Except for vegetarians and perhaps the hyperlipidemic, fried chicken is beloved nearly universally. And that’s a universe that includes some pretty discriminating palates—many of whom seem to prefer Popeyes over anything else. Anthony Bourdain was a vocal fan. Celebrity chefs like David Chang and Hugh Acheson sing its praises. The fried chicken experts MUNCHIES spoke to had plenty of compliments, too.

Popeyes is an industrial anomaly. In virtually all other cases, mass production seems to be bad for food quality. Every sort of fast food has its devotees, but if you’re after a burger, a burrito, or a salad, the fast food version is usually a cheap approximation of what you can find in a nicer restaurant (or even what you could make yourself). Big Macs might be delicious and crave-able, but they're unlikely to land on any Best of Burgers lists. When it comes to fried chicken, though, disappointment is more likely to come on a fresh white tablecloth than in a grease-stained paperboard box.

Biting into a good piece of fried chicken is a pan-sensory experience that checks off just about every box of non-sexual physical pleasure. You pick it up with your hands, shatter the crust with your incisors, and rip the succulent flesh from the bone. Steam wafts any seasonings noseward as the hot fat coats your lips and courses over your tongue. If it’s prepared right, that first bite is a high you chase for the rest of the meal and onward until your next bucket.

Whether it’s a Michelin-rated kitchen or a hole-in-the-wall local legend, few can match Popeyes’s bird. Which is why some don’t even try: Last year, a Long Beach restaurant was busted for serving Popeyes chicken and ostensibly passing it off as its own . Poultry fraud is tough to defend, but this particular culinary con speaks to how Popeyes punches above its weight class in terms of quality.

“Popeyes has great fried chicken,” says James Beard Award-winning chef Ashley Christensen. “I like the level of salt in the chicken. They push it just enough. It’s got a touch of spice to it. The meat is super juicy.”

At most fast food fried chicken places, the chicken shows up fresh, and it’s brined, dredged, and fried on site. “Even KFC uses fresh chicken,” says Edward Lee, chef and owner of 610 Magnolia in Louisville and Succotash in Washington, D.C. “There’s no way to pre-fry chicken. It has to be fried to order, or at least fried in batches.”

Fried chicken is the darling of industrialization for the simple reason that it’s extremely difficult to industrialize. In comparison to, say, a cheeseburger—where the patties, buns, and cheese all come premade from different sources, each ingredient heavily processed along the way—a fast food fried chicken restaurant is starting with something a lot closer to what the fanciest kitchens might use: raw ingredients.

So why is the fried chicken at 3,000 different Popeyes locations better than what so many accomplished chefs can produce either in their high-end kitchens or at home?

In many ways, fried chicken seems antithetical to mass production. It’s a food that requires levels of finesse and expertise that take decades to cultivate, not to mention that it’s often associated with the accrued family secrets of intergenerational R&D. One of those a-lifetime-to-master things. Fast food kitchens, on the other hand, are synonymous with constant staff turnover and a general deskilling of labor. The whole concept is based on the idea that any can do it.

For López-Alt, it’s the skin that stands out. “They have the crust down perfect,” he tells MUNCHIES. “The right level of craggliness. Very salty. High surface area. They get crispy all over. There aren’t any soggy spots.” He also highlighted what his Serious Eats colleague calls “the cosmic oneness between breading and skin,” such that the breading doesn’t slide off and leave you with a flabby layer of naked skin.

J. Kenji López-Alt, another Beard Award-winner, goes even further. He claimed that Popeyes is the best fried chicken anywhere you can get it. (In response to the Washington Post food critic putting Popeyes on the list of the best fried chicken in D.C. )

That can make things tricky. Consistency is the hallmark of fast food, and it’s especially important when it comes to chicken. Whereas a burger has a wide range of temperatures it can be cooked to—anything from medium rare to well done probably won’t be sent back—chicken has a much narrower sweet spot. It becomes virtually inedible if it’s just a little overcooked, and undercooked chicken can bring about illness and lawsuits. Every bird has to hit the bullseye.

In fast food operations, standardization is the guiding mission. Timers start ticking as soon as a basket of chicken is dropped into a fryer, they start beeping when it’s time to come out, and they don’t stop beeping until someone does it. In independent kitchens, staff are more likely to cook by feel, and the result is a less consistent product. That type of intuition can come in handy for cooking steaks to different temperatures or adapting to menu substitutions, but for fried chicken, precision is more important.

Fast food chains like Popeyes also buy a whole lot more raw inventory than a typical independent restaurant, and they can leverage that monopsonistic power toward consistency. “They have a very strict limit on the size of the chickens,” López-Alt says. “They'll reject any chickens that aren't in that range...Most fast food chains are pretty strict with their suppliers and have a lot of power because they buy so much.”