There have been plenty of stories written about Costco over the years, but nothing has captured people’s interest quite like their legendary rotisserie chickens. Served fresh and hot every two hours, and priced at just $4.99, it’s not unusual to see a crowd gathering in the deli — or witness a mad rush when the fresh chicken bell goes off. But what if we told you that there was a way to get even more Costco chicken for just one extra dollar?
All you have to do is force yourself to walk past the hot chickens and head for the cold, prepared foods section. Depending on your location, there should be containers filled with chopped or halved rotisserie chicken priced at $5.99. These are yesterday’s chickens that weren’t sold within that two-hour window, and now they’re cut up and ready for your next meal.
Admittedly, buying cold chicken doesn’t quite have the cache as a hot chicken. After all, you won’t fill the car with the delicious smell of cooked chicken on the drive home. However, if you’re one of the millions of people who buy Costco chickens to use for ingredients in another recipe, or for any type of meal prep for the week, there’s really no difference between a cold chicken and a hot chicken.
Cold chickens offer more meat, less waste
Perhaps the best reason to buy cold rotisserie chicken from Costco is the value. Cold birds are often pre-picked or chopped, and sometimes even the bones are removed (though this can vary from store to store). This means that the bulk of the weight of the package is edible chicken. The wholesale club’s chickens, many of which are raised on their own farm in Nebraska (just another fact you may not have known about Costco’s rotisserie chickens), are bigger than most regular 2-pound grocery store birds. A single Costco chicken weighs around 3 pounds with the bones, and yield around 2 pounds of meat.
Meanwhile, the cold packages contain one and a half chickens, so you’ll get roughly an extra 1.5 pounds of meat for just a buck. That can fill a lot of burritos or chicken salad sandwiches. Even better, if the chicken is, in fact, already cut up or pulled off the bone, you don’t have to get out a cutting board and do all the prep of pulling the meat apart, which is kinda priceless, really.
Cold chicken also has an advantage if your family receives funds from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Unlike hot chickens, which are not considered staple items by the USDA, you’re allowed to buy cold rotisserie chicken with an EBT card. And at $1.99 a pound, this is one deal that you’ll definitely want to stock up on for cheap, nutritious meals throughout the week.
