Boddie-Noell Enterprises is credited as the Hardee’s biscuit originator and that the idea followed a visit to a small country restaurant selling breakfast biscuit sandwiches. That detail matters, because it points to a roadside tradition of biscuit sandwiches that predates the chain. The same article reports that biscuits made up almost half of Hardee’s sales in 2018 and about a third in 2020, which shows how central the bread became. It does not describe a chicken biscuit at Hardee’s, so it cannot say who put fried chicken in one first.

Bojangles, Jack Fulk and a recipe borrowed from Hardee’s

Bojangles’ Famous Chicken ‘n Biscuits opened on July 6, 1977, in Charlotte, North Carolina, according to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which says the founders were Jack Fulk and Richard Thomas and that the first restaurant was a walk-in spot with no seating. The first franchise followed in 1978. WBTV’s company history says the menu centered on flavorful chicken served with buttermilk biscuits, and quotes the company calling the biscuits “the basis for the best breakfast in the industry.”

The connection to Hardee’s runs through Fulk. NCpedia, the state’s encyclopedia, says he operated a Hardee’s in Wilkesboro, where he is credited with introducing that restaurant’s scratch-made biscuit, and that his biscuit was added to the Bojangles menu soon after opening. Richard Thomas had been a Kentucky Fried Chicken president before starting a restaurant of his own called Sunny’s in Charlotte around 1975, which NCpedia says did not do well.

Mental Floss tells the biscuit story with a few extra details. It says Fulk perfected his biscuit-making while owning a Hardee’s franchise in North Carolina and was reprimanded for changing the corporation’s recipes. Adding his recipe to the Bojangles menu alongside Thomas reportedly raised sales by 60 percent. The article, dated August 14, 2015, quotes a company executive vice-president as saying a new batch is made about every 20 minutes, and adds that the kneading technique is closely guarded and that the company runs a Master Biscuit Maker Training Center.

NCpedia adds that both founders had sold their interests by the mid-1980s and that the chain opened its 600th shop on Galleria Road in Charlotte in 2014. Bojangles’ lineage, then, is documented, and it is a lineage of biscuits. The sources say the chain was built around chicken and biscuits served together. They do not say the chain invented the sandwich form, and the Fulk story is a reminder that the scratch biscuit itself traveled between chains with the people who baked it.

Chick-fil-A adds breakfast

Chick-fil-A starts from a different place. The company says S. Truett Cathy opened the Dwarf House, originally the Dwarf Grill, in Atlanta in 1946, and that he invented the original chicken sandwich there. The first Chick-fil-A restaurant opened in 1967, again in Atlanta.

The company’s own story page says the Chicken Biscuit debuted in 1986, the same year the first stand-alone restaurant was built in Atlanta. Senior menu manager Shona Jonson explains the reasoning on that page: “Chick-fil-A wanted to bring guests in for breakfast.” The page adds that, because the brand started in the South, a biscuit was a fitting choice. It does not name a person who created the sandwich.

Mashed, quoting a post on the company’s blog, gives a slightly earlier date for the work. It says the breakfast was developed in 1985, a year before the first stand-alone location in 1986, and that the chain had operated only in shopping centers for the previous 19 years. A separate Mashed article on the chain’s breakfast gives 1986 as the year breakfast was added to the menu. The two articles can be reconciled as development in 1985 and a menu launch in 1986, though neither says so directly.

The sandwich itself is built from a boneless chicken breast portion that Mashed says is pressure-cooked in refined peanut oil, served on a buttermilk biscuit. The company page says biscuits are made in several fresh batches through the morning and the dough is rolled roughly every 30 minutes. Mashed’s breakfast article adds that team members arrive before 5:30 a.m. to start baking, while its other article puts the start at 4:30.

Breakfast was not an easy sell outside the South. The company page says chicken for breakfast was initially a tough sell as the chain grew beyond its home region, and it is now the best-selling entrée on the breakfast menu.

Golden fried chicken filets on a wire rack beside a skillet and a bowl of seasoned flour.

What the sources say about who was first

Three companies, three documented starting points, and no document that names the first chicken biscuit.

Hardee’s has a mid-1970s scratch biscuit and, per the Virginian-Pilot as relayed by Mashed, a model in a country restaurant selling breakfast biscuit sandwiches. Bojangles has a July 1977 opening built on chicken and biscuits. Chick-fil-A has a 1985 development and a 1986 debut. Any of them could have sold a fried chicken filet on a biscuit before the others, and none of the sources fetched for this post says which did. Mashed does say that fried chicken on a biscuit was not unusual in the South before Chick-fil-A added it, but it names no earlier seller and no date.

Pitco, a commercial fryer maker, wrote in a 2023 blog post that pairing biscuits and fried chicken seemed like a natural culinary fit because biscuits were already a Southern breakfast staple. That is a company’s marketing reasoning, not a history, but it matches the logic Chick-fil-A gives in its own account.

Two chicken biscuit sandwiches on parchment, one plain and one topped with pimento cheese and a pickle.

Numbers, spicy versions and variations

The chain-scale figures come from company-aligned sources and should be read that way. Mashed’s breakfast article reports 119 million chicken biscuits ordered in 2017, and its separate Chick-fil-A article reports 133 million sold in 2018. The first article adds that in 2022 the chicken biscuit ranked among the chain’s top five entrées, behind only the original chicken sandwich.

The menu has shifted at the edges. Mashed says the Egg White Grill, launched in 2016 as the chain’s first new breakfast item in six years, replaced the Spicy Chicken Biscuit, which returned to the menu in 2022. At Bojangles the spicy option is a Cajun Filet Biscuit, which First We Feast’s 2013 comparison describes as spicy by design, while it says Chick-fil-A’s heat comes from the spice in the batter.

Toppings vary by region and by cook. Pitco lists egg, cheese, and bacon or sausage as common additions, with pimento cheese popular in the South and hot sauce, pickles and relish favored elsewhere. The same post says that early worries about the biscuit’s appeal in the North proved unnecessary and that chicken breakfast biscuits are now widespread across the country.

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