Sophie Hartman, a 33-year-old from Oregon, first noticed that the chicken breasts she was buying had a strange texture a few years ago. 

It was tough to chew. Rubbery almost. “Like it wasn't cooked. And I didn't know how to put a name to it,” Hartman said. 

She regularly tossed chicken breasts onto the grill to feed her family and they came out great, but was she losing her touch? 

What Hartman later discovered is that she wasn’t the problem. She was dealing with woody chicken, a condition that’s consistently plagued poultry for more than a decade. 

“Woody breast syndrome is a muscle disorder in poultry that results in hard and rigid breast meat,” explained Seung-Chul Yoon, a research electronics engineer with the U.S. National Poultry Research Center’s Quality and Safety Assessment Research Unit. This research center is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Yoon said it occurs particularly in large and fast-growing “broilers,” which is a term used to describe chickens that are raised for consumption. 

As producers moved toward these larger broilers around 2009, the industry began to notice the emergence of woody chicken, said Amit Morey, an associate professor of poultry science at Auburn University. 

Consumer demand has driven producers to increase poultry production while saving on costs and production time, which is why they’re breeding heavier broilers.

The average American is expected to eat 104 pounds of chicken this year, double the amount from 1985, according to the USDA. While woody chicken isn’t pleasant, Morey noted that it is still safe to eat.

Customers told Marketplace that they’ve encountered woody chicken at local restaurants, nationwide restaurant chains and grocery stores. 

Morey said the number of woody chicken breast cases hasn’t risen, but the condition has persisted.

“Some companies claim to have taken steps to mediate it during the growing phase of the chicken while others are trying to remove the affected meat from the supply chain,” Morey said. 

A spokesperson for the National Chicken Council, when asked about woody chicken, said “we've actually seen a significant decline over the past several years.” The representative pointed to an FAQ on the NCC site noting the methods poultry companies are taking to mitigate the issue, which include inspecting every piece of breast meat. 

But customers who frequently purchased chicken breasts told us they only started encountering this issue in recent years.

The rise of woody chicken

Woody chicken is not limited to one geographic area, one brand or one grocery store. Customers on opposite sides of the country have dealt with woody chicken.

It occurs randomly, and experts are still trying to understand the mechanisms behind it, Morey said. 

“It's a much deeper, complex problem than what we had initially thought,” he said. 

There are different degrees of severity when it comes to woody breasts, which range from mild to severe, Morey said.

Severe woody breast occurs 10-15% of the time in big, fast-growing broilers weighing more than 8 pounds, Morey explained. 

Poultry meat is high protein, low cost and highly versatile, making it an appealing option for many consumers, Morey said. In the United States, specifically, people like to eat white meat vs. dark meat, he noted.

But as poultry consumption in the U.S. continued to increase, the industry shifted to larger broilers, leading to the rise of woody chicken.

“There is no one specific producer to be blamed for it. It is something that we are observing across the industry,” Morey said.

Derailing dinner

Hartman said she dealt with so much woody chicken that she stopped purchasing it almost entirely.

“It’s definitely changed our purchasing habits,” Hartman said. 

It’s been hard to find a replacement protein — either the cut of meat doesn’t stretch far enough for the price or her two children aren’t fans.

“Both of them have autism, so it's one of those things where it ascends beyond pickiness, and if something is even remotely different, they're going to notice,” Hartman said.

Hartman is unsure if people are passionate enough about the issue to demand change. “I just don't know that that's a priority right now with the state of things where people are like, ‘Fix the chicken!’” Hartman said.  

But she isn’t alone. Alex Smith, a 32-year-old from Raleigh, North Carolina, said he regularly had been purchasing chicken breast for the past five years. Protein is a crucial part of his diet because he’s strength training, and chicken breast is ideal because of how cheap and lean it is. 

But after first encountering woody chicken about a year ago, he’s now made the switch to chicken thighs and organic and air-chilled chicken breasts. Those premium chicken breasts cost $7 to $10 a pound, almost double the price he was paying before. 

But even getting pricier chicken breasts doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to avoid the issue – Smith said the pack he recently purchased had woody chicken. 

What’s being done to address woody chicken?

Woody chicken isn’t just a problem for customers, it’s a huge issue for poultry producers, too. One 2016 estimate found that woody chicken costs the poultry industry $200 million a year.

But there are some scientists who are trying to find new ways to identify woody chicken. 

Researchers at the University of Delaware have been able to identify the genes that indicate woody breast, according to the National Chicken Council. 

Yuzhen Lu, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, has developed technology that uses optical imaging and artificial intelligence to identify woody breasts. While Lu has heard that incidences of woody chicken have gone down, he told Marketplace this is still an important economic issue. 

And Yoon, with the USDA, has created an imaging system that he says is able to measure chicken meat’s rigidity in real time and can identify woody chicken with more than 95% accuracy. For severe woody chicken, the accuracy rate is over 99%. 

Yoon said the USDA is looking for a commercial partner to license the technology.

If these technologies get implemented, they will go a long way in helping out people like Smith, Hartman and the millions of Americans who eat chicken breast. 

While woody chicken may seem like a minor issue, it’s limited the types of meals Hartman can cook for her family.

“It was an affordable protein. And now it's kind of put us in this position where I don't know what to cook,” Hartman said.