What the KFC, Beyond Meat plant-based fried chicken tastes like

Yahoo Finance's Allie Canal joins the Live show to review the new Beyond Meat plant-based fried chicken featured on KFC's menu.

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ADAM SHAPIRO: Let's go back to Allie Canal who has the best job in North America. Joining us from our Bureau in Florida, Allie, you're taste testing the new Beyond Meat fried chicken from KFC. We want to see-- we want to see you taste it, then we want to hear what you think.

ALLIE CANAL: Yeah, Adam. I know. It's not a bad day job. I'm not going to lie. But we finally have this nationwide rollout of the new KFC beyond fried chicken. Now this follows a two year testing period. It was first tested in Atlanta in August of 2019. It sold out in just five hours. Then one year later, we had expanded tests in Nashville, Charlotte, southern California, all successful. Hence, this nationwide rollout today.

Now I have right here the Beyond fried chicken. These are nuggets. You can get them in a six pack, 12 pack, a la carte. Comes with a variety of dipping sauces. It smells absolutely delicious, that fried KFC seasoning. And now I'm going to try it. And I'm to tell you what I think. Let's go. Wow. This does really-- this tastes like chicken. It tastes like I'm eating a KFC chicken nugget. If you told me that this was Beyond Meat, I probably wouldn't have believed you.

Wow, I'm very impressed. This might be the first five in all the eats. Because I'm very, very picky. Maybe the first five, which is honestly incredible. And I think it's a great marketing for KFC and Beyond Meat too to try and reach a new audience. And that's exactly what they're trying to do. Earlier today, we had the CEO of Beyond Meat, Ethan Brown, along with Kevin Hochman, who's a KFC US president. And they talked a little bit more about the core consumer that they're trying to reach with this new product.

So take a look at what they said earlier today.

ETHAN BROWN: It really is to appeal to what we call flexitarians, folks that are making reductions in animal protein consumption, but not eliminating animal protein consumption, and doing that in the places they love to eat, like KFC.

KEVIN HOCHMAN: We think that we're going to attract some new younger customers that traditionally have not come to KFC that are looking for more plant based options in their lifestyle, as well as potentially getting our existing customers to come more frequently because they have folks in their households or themselves wanting to eat more plant based protein.

ALLIE CANAL: There you go. So really that younger, newer consumer. Kevin Hochman has said that this is not just a blip, that this is a longer term trend. And there's a lot of stats behind it. US-- [COUGH] excuse me. We have the KFC seasonings from this chicken nugget really coming through right now. Live television, folks. But US plant based food sales grew two times as fast as animal based food sales in 2020. There's more room to run here according to Tastewise. The market has the potential to reach $14 billion over the next decade.

So a lot of money at stake. And I think that's one of the reasons why we're going to see Beyond Meat products pop up continuously in fast food chains, in restaurants, and really become a mainstay staple on these menus, not just a temporary limited edition run.

ADAM SHAPIRO: All right. Well some of us are-- we usually run for the border. We're going to run to KFC because we want to try these things. Allie Canal. Thank you very much.