Chick-fil-A nears $19 billion in sales: Inside the evolution of a controversial brand

“Are we boycotting Chick-fil-A over this?” a podcaster named Joey Mannarino asked his followers on Twitter last May, accusing the fried-chicken chain of pushing what he saw as an offensive political agenda. Of the more than 110,000 people who responded to the poll he’d attached, almost half clicked “Yes, boycott.”



Being shunned is familiar territory for Chick-fil-A. The company has found itself in this spot repeatedly since 2012, when then-CEO Dan Cathy, a vocal Southern Baptist and son of Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy, stepped into the heat of the gay marriage debate—on the “against” side. LGBTQ activists called for a boycott. When news spread that Cathy and his family had donated millions to anti-LGBTQ Christian groups, protesters dug in further.



Last May, though, things were different. Mannarino is a conservative political media strategist who listed his pronouns as “Shut/Up,” and his outrage stemmed from the fact that Chick-fil-A now has a vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion. His supporters had also discovered another red flag on the company website: a policy endorsing “valuing differences,” “ensuring equal access,” and “creating a culture of belonging.”



The language was boilerplate policy echoing federal anti-discrimination laws regarding gender, skin color, religion, age, physical disability, marital status, sexual orientation, and veteran status. That didn’t stop these activists from launching their own investigation into Chick-fil-A’s charitable donations, unearthing almost a quarter-million dollars that the company had given to Covenant House, the largest privately funded charity for homeless youth in America. Covenant House says it takes an “affirming” view of LGBTQ youth and has even provided “community space” to Drag Queen Story Hour. Conservative voices, from right-wing internet personality Ian Miles Cheong to The Federalist, regretted having to inform readers that their beloved restaurant chain had gone woke.



The result: Chick-fil-A now has the unenviable distinction of being perhaps the only major U.S. brand to be simultaneously boycotted by the left and the right. That is some heavy compression to put on a chicken sandwich—and Chick-fil-A already fries the breast in a commercial-grade pressure cooker.



Once well-anchored to the South, both geographically and culturally, the Atlanta-based chain that invented the fast-food chicken sandwich was founded in 1967 by Truett, using a business philosophy based on biblical teachings. The company, which agreed to cooperate with this story but declined to make its C-suite executives available for interviews, has grown into a 48-state empire of some 2,800 restaurants known for their top-rate customer service. Chick-fil-A boasts America’s longest drive-through lines, and in recent years it has outearned every fast-food competitor except McDonald’s and Starbucks, despite being closed on Sundays in observance of the Lord’s Day. Last year’s total sales were nearly $19 billion, an 88% increase from just five years ago.



The privately held Chick-fil-A is growing in other ways as well. Andrew Cathy, the founder’s 45-year-old grandson, replaced his father as CEO two years ago. His first big announcement, in early 2023, was a billion-dollar plan to expand into five markets in Europe and Asia by 2030—a considerable increase to its nondomestic presence, which currently consists of 11 Canadian locations and five in Puerto Rico. A U.K. outpost is scheduled to open in early 2025, with four more by 2027.



To succeed in these new markets, Chick-fil-A is going to have to find ways to maintain its Southern Baptist principles across a much wider range of cultures and to apply its famous customer services practices to a digital ordering model—or decide, perhaps, to sacrifice some of those principles on the altar of growth.







I grew up Southern Baptist in the Dallas suburbs, attending church on Sundays, Wednesdays, and sometimes in between. I loved going to Chick-fil-A and was briefly obsessed with collecting the audiocassette tapes—from evangelical ministry Focus on the Family’s Adventures in Odyssey series—that came tucked inside my Nuggets Kid’s Meals in the 1990s. I don’t remember any of the Happy Meal toys I got at McDonald’s during that era, but I can still hear the plummy voice of Whit, owner of the series’ Whit’s End ice cream parlor. Located in a converted church, Whit’s End was where the Bible would “come alive for all who enter.” Episodes always ended with a moral message. In “Suspicious Minds,” cash keeps disappearing from the Whit’s End cash register. Connie and her coworker Eugene accuse each other—and eventually the janitor, Bernard—of stealing the money. Attempting to nab the culprit, they booby-trap the register . . . just in time for Whit to discover the missing $100 wedged behind the drawer, offering a valuable lesson about jumping to conclusions.



Truett Cathy, who passed away in 2014 at age 93, viewed this part of his job—influencing others while bringing joy—as his religious calling, according to Steve Robinson, who spent 34 years as Chick-fil-A’s chief marketing officer before retiring in 2015. “Truett would often say, ‘Sometimes people are going to come into Chick-fil-A and the only time that anybody is going to show them honor, dignity, and respect for that whole day is if we do it,’” Robinson tells me.



As the business grew—from a post-WWII restaurant called Dwarf Grill to more than 100 mall food-court Chick-fil-A outlets by 1980—Truett had to ensure that he could trust others to stay on message. To do that, he devised a franchise model that remains unlike any other in the United States. It is inarguably responsible for Chick-fil-A’s success.



[Illustration: Matt Chase ]



For years, Truett personally interviewed every prospective “operator,” as franchise owners are known. As he wrote in his memoir, Eat Mor Chikin: Inspire More People, during these conversations he’d say things like, “I want to know that you and I can work together until one of us dies” or describe the potential partnership as “a marriage with no consideration given for divorce.” In the course of my reporting, I heard stories of operators being asked over the years to bring high school transcripts and their spouses (or even children) to interviews. Justin Lindsey, an operator in Miami, interviewed for four years before finally being awarded a franchise. His brother-in-law was just invited to join the Chick-fil-A family after trying for almost five.



“You might go months without hearing anything,” Lindsey tells me. “Then they call and say, ‘In a couple days, we need you to fly to Atlanta for eight hours of interviews.’”



If selected, an operator is invited to purchase a Chick-fil-A restaurant for $10,000—a sum so low it sounds like a trap. (To own a McDonald’s, KFC, or Burger King license, a franchisee must pay a fee of at least $45,000 and have liquid assets between $500,000 and $750,000.) The Chick-fil-A deal, once offered, gets even sweeter. An average Chick-fil-A does $8.1 million in annual sales—eight times more than Dunkin’, two times more than McDonald’s, and in fact more than every other fast-food franchise. After fees, net profit often runs 10%, and half goes to the operator, allowing for many to clear almost half a million dollars annually. Lindsey’s restaurant booked $17 million in sales last year, which would qualify it as one of America’s 50 highest-grossing independent restaurants if it weren’t part of the chain, in the company of three-Michelin-star Alinea in Chicago and Las Vegas’s Top of the World.



The trade-off is that Chick-fil-A operators are expected to live in the community they serve and to be physically present in their restaurant. Owning other businesses is mostly prohibited. Originally, Chick-fil-A capped operators at one restaurant apiece. (In recent years, Chick-fil-A has permitted a select few to open a second very close to their first, and around three dozen now operate a third.) Operators set their own hourly wages and benefits. That’s typical for franchises, though some store operators told me they offer $20 an hour, full healthcare coverage, life insurance, matching 401(k)s, and tuition reimbursement for bachelor’s and even graduate degrees—in an industry where the median wage is only $13.25 and where workers are the group in America most likely to live below the poverty line.



If you want to operate a franchise, though, prepare to get in line. Chick-fil-A added 138 new restaurants last year and told me that it received nearly 100,000 applications for those. That’s an acceptance rate of just over 0.1%. Both the press and Chick-fil-A are fond of saying that it’s easier to get into Harvard (acceptance rate: 3%) than it is to become a Chick-fil-A franchisee.



Once aspiring operators are awarded a restaurant, they receive strong encouragement from corporate: Serve others—not only food but on a deeper emotional level too. This dedication to service has become a signature of the company, helping it build trust, community, and the kind of sales growth and loyalty rankings that are the envy of the business world.



That service mandate was solidified in the crisis year of 1982, which Truett Cathy called “the most severe ever for the company.” The U.S. economy was in a downturn, shopping mall development had slowed, and Chick-fil-A reported its only annual sales decline in company history. Rather than draft a corporate turnaround plan, the executive committee decided to pray and reflect on Chick-fil-A’s purpose. The result was the first official Chick-fil-A mission statement: “To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us. To have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.”



Truett later said that “wonderful things began to happen” once the company committed to glorifying God: Chick-fil-A experienced 28.9% growth in 1983. This was also right after the company introduced chicken nuggets and recruited a Georgia State marketing professor named Ken Bernhardt to study customer experience—just as rivals like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King were copying the brand’s famous sandwich. “It was still the best chicken sandwich, but not by much anymore,” Bernhardt tells me. “So Chick-fil-A did research into what consumers wanted, beyond something that tasted good. The answer was a great experience.” Chick-fil-A began suggesting that operators place fresh flowers on tables and escort customers to their cars with an umbrella on rainy days.



Twenty-five years later, during the Great Recession, another crisis was averted—also, the Cathy family claims, by refocusing on biblical principles. Aware that Americans were facing hard times, Dan Cathy, then president and chief operations officer, drew inspiration from a sermon in Matthew where Jesus addresses a Roman law that allowed soldiers to force Jews to carry their armor for up to one mile, but no farther. In this passage Jesus commands, go a second mile.



Some interpret this as a call to love thine enemy. For Cathy, it was also the impetus for what he called a “radical service makeover” for Chick-fil-A. The first mile hinged on flawlessly executing protocol (a small menu is easier to perfect, don’t cut corners on ingredients, keep restaurants immaculate, grow smart not fast). The second mile was stuff a business consultant might fight you on.



Second Mile Service, or 2MS, rolled out in 2005 and was gaining steam. The company recruited restaurateur Danny Meyer, founder of Eleven Madison Park and Shake Shack, and Horst Schulze, cofounder of Ritz-Carlton hotels, for advice on how to take its connection with customers further. Among other updates, the company retooled the vocabulary of its workers: “Uh-huh” and “No problem” gave way to niceties like “My delight” and “May I refresh your beverage?”



Speaking at Biola University in 2011, Dan Cathy tied 2MS directly to 48 straight months of double-digit sales increases during “the worst economic backdrop we’ve ever seen in my lifetime”—a period when the restaurant industry at large posted 10 consecutive months of negative sales. That chapter of Matthew turned out to be “a sermon on how to operate a Chick-fil-A restaurant,” Cathy said, joking that “Jesus also said in this same chapter, ‘Let your light so shine among men that they may see your clean parking lots and taste those hot waffle fries.’”







More than a decade later, the fast-food landscape has shifted away from personal service and toward convenience. Customers are increasingly eating at home, in the car, at their desk—anywhere but at restaurant tables. Clean floors, crispy fries, and clever ads matter less than which brand pops up first on Grubhub or Uber Eats. Technology is having a disruptive impact across the sector, most notably at Starbucks, where the company’s famous third place café concept has essentially been recast as a contactless Frappuccino pickup depot.



This is a concerning development for a high-touch chain like Chick-fil-A, but the company is adapting. At its drive-throughs, where franchise operators can push upwards of 500 cars past the windows per hour, the process still ends “with a face-to-face encounter where we can connect with the guest,” says David Farmer, Chick-fil-A’s vice president of innovation and new ventures. Farmer told me that the company has developed a prototype restaurant with a drive-through that can serve 720 vehicles per hour—a four-lane affair with an elevated kitchen and conveyors dispatching the food to runners below, who carry it to vehicles like valets.



The company’s urban locations are transforming in different ways. In August, I took the subway to downtown Brooklyn to meet Brandon Hurst, an operator who runs one of the busiest Chick-fil-As in the country.



It was the lunch rush at his four-year-old store, the borough’s only Chick-fil-A, across the street from the Barclays Center on Flatbush Avenue. Standing outside with me, Hurst—a 35-year-old transplant from Atlanta who previously managed store openings nationwide—had just trailed off mid-sentence. Hurtling toward him on the sidewalk was a fat-tired moped. “Nuh-uh! We are not doing this,” he yelled to the food-delivery worker, who was now gaining on two pedestrians. The worker looked back at Hurst briefly, then sped off.



This restaurant doesn’t have a drive-through, patio, or even much of a dining room—just eight two-tops and a counter with stools. Nevertheless, it ranks among America’s highest-grossing Chick-fil-As. Seventy percent of the sales come through mobile orders and digital sales channels like Uber Eats. Hurst has taken me out through a side exit so I can bear witness to the delivery-worker boomtown proliferating outside: at least three dozen bikes and e-scooters. (A DoorDash worker recently posted TikTok videos showing what he estimated were 100 workers queued near the food-pickup zone.) Over the past few years, he says, this space “has been everything from an impromptu barbershop to a hookah lounge, a mechanic’s shop, and a lawn party with folding chairs and a boom box.”



Hurst, a member of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, spent months lobbying officials to create a bike lane to relieve the congestion. For now, the city has established a buffer zone, and he is simply plying delivery workers—who number 65,000 in New York City, are not well paid or well resourced, and are often unprepared for the elements—with free sandwiches so that they’ll consider dismounting before reaching the sidewalk.



Congestion like this is now routine outside restaurants across the city. Chick-fil-A is at least trying to do something about it. Last winter, the company temporarily converted a storefront on the Upper East Side into something called the Brake Room—a delivery-worker hangout space with leather couches, bathrooms, and free coffee and bottled water—that could be used by any delivery worker who needed it. It was the first program of its kind in the city.



Farmer tells me that Chick-fil-A views delivery workers as “an extension of the experience and the brand.” Indeed, these food couriers—who are responsible for what might be considered a new, third mile of service—are often the only individuals who will have any face-to-face contact with Chick-fil-A customers. Yet they’re not Chick-fil-A employees. It’s hard to imagine them agreeing to say “My delight” as they hand over a bag of food at someone’s apartment door in New York (or in London or Asia, for that matter). They work for an app, where the only principle that truly matters is efficiency.







Today, Chick-fil-A’s headquarters, on 99 wooded acres near the Atlanta airport, has just one private office. Located on the fifth floor, facing the tree canopy, it was once Truett Cathy’s. Now it serves as a museum, said to be exactly how the founder left it, with Truett’s Rolodex on his desk next to a Bible open to a verse from Proverbs that he often quoted: “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, loving favor rather than silver and gold.”



Those who first became aware of Chick-fil-A’s Christian perspective after Dan Cathy denounced gay marriage might be surprised to learn that his father was adamantly opposed to mingling business with politics. In his own memoir, Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A, Steve Robinson says that Truett repeatedly stressed that the company should never be used as “a platform for social, political, or religious narratives or positions.” The corporate ethos was servant leadership, Truett believed, and expressing a strong opinion always repels someone.



Through the years, Christian companies have varied widely on where to set boundaries between their businesses and their values. For every Tom Monaghan, the Domino’s cofounder and devout Catholic who donated so much money to anti-abortion groups in the 1980s that he triggered a pizza boycott from the National Organization for Women, or the Green family, who got the Supreme Court to carve out a right to religious freedom for Hobby Lobby by suing to overturn the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, there is a more subtle player. Take the Snyder family, owners of In-N-Out Burger, who for 40 years have done little beyond stamping Bible verse references onto various food and beverage packaging items. “There are lots of ways to be a Christian business,” says Jonathan Merritt, author of several books about Christianity, including A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars. “And some are riskier than others.”



When Dan Cathy was asked about the nation’s “crisis of fatherlessness” on a radio show in 2012, his answer ruptured the decades-old seal that separated Chick-fil-A from politics. “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,’” he replied. Later, a Baptist Record editor called Cathy, catching him while he was doing some weekend yardwork, and asked if his comments meant that Chick-fil-A supported the biblical definition of a family unit. “Guilty as charged,” Cathy answered, adding that the company’s executives were still “married to our first wives.”



This came not long after pro-LGBTQ media group Equality Matters revealed the Cathy family’s $1.75 million charitable donations to anti–gay marriage organizations, including a $1,000 gift to Exodus International, a group that supported conversion therapy.



LGBTQ activists responded in force, assembling outside restaurants with vuvuzelas and signs that said “Hate-ful-A” and “Cluck you” and organizing a day of same-sex kiss-ins across the country. Jim Henson’s Muppets ended a finger-puppet promotion in Chick-fil-A kids’ meals, donating the remainder of the payment to GLAAD, and Conan O’Brien introduced a new mascot, Chaz the Intolerant Chicken, to his late-night audience.



On the other side of the cultural divide, the protests triggered a groundswell of support for the company. While campaigning in Houston, Sarah Palin (and her now ex-husband) showed up at a Chick-fil-A to support “traditional marriage.” Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee organized Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day a month later. “The goal is simple,” the pastor turned radio host explained. “Let’s affirm a business that operates on Christian principles and whose executives are willing to take a stand for the Godly values we espouse.” The outpouring gave Chick-fil-A its highest-volume sales day on record, primarily driven by Southern locations, where the brand was still highly concentrated at the time.



[Illustration: Matt Chase ]



But in other regions where the company had begun to expand, the consequences were calamitous. “I lost more than a million in revenue overnight,” recalls Jeremiah Cillpam. Less than a year before, he had opened the first Chick-fil-A franchise in Hollywood, a drive-through-only joint on Sunset Boulevard popular with students at Hollywood High School across the street. His staff, he says, reflects the local demographics: two-fifths Hispanic, one-fifth Black, and more than 40% LGBTQ. Cillpam released a public letter noting that “those were [Cathy’s] personal views,” but he says sales still took months to recover.



Cillpam and I met in September at Chick-fil-A’s urging. Sitting in his office, off a side street near the restaurant, he tells me he grew up “dirt poor” in the L.A. area and along the southeastern coast, the son of a pastor who immigrated from Vietnam. Cillpam now owns a second Hollywood store, and his total sales last year were $22 million. This allows him to partner with community organizations ranging from schools and churches to Covenant House and Los Angeles Community College, where Cillpam has endowed a business school scholarship. Pay at his restaurants averages $22 an hour, and benefits include a company-funded 401(k), 100% coverage of health insurance premiums, and free college tuition through a program with Point University. This year, three managers are on track to earn six figures, with $175,000 going to his top lieutenant.



Around a dozen current and former employees, two of whom identify as LGBTQ, run or have been tapped to run their own Chick-fil-As. “It’s arguably generational-changing money, especially for Indigenous, Black, and brown employees from a low-income neighborhood in Los Angeles like mine,” Cillpam said.



Dan Cathy visited Hollywood a few months after his controversial comments and apologized to Cillpam’s team. It took almost two years, though, for him to publicly express any regret as CEO, telling The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in March 2014, “You learn from those mistakes. If not, you’re just a fool.” He added that “we have a responsibility here to keep the whole of the organization in mind, and it has to take precedence over the personal expression and opinion on social issues.”



All the while, it seems Cathy was processing the incident—just not publicly. In the weeks after his 2012 comments, he called one of his loudest critics—Shane Windmeyer, founder of Campus Pride, an LGBTQ group that was organizing student protests at colleges around the country—and the two began to talk. “I told him how it was impacting young people,” Windmeyer tells me. “That Chick-fil-A had become a hate symbol. How students would throw the brand’s bags at groups of queer students as they sat in the student union. And Dan just listened.”



Cathy kept calling. There were also invitations: Cathy was meeting with 500 franchise operators in Charlotte, North Carolina, Windmeyer’s hometown—would Windmeyer come and share his story? Would he like to join the Sunday school class for teens Cathy taught and share what it’s like to come out? What about attending the 2013 Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, as Cathy’s guest? During these hangouts, Windmeyer says the two asked each other lots of questions—about their backgrounds, Windmeyer’s husband, Tommy, and Cathy’s devout belief in Jesus.



“Neither of us could—or would—change. It was not possible,” acknowledges Windmeyer, who continues to advise Chick-fil-A. But he says the listening meant a lot.



Not every critic sees things the same way. Carly McGehee is an LGBTQ activist who spearheaded the kiss-ins in 2012, with help from GLAAD. She says people still ask her if they can eat Chick-fil-A’s sandwiches with a clear conscience. “I say, if the chicken is that important to you, be my guest,” she told me from Denton, Texas, where she teaches high school theater. “But until Chick-fil-A says, ‘It doesn’t matter who you love, God loves you’ loudly enough for gay and trans kids in flyover country to hear it, I can’t patronize their business. They have to become more aware of the impact their actions can have on young people who feel alone, unloved, and unsafe.”



In 2019, airports in San Antonio, Buffalo, and San Jose rejected applications to open or extend contracts for Chick-fil-A outposts in their terminals due to ongoing worries about the company’s giving. That same year, eight days after the chain’s grand opening in England, its landlord announced that the restaurant would close when the lease expired six months later, calling backing out “the right thing to do.” At this point, Chick-fil-A tacitly acknowledged that its reputation for anti-LGBTQ giving had been impacting growth.



“There’s no question—we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are,” Chick-fil-A’s president and chief operating officer, Tim Tassopoulos, a 46-year company veteran, told the trade magazine Bisnow. Who they are, he explained, is a company that no longer donates to organizations with political agendas, anti-LGBTQ or otherwise. The company’s giving arm, the Chick-fil-A Foundation, soon announced that it would donate exclusively to education and fighting homelessness and hunger.



Aghast, Mike Huckabee argued that the brand wasn’t staying out of the culture wars but fighting for the other side. “If Chick-fil-A believes that the Left is now going to start patronizing Chick-fil-A and saying wonderful things about them,” he warned, “they’ve got to be kidding.”



Huckabee’s reaction portended the broader conservative fury to come. In 2020, as the acronyms ESG and DEI entered the corporate lexicon, Chick-fil-A named Erick McReynolds, a 13-year veteran of the company, as its first executive director of DEI. It also started publishing an annual impact report—the latest edition of which focuses on racial equity and climate stewardship—and debuted an animated series called The Stories of Evergreen Hills, a modernized and inclusive Adventures in Odyssey, with the racially ambiguous protagonist Sam and her Black friend CeCe learning life lessons from an inventor resembling Whit at Whit’s End.



That summer, the Black Lives Matter movement was in its fullest swing. During an appearance at an Atlanta megachurch, Dan Cathy pleaded for the mostly white crowd to take ownership and fight racism through acts of service. He then knelt at the feet of the other guest onstage—Lecrae Moore, a Black Grammy-winning rapper—and began lightly scrubbing Moore’s sneakers with a shoe brush. “If we find somebody that needs to have their shoes shined,” Cathy said, “we need to go over and shine their shoes.”



The stunt made many progressives cringe. Shining another man’s shoes carries historical baggage involving race and class. Yet it stirred outrage among certain conservatives, too, for its deference. The sermon resurfaced again three years later, in May, when Fox News host Harris Faulkner labeled Cathy’s comments “amazingly crazy stuff” and conservative media strategist Mannarino tweeted out his poll. Podcaster Benny Johnson said Cathy was infected with the “woke Christian mind virus” and that Chick-fil-A had become “the biggest fraud ever pulled on American Christians.”







Half of all Americans say they have boycotted a brand specifically because it took a political stand they disagreed with. And in today’s charged political environment, it’s easy to become a lightning rod with a single misstep. Just ask Bud Light or Disney. All of this will make Chick-fil-A’s next moves critical viewing for business leaders everywhere.



If Chick-fil-A manages to thread the needle—succeeding with its growth plan while retaining its bedrock principles and evolving with the times—it will be a testament to the company’s willingness to listen to, and learn from, those who disagree with some of those beliefs. It will also be a function of the freedom it gives operators to engage with their local communities. And then there’s the company’s dedication to service. Good service and good food can overcome a lot of perceived sins in today’s consumer-driven convenience economy.



Meanwhile, the company’s next generation of customers—despite identifying as more politically radical than their forebears—seem largely unconcerned with both the decade-old anti-LGBTQ controversy and today’s conservative anti-DEI outrage. Investment bank Piper Sandler’s “Taking Stock With Teens” survey, released in October, found that Chick-fil-A ranks as the top restaurant among American teens for the seventh straight year, ahead of Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Chipotle.



On a cool fall evening, I returned to Hurst’s Chick-fil-A in Brooklyn to watch the dinner rush. Out on the sidewalk, things felt as Mad Max as ever, with delivery workers zooming by on their e-bikes and idling in cars double-parked at the curb. Inside, the store was relatively empty. Two customers who looked to be in their twenties gazed up at the menu and mulled their options. “Honey pepper pimento—do they do that in the South?” one asked, referring to the newest menu item, Chick-fil-A’s first-ever riff on its original chicken sandwich. He paused for a second. “I’m getting it.”