Why McDonald's McNuggets Are Always Frozen, Never Fresh

If you're a McDonald's fan, but also a fan of food prepared fresh, you might be skeptical of McNuggets. Those little chunks of lightly battered and fried chicken are, without fail, delivered to McDonald's restaurants frozen, rather than being prepared from scratch on-site. In fact, the nuggets aren't even cooked from their fully raw state in the restaurant: The "cooking" is arguably closer to "reheating," as the nuggets are also partially fried in a McDonald's factory before being flash-frozen.

Yet, the fact that they're frozen might actually be a good thing. Just ask Chip Carter, host of TV and YouTube documentary series "Where The Food Comes From", which aims to explain how the American food chain delivers food from farms to factories and onto our plates. While most of us probably know that chicken is perishable, Carter emphasizes that even among meat, it goes bad pretty easily. "From a food service supply chain standpoint, fresh chicken is a nightmare in the first place," he said in a talk with Chowhound. "It's just slowly rotting from the time it's ready to start its journey to you. ... And now imagine you have to get that same product to NYC and Shanghai and Paris and Hahira, Georgia, and 99 million other places, and it has to arrive in the same shape and meet the same expectations."

While Carter doesn't have firsthand experience with McDonald's exact production or business strategies, he concludes that frozen is the way to go to strike the right balance of quality, consistency, and most importantly, safety.

Chip Carter argues that frozen food gets an undeserved bad reputation, noting that at home, he's mastered the art of freezing food when it's fresh and defrosting it carefully to get a meal that's at peak quality. And huge chains like McDonald's are even better at this. "In the commercial food world, it's a science, and they have it all down pat," he said.

For one, frozen nuggets reduce food waste. In fact, the same logic extends to McDonald's beef, Carter explains, another highly perishable food. Keeping these foods frozen minimizes the amount that is thrown away, while also preventing restaurants from having to constantly check on fresh food to determine whether it's safe to serve. This saves money, and while it obviously boosts McDonald's profits, it also helps keep prices down.

And then there are other aspects to the food safety side: Not only does freezing nuggets circumvent chicken's short shelf life, it also means restaurants don't risk cross-contamination from preparing raw chicken in-house ("the nuclear disaster waiting in every commercial kitchen," says Carter). In turn, restaurants don't need to worry too much about getting sued for making someone sick. In fact, McNuggets are so safe that you can generally even freeze them if you have leftovers and heat them up later, although the quality may decline.