The Happy Accident That Brought Chick-Fil-A Sauce Into The World

Chick-fil-A sauce is the best sauce the fried chicken champion has put on its menu through decades of business. Where a lot of restaurants' signature sauces are a play on Thousand Island dressing, Chick-fil-A sauce stands apart from the crowd with its tangy mustard base and barbecue notes. It's popular enough to where you can buy entire bottles at the grocery store or order for delivery from Amazon. Surely, something this good must've been a concentrated effort by expert recipe developers — or was it?

The Chick-fil-A sauce people know and love today was invented by a man named Hugh Fleming, a franchise owner in Spotsylvania, Virginia. The story goes that an employee delivered Chick-fil-A nuggets to other retail workers at the mall Fleming's store was in. The workers remarked that the nuggets could be improved with a dipping sauce, but there was one problem: Chick-fil-A didn't offer any dipping sauces at the time.

Upon hearing this feedback, Fleming began offering cups of homemade honey mustard dressing for customers to enjoy. Shortly after, a staff member accidentally mixed barbecue sauce with the honey mustard dressing and found that it was a killer combo. This happy accident created a unique flavor that Fleming decided to further develop in his dipping sauce recipe.

Hugh Fleming didn't expect his blended honey mustard and barbecue sauce to be such a success. The demand for his homemade sauce was hard to keep up with, going through gallon dispensers' worth of product. The need for nugget dipping sauces eventually traveled to Chick-fil-A corporate, which rolled out the honey mustard, barbecue, and Polynesian sauces in 1984. Nearly 20 years later, the restaurant acquired the rights to Fleming's sauce, becoming an official menu item in 2006. He gave the recipe to Chick-fil-A completely free of charge.

It takes a lot of confidence for a company to self-title a dipping sauce, and the Chick-fil-A sauce proved itself worthy with instant nationwide success. Its simplicity makes it easy to dupe at home or by mixing other common sauces together. Mustard, barbecue, and some kind of ranch are all that's required to whip up a Chick-fil-A copycat sauce. The nuggets couldn't live without the dip, and now the dip can't live without the nuggets. How's that for some fried chicken lore?