Is Rotisserie Chicken Healthy? Why Is It So Cheap?

Is rotisserie chicken healthy?

Rotisserie chicken (named because it’s cooked on a rotisserie, or rotating pole inside a hot oven) is cheap and pre-cooked, making it a popular choice among shoppers. While it’s generally considered healthy, it also comes with significant drawbacks—including high sodium content and some questionable additives.

Rotisserie chickens, along with many other types of chickens sold in grocery stores, are often marinated in a preservative solution to extend shelf life and reduce bacterial growth. This solution can contain phosphates, salts, and/or acids such as sodium tripolyphosphate or acetic acid. While it protects against dangerous bacteria, this preservative solution comes with its own downsides.

High-normal levels of phosphates in the human body are linked to calcium deposits, the hardening of arteries in the heart, decreased bone health, and a higher risk of heart attacks and heart disease. The Washington Post even calls phosphate additives the “trans fats of the future; at one time prevalent throughout our food supply, and eventually banned due to overwhelming evidence of their negative impact on human health.”

So while rotisserie chickens provide protein and nutrients in the short term, it’s worth considering their long-term health impacts—even though they aren’t listed in the nutrition facts.

Is rotisserie chicken processed?

Yes. While each whole rotisserie chicken may appear unprocessed, the addition of additives like those described above mean it’s actually considered a processed food. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), processed meat is any meat that’s been modified from its natural state, whether “through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation.”

Unfortunately, processed meat comes with big health concerns. In 2015, the World Health Organization revised its health guidelines for processed meat, labeling it as carcinogenic to humans. Based on their report, diets rich in processed meat could cause 30,000 deaths every year around the globe.

Are rotisserie chickens good for weight loss?

When it comes to weight loss, rotisserie chicken is certainly better than similar options like chicken nuggets or fried chicken sandwiches. It has a high protein content while being lower in calories than these alternatives. But when compared to plant sources of protein, rotisserie chicken has some notable downsides for weight loss and overall health.

For example, rotisserie chicken skin is high in saturated fat. One 3-ounce serving of rotisserie chicken (dark meat, with the skin) contains 3g of saturated fat. The American Heart Association recommends eating no more than 13g of saturated fat per day—meaning a small serving of rotisserie chicken contains about 23% of your recommended daily intake. Eating saturated fat is shown to increase LDL cholesterol, which in turn increases the risk of heart disease.

Is rotisserie chicken heart healthy?

Unfortunately, rotisserie chickens are packed with hidden sodium—which is bad news for your heart. To determine the health of different rotisserie chickens sold in stores, nutrition experts at Consumer Reports evaluated 16 rotisserie chickens from these popular chains: Kroger, Publix, Safeway, Stop & Shop, Walmart, Wegmans, Whole Foods, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Costco, Sam’s Club, and Boston Market. They found that most of these chickens contained many more ingredients than just chicken.

Most of these ingredients come from the “injection solution” added to rotisserie chickens. According to Tom Super, senior vice president of communications for the National Chicken Council, “Essentially, all rotisserie chickens are enhanced with a solution (injected into the bird).” Added mainly for taste, that solution can contain processed ingredients (such as natural flavors, which aren’t as natural as they sound), added sugar, gums, carrageenan, and large amounts of sodium.

According to their investigation, Sam’s Club’s “Member’s Mark Seasoned Rotisserie Chicken” contained 550mg of sodium in a single 3-ounce serving. Put into perspective, that’s about one quarter of your recommended daily sodium intake.

According to the CDC, there’s a strong relationship between high sodium consumption and higher levels of blood pressure. High blood pressure is a “major risk factor” for stroke and heart disease. To cut down on sodium intake, it’s best to avoid sources of hidden sodium—like rotisserie chickens—altogether.

Is rotisserie chicken healthy without the skin?

Some nutritionists suggest eating rotisserie chicken without the skin, in order to cut down on the salt and saturated fat content. However, this doesn’t necessarily help you avoid the additives. Again, this is because most rotisserie chickens contain an “injection solution” of sugars, sodium, and other processed ingredients. Because they are injected into the meat, these additives, salts, and sugars are distributed throughout the chicken—so you can’t avoid them by not eating the skin.

But even beyond additives, there’s often another hidden ingredient lurking in rotisserie chicken: antibiotics. Because the unnaturally crowded, filthy conditions on factory farms make animals more susceptible to disease, the industry administers antibiotics to chickens throughout their lives to prevent them from getting sick. Without preventative drugs to protect their weak immune systems from disease, these animals simply wouldn’t survive.

Unfortunately, this means the chicken on your plate could be laced with antibiotic residues. On a massive scale, this sheer volume of antibiotics presents one of the greatest threats to human health that exists: antibiotic resistance. According to the WHO, at least 700,000 people die every year from antibiotic-resistant infections—a number that could spike to 10 million as early as 2050.

Rotisserie chicken nutrition

While rotisserie chicken is healthier than some other meat alternatives, it’s significantly less nutritious than plant sources of protein, like legumes. Here’s how the nutrition facts stack up for a 100-gram serving of rotisserie chicken, compared with a 100-gram serving of dry black beans.

Rotisserie chicken ingredients

Here the list of ingredients in a Kirkland Signature seasoned rotisserie chicken, which is pretty typical for a store-bought rotisserie chicken:

• Whole chicken
• Water
• Seasoning (salt, sodium phosphates, hydrolyzed casein, modified corn starch, sugar, dextrose, chicken broth, and natural flavors)
• Seasoning (isolated soy protein, starch, lecithin)
• Mono- and di-glycerides
• Salt

From the outside, it appears to have just one ingredient—chicken. But this particular product contains 16+ different ingredients, many of which come with health concerns. And nutritionists agree that this type of deception can be dangerous. Generally, when people purchase chicken, they think they’re getting a simple, low-sodium food. But when injected with a salt brine, each serving of chicken might have over 400mg of sodium—which is one-third of your maximum recommended daily intake.

What do they inject into rotisserie chicken?

Most rotisserie chickens are injected with a saline, or salt, solution. The solution, which can also contain flavorings or sweeteners, can make up to 15% of the meat—meaning much of it is just water weight.

Why are rotisserie chickens so cheap?

Rotisserie chickens can cost as little as $5. How is it possible that an entire chicken—who needed to be hatched, raised, fed, housed, transported, slaughtered, processed, and shipped to the grocery store—can be so cheap? Where do all these costs go, and why don’t they end up in the final price of the chicken?

The sad truth is that these costs don’t go away. They’re just offloaded elsewhere—onto the environment, into the rural communities surrounding chicken farms, onto factory workers, and onto the chickens themselves. And that’s a major problem.

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94% of all animals raised for food are living on factory farms.

Chickens living on factory farms endure some of the worst abuses imaginable. They spend their lives in near-total darkness, crowded tightly into vast indoor warehouses. These facilities are so packed with birds that, toward the end of their lives, each individual chicken has less floor space than a sheet of paper. Being cramped in such a small space can prevent birds from getting the exercise or rest they need, and it also creates dangerously unsanitary living conditions.

Genetically selected to grow very large, very quickly, broiler chickens’ hearts and skeletal systems can’t keep up with their rate of growth. This often results in heart failure and other painful conditions—sometimes, birds’ legs will even break underneath them from the burden of carrying so much weight. Forced to spend most of their lives lying in their own waste, the birds often develop painful chemical burns to their legs and chest.

At the end of their short lives, the worst suffering is yet to come. The majority of chickens today are killed using live-shackle slaughter, a horrific process in which they’re hung upside down in shackles, electrocuted in a water bath, and slashed across the throat. Tragically, many birds—writhing frantically in their panic—manage to avoid the electric stunning, often receiving non-fatal shocks through their wings. Some even avoid the blade meant to slice their throats. They are then dropped into a vat of boiling water, fully conscious.

And it isn’t just the birds who endure abuses. Workers at poultry processing plants also bear the costs the industry isn’t willing to pay—putting up with such fast “line speeds” that they often suffer repetitive motion injuries. The terrible air quality on chicken factory farms can cause respiratory illnesses for farm workers and those living in the surrounding communities. To make matters worse, factory farms often depress local property values, since no one wants to experience the poor air quality and stench of living next to a factory farm. Since factory farms require a global supply chain, rather than relying on local businesses, many of those businesses go under.

You might be wondering, what about humanely raised chickens, like the ones sold at stores like Whole Foods? Unfortunately, “humane” claims aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Industry marketing—rife with illustrations of pastoral farms, red barns, and happy chickens—is designed to intentionally mislead shoppers, taking advantage of their desire to do the right thing and buy humanely raised products.

The unfortunate reality is that 94% of all animals raised for food are living on factory farms. By contrast, 75% of Americans believe they generally purchase humane animal products—because that’s what product marketing would have them believe. Unfortunately, something just doesn’t add up.

Costco rotisserie chicken

For years (since 2009, according to some sources), Costco’s rotisserie chicken has cost exactly $4.99. This shockingly low price helped the company sell over 137 million chickens in 2023, breaking its own record for the most rotisserie chickens sold in one year. It’s because Costco uses its rotisserie chickens as “loss leaders,” a marketing ploy to get customers into the store.

According to the chief financial officer at Costco, the retailer takes a big financial hit on its rotisserie chickens—to the tune of $30-40 million per year. But because many customers come in to purchase a rotisserie chicken (and then leave with many other products they weren’t planning on buying), the company ends up making a profit. The problem? Living, breathing animals shouldn’t be used as loss leaders.

In 2021, The New York Times broke an undercover investigation by Mercy for Animals that revealed the ugly secrets behind Costco’s rotisserie chicken. The undercover videos showed piles of dying animals, extreme overcrowding, floors covered in waste, and chickens with chemical burns. The conditions couldn’t have been worse—but according to Costco’s general counsel, these cruelties were “normal and uneventful activity;” just part of doing business. Unfortunately, the meat industry’s standards and practices have made extreme suffering the new normal.

Costco’s “$4.99 chicken” is proof that such cheap chickens don’t exist. Someone, in the end, ends up bearing the true cost.

Rotisserie chicken alternatives

Feeling grossed out yet? Luckily, there are numerous alternatives to rotisserie chicken that can be just as cheap, filling, and tasty.

• Beans and legumes: At as little as $1 per can, beans are even more affordable than rotisserie chicken, and they provide a filling protein boost in a variety of dishes. Try black beans, refried beans, chickpeas, pinto beans, butter beans, or any other varieties.
• Daring Chicken: If you want a protein that tastes exactly like chicken, try this one!
• Oyster mushrooms: Gently wash off any dirt and saute them dry in a pan until they’ve been dehydrated. Cooking them this way brings out a delicious, meaty flavor, with a texture very similar to cooked chicken strips.
• Tempeh: A quick pan-fry, and you have a delicious protein for dinner. Tempeh is less similar to chicken, but has a rich, nutty flavor that’s great in salads or sandwiches.
• Jackfruit: It’s a little harder to find in stores, but jackfruit’s stringy texture makes it the perfect replacement for pulled chicken in sandwiches.
• Cauliflower: Cover pieces of cauliflower in a crispy batter and serve them with buffalo sauce for a “cauliflower wing” appetizer at your next gathering!

Those rotisserie chickens at the store were once living, breathing, feeling beings. And they deserve better. Join us in calling on the world’s largest companies to end some of the worst abuses chickens endure in our food system. Together, we can build a more compassionate world—and change the lives of billions of animals, starting today.