VIDEO: McDonald's reveals how its Chicken McNuggets are made

WPVI logo
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Chicken McNuggets
This stock photo shows three Chicken McNuggets sold at McDonald's
Shutterstock-WPVI

Are they made of real chicken?

Is the whole chicken used, bones and all?

Do they contain that stuff known as 'pink slime'?

McDonald's says these are some of the biggest questions sent in by customers every day wanting to know exactly what Chicken McNuggets are made of. And now, the fast food chain is revealing all as part of its new campaign called "Our Food. Your Questions."

Click here to watch if you're viewing on the news app.

McDonald's invited former "MythBusters" host Grant Imahara to one of the Tyson Foods factories that makes its Chicken McNuggets.

Almost immediately, Imahara began asking Tyson Food's Amy Steward to explain that infamous picture of 'pink slime.'

"If you do a search on the Internet for Chicken McNuggets, this pops up," Imahara says in the video. "They say that this is pink slime. So if you grind up parts of chicken that you use does it look like this?"

"I don't know where that picture came from, but that's not used in Chicken McNuggets," Steward replied.

Instead, Steward says the process is similar to what you'd do if you wanted to make a chicken nugget at home. It starts with people, not machines, butchering down a whole chicken. The breast, rib and tenderloin meat are then sent to a grinder that creates ground chicken that looks like the same product you'd find at your grocery store.

The ground chicken is combined with spices, a little bit of chicken skin for flavor and preservatives before being shaped into the nugget shapes. The nuggets then get a tempura batter coating before being partially cooked, flash-frozen and shipped to McDonald's restaurants world-wide.

McDonald's says it's just trying to reveal the truth to the public about how its food is processed, and says the ingredients to its Chicken McNuggets are no secret.

Copyright © 2024 WPVI-TV. All Rights Reserved.