Chick-fil-A Isn’t Launching A Streaming Service. It’s Actually Way Bigger Than That
Source: Fast Company, Clint Rainey
Photo: Chick-fil-A
What is Chick-fil-A Play? Inside the food chain’s surprisingly logical next move.
Since late last year, rumors have swirled that Chick-fil-A is launching its own streaming platform—scuttlebut that the chicken sandwich chain is eager to dismiss.
After getting a first look earlier this month at what the company actually has planned, Fast Company can report what the brand is launching is indeed less than a full streaming platform, but potentially something significantly more.
In late August, Deadline reported that Chick-fil-A was “moving aggressively into the entertainment space,” developing a slate of original content for an alleged proprietary streaming platform. “The fast-food firm has been working with a number of major production companies, including some of the studios, to create family-friendly shows,” it reported, citing sources close to the deals. The programming was said to span animated shows, reality shows, and game shows, with budgets running to $400,000 per half-hour episode, and the whole platform set to debut later this year.
This had followed a job posting the previous November where Chick-fil-A first revealed its hand. The company sought a producer to help create “original programming intended for Chick-fil-A’s soon-to-be launched PLAY entertainment app,” adding: “Shifts in the advertising industry, in concert with our customers’ trust and affinity for the Chick-fil-A brand, all open up an opportunity for Chick-fil-A to extend our role in customers’ lives.”
After Deadline surfaced some actual details, the media pounced. Outlets often responded with a mix of shock and mild condescension: “Um, Chick-fil-A Is Starting a Streaming Service?” asked Vanity Fair, New York went with “Normal Headline: Chick-fil-A to Launch Streaming Service,” while The Nation got theatrical (“Move Over Hollywood, Here Comes Chick-fil-A”), and Eater gave programming suggestions, such as a show called Eat Mor Chikin where the brand’s signature cow characters grow so erratically mischievous that “anti-red meat messaging and guerrilla activism tactics become too didactic for viewers.”
So what is Chick-fil-A releasing? The answer is an app, called Chick-fil-A Play, which will come out on November 18. It does indeed offer scripted programming that the brand’s fans won’t find anywhere else, along with family-focused games, activities, and entertainment options that reflect aspects of the brand that Chick-fil-A has been busily, if quietly, working to develop for years.
The early look we got made clear that if the Play app realizes its full potential, it could be a pipeline not only for a rich supply of original content (like Netflix and HBO), but also original audio series (like Gimlet Media and Wondery), ebooks (like Amazon Kindle), interactive games (like Nintendo), and cooking videos (like Bon Appétit’s Instagram and all those other viral food Reels).
So whatever you decide to call it—when asked, Chick-fil-A told me just to say an app offering “family-friendly games, activities, and entertainment”—the platform is laying the groundwork for a family-focused entertainment empire that could leave existing players like greeting cardmaker-turned-cable TV network Hallmark in the dust, and maybe even compete in scope, if not reach, with bigger players like Apple or Disney. After all, before being recognized this summer with a record 72 Emmy nominations for shows like The Morning Show and Palm Royale, Apple was simply a computer company.
What’s on Chick-fil-A Play
In some exciting news, the cows are definitely back. Daisy, Sarge, and Carrots welcome users, then pop up elsewhere across the Play universe, such as in Go Go Cow—which Dustin Britt, Chick-fil-A’s executive director of brand strategy, entertainment, and media, explained to me is the digital racing game the company released on its website last summer, but now with “some enhancements.” The cows appear in their own original shorts too, the company adds. (It’s a safe guess that they’ll be reprising their roles as anti-beef crusaders trying to sabotage the Circus Burger chain’s expansion plans, a theme Chick-fil-A has been developing in recent shorts.)
The app will also feature family trivia and singing games, craft activities, cooking videos called “Recipe Remixes” that jazz up a popular Chick-fil-A menu item, a joke generator that Britt warns is programmed with dad jokes, and a library that will initially carry 20 e-book titles, like Kate Messner’s Over and Under the Snow and Kimberlee Gard’s The Day Punctuation Came to Town, with some interactive elements added in.
But the section known as “Watch” is what’s primed to draw the most interest. This is where initial users will find seven original animated shorts, though more are planned. Two involve the cows. The rest are episodes of Chick-fil-A’s Evergreen Hills franchise, which the company has spent the past five years refining, maybe for this exact moment.
Loosely, it’s about a girl named Sam who discovers a magic passageway in her family’s grandfather clock where she encounters “the Timekeeper,” a wise figure who teaches her the power of small acts of kindness. The first four episodes were bite-size storylets of only two minutes, doled out one per year, pegged to the holidays. However, last year Sam discovered the world inside the grandfather clock is actually far more elaborate than she believed; that fifth episode, of 10 minutes, has pulled in 141 million views on YouTube. Play app users will get to watch those five episodes, plus the first full season, along with five more episodes (now 22 minutes long), with a new one dropping each week through the holiday season.
There’s also audio: A brand-new series called Hidden Island follows a family that got shipwrecked during a catastrophic holiday ocean misadventure. (Chick-fil-A loves good holiday-themed drama.) More audio shows are set to debut in 2025, one being Ice Lions, based on the true story of Kenya’s only hockey team.
All of this original content—plus for that matter, anything else on the app—stays true to Chick-fil-A’s two-pronged business philosophy that all products must be memorable, and their ingredients must include family values. That’s been the corporate ethos since S. Truett Cathy founded Chick-fil-A almost 80 years ago, though lately the company has been working to make its reach much more inclusive. The app seems to be an obvious next move in this strategy.
In fact, according to Khalilah Cooper, vice president of brand strategy, advertising, and media who helped walk us through the app, the new content push represents a direction the company was moving in already. Chick-fil-A’s sales—$19 billion in 2022 and $21.6 billion in 2023—are basically the envy of the industry, but executives are aware of the fact that customers also spend less and less time inside their restaurants’ four walls. In light of that, Cooper says the company simply chose to double down and “create something uniquely Chick-fil-A.”
Former chief marketing executive Steve Robinson told Fast Company in an interview last year that Chick-fil-A was founded on the idea that customer service comes first, and initially that took the form of simple acts inside the restaurants—roaming the dining room with a pepper grinder for salads, escorting guests to their cars by umbrella when it’s rainy, building over-the-top playgrounds. But in an era when guests “don’t necessarily even come inside on every occasion,” as Cooper notes, hospitality needs to take other forms. In Chick-fil-A’s case, that means making guests feel safe and happy wherever they might end up enjoying their chicken sandwich. And lately, she says, the company believes it’s becoming “harder and harder” to find “safe and trusted” family entertainment that is top-rate.
“Content and games sit very adjacent to mealtime,” adds Britt. “If you want to watch or play something, you may be doing it during a meal. Sometimes you’re doing it on the way to the meal. Sometimes you’re doing it while you’re making a meal.” He gave an example of a family pulling into a Chick-fil-A drive-through with hangry kids; the parents crank the app’s dance game, which warns nonparticipants they’ll have to pay a waffle-fry tax. And of a tired working mom grabbing chicken sandwiches on her drive home on Friday, then assembling the kids on a blanket in the living room picnic-style to stream the cows or Evergreen Hills on the big TV.
All brands are content creators now
Anyone who chuckled at the notion that Chick-fil-A was creating its own content hasn’t been paying much attention over these past few years. Mattel made a Barbie movie that earned $2 billion. Nike has a sports film deal with Apple TV+. Luxury giant LVMH forged a content partnership with the same production house that Nike chose (Superconnector Studios), and as Fast Company’s Jeff Beer reported earlier this year, the two are hoping to tell long-form brand stories about, say, Tiffany & Co. making the Stanley Cup and pens that were used to sign international peace treaties. Mall accessory brand Claire’s is developing kids programming with Sony Pictures. Yeti made a fantastic short film. REI is in the game now too, to “shift perceptions of the outdoor experience,” as is New York’s largest hospital system, Northwell Health.
In the meantime, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros., and others are embracing brand-sponsored TV that resembles early soap opera days—like an hour of commercial-free Olympics coverage, or Saturday Night Live skits where brands like Volkswagen and L’Oreal agree to become the butt of jokes.
Oscar-winning producer Michael Sugar has for some time been arguing that we are living in an era when any brand can, and probably should, build their own entertainment empire. His studio, Sugar23, now offers brands a tool kit, and it announced a new marketplace in April that seeks to connect advertisers directly with talent, to level the playing field between them and legacy Hollywood production companies. Brands representing $120 billion worth of ad dollars have reportedly signed up.
Sugar23 has confirmed that Starbucks is a client. This past June, the two unveiled Starbucks Studios, an endeavor they say will “produce original entertainment and tell stories that deepen connections and spark conversations.”
Sugar23 is also working with Chick-fil-A. The company, alongside Glassman Media—maker of reality series and primetime TV game shows such as NBC’s The Wall—are in the middle of producing a 10-episode game show for Chick-fil-A. Sugar23 declined to comment for this story, and for now, Chick-fil-A still isn’t confirming that deal. “We can’t share any specifics at this time,” a company spokesperson tells us, leaving things coyly at: “There are many production companies we are in discussions with over potential future content.”
Chick-fil-A’s continuing odyssey
Chick-fil-A is new to producing original content with such high production values, but it has been creating original entertainment that competes with Hollywood for decades
Throughout the ’90s, the heyday for kids’ meal toys, the fast food industry leveraged Hollywood hard. McDonald’s cranked out a seemingly indefatigable stream of Disney Happy Meal toys: plastic Ariels, Genies, Quasimodos, Buzz Lightyears, Timons and Pumbaas, and literally a hundred and one different 101 Dalmatians puppies. Pizza Hut armed small children with throwable plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizzas. Burger King caused stampedes by releasing a comically large set of 57 collectible Poké Balls for the Pokémon movie. Wendy’s introduced at least four different sets of Land Before Time dinosaurs. Subway countered with Jurassic Park trading cards.
But Chick-fil-A skipped the transactional blockbuster promotion deals. Its kids’ meals prizes were what you could call “evergreens”: toys with an educational and often morally edifying purpose, such as space decals developed exclusively with NASA in the ’80s, VeggieTales CDs in the 2010s, and, most importantly here, limited-edition cassettes for an audio series called Adventures in Odyssey.
Set in a fictional Middle America town, Adventures in Odyssey centered around a bespectacled, white-haired ice cream proprietor, Whit, who’d impart moral lessons and practical wisdom to the unruly local kids. Produced by Focus on the Family when the conservative Christian group’s cultural influence was at its zenith, the series commanded a cast rivaling what you could find on the major networks’ Saturday morning cartoons. Voice artists, in no particular order, included actors who portrayed Goofy and Owl from Winnie the Pooh, Wilbur on Mister Ed, Elmer Fudd in Looney Tunes, Milhouse from The Simpsons, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Michelangelo, the America’s Funniest Videos announcer, and Scrooge McDuck.
These bona fides surely pleased Chick-fil-A’s owners, who were entertainment lovers. Founder S. Truett Cathy was infatuated enough with 1992’s Batman Returns to buy the Batmobile that Michael Keaton drove. His son Dan Cathy entered the moviemaking business two decades later by helping erect the Atlanta-based Trilith Studios in his old airplane hangar. At 700 acres and 32 sound stages and counting, Trilith has grown into the largest studio outside of Hollywood, and in fact now rivals those within it. It’s where almost every Marvel movie since 2014 has been shot—including the latest Avengers, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, and Blank Panther films. Other recent “tentpole” movies filmed there include Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey’s remake of The Color Purple, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and, yes, Barbie.
Chick-fil-A reps are quick to point out that Dan Cathy’s film work with Trilith has zero overlap with the chicken sandwiches being made at its 3,000 restaurants; they are separate companies. But there’s an undeniable through-line: the family’s formidable skills at using storytelling to craft successful brands.
Consider, for example, that Chick-fil-A essentially already operates a theme park of sorts. The company’s Atlanta headquarters sells 90-minute “backstage tours,” some that sell out months in advance, in which fans meet three generations of Cathys (Truett, Dan, and Dan’s son and current CEO Andrew) in a biographical film, gawk at Truett’s Batmobile and other cars he collected, and step into his old office furnished exactly how he’s said to have kept it, down to the trinkets on his big wood desk. It’s billed as a chance to get up close to the history, culture, and values of the brand, and gives off Disney vibes.
Chick-fil-A has also spawned a side business, Pennycake, specializing in offscreen entertainment. Launching right before the 2023 holidays, the company, citing a survey that found American families get on average 37 minutes of quality time together each workweek, set out to develop puzzles and various games (memory keepers, conversation starters, travel games). There are already more than 15, and almost immediately they snagged a wide array of national parenting awards that in the past have been given to Lego, Disney, and Hasbro.
Chick-fil-A Play’s hidden advantage
The Chick-fil-A Play app is functioning as an R&D lab for the brand’s burgeoning entertainment arm—a controlled environment that allows Chick-fil-A to test out new content and gauge user reaction and engagement.
That’s effectively how the company developed Evergreen Hills. The bespectacled, white-haired “Timekeeper” character is a throwback to Whit in the brand’s first big success, Adventures in Odyssey, but whereas the action in the earlier series sometimes occurred in Sunday school class, and Whit’s ice cream store was located symbolically atop an old church, the new show contains all kinds of fantasy tropes that could hook a Comic Con-goer, including a Game of Thrones-style intro sequence where molten metal flows through channels, set to a dramatic score.
These flairs are the work of Aaron Johnson, the creative director of a discreet division within the company that’s been dubbed “Brand Entertainment.” (Before Chick-fil-A, Johnson spent time cowriting the Ender’s Game comic books for Marvel as well as several sci-fi film screenplays with Orson Scott Card, the Hugo and Nebula winner and occasional conservative political commentator.)
The series “was supposed to last one year, that was as far out as we saw,” Britt said. But now they’re “in a rhythm,” he added. “The narrative framework is there for us to have lots of options.”
Maybe that will mean heading to a studio to produce a live-action Evergreen Hills movie. Maybe it will be a spin-off series. The company’s morals-focused messaging over the past several decades has helped it cement a loyal and powerful faith-based audience—representing over a trillion dollars in annual purchasing power—but could be an obstacle in scaling it further.
After all, storytelling was an obsession of Howard Schultz’s while he was Starbucks’s CEO. He even formed an in-house media venture that produced original docuseries, like Upstanders, that, much like Schultz’s memoirs, implored readers to fix America’s social ills by finding ways to unite and essentially love the country more. That approach never energized the target audience.
Similar activist bents by brands have also proven unpopular. In 2013, Chipotle released a dystopian animated short called The Scarecrow that savaged industrialized food. It attracted some raves and won an award at Cannes, but its ham-fisted back-patting and moralizing—set to “Pure Imagination,” the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka song that gives many people the heebie-jeebies—turned off enough viewers that the whole film got ranked one of 2013’s worst ads and spawned a Funny or Die parody. Consumers will fight over a kids’ Hollywood tie-in toy made in China, but the truth is few are interested in being served a social agenda with their fast food.
But maybe the moralizing will become subtle enough that it becomes indistinguishable from what you’d see in typical Disney family fare. One thing’s certain: Chick-fil-A has built a thriving entertainment ecosystem, one that’s about to meet a much larger swath of parents and kids on road trips, errands, and game nights. Critics will be cynical about what comes next, but the market potential is impossible to ignore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clint Rainey is a Fast Company contributor based in New York who reports on business, often food brands. He has covered the anti-ESG movement, rumors of a Big Meat psyop against plant-based proteins, Chick-fil-A’s quest to walk the narrow path to growth, as well as Starbucks’s pivot from a progressive brand—into one that’s far more Chinese.