The best frozen chicken wings should pass for restaurant-quality chicken wings without any work on your part. Let’s be real: You’re not going to season and deep-fry fresh chicken wings for your game day party. You’re going to get a big, giant bag of frozen chicken wings and pour them into the air fryer or onto a baking sheet. But you still want your guests to think you’ve got a mini Buffalo Wild Wings in your kitchen.
The best chicken wings can be defined by two things: Crispy skin and juicy meat. So that’s what we looked for when we cooked up a slew of the top frozen chicken wing brands. If we bit into a wing and the skin went “squish,” we tossed it out of the running. We also looked for good quality meat—something that really tasted like chicken. We also looked for flavor, whether that was from a tangy Buffalo sauce, sweet honey BBQ, or just some salt and pepper. Flavor has to show up to get a high score. Also, ideally, the best frozen chicken wing should cook up to look and taste like it’s been in the deep fryer. Seems impossible, right? Well, some of these brands actually got pretty darn close.
For our multiple frozen chicken wing taste tests, we used either an oven or a toaster oven to prep our wings. (It’s the best way to cook frozen chicken wings, according to our own experimentation.) But you can use an air fryer and get different results.
While we continue to search for the best frozen boneless wings (none of the brands we’ve tasted have earned a spot on this list so far), two Kroger brand frozen wings snagged a couple spots after our most recent taste test. But nothing can touch our number one pick for the best frozen wings. Read on for the full ranking and find the best frozen chicken wings for your tastes.
- Kroger Honey Flavored BBQ
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Look, these aren’t the best frozen chicken wings for a party. They’re not super crispy and they don’t have a fried texture. But we still think they deserve a spot on this list as the best frozen wings to buy for an easy weeknight dinner. These Kroger brand frozen wings come out of the oven tasting like homemade BBQ chicken. The sauce is mellow and sweet and very honey-forward. It’s buttery and rich and really comforting. And the chicken is good quality chicken, too. That’s not always a given with frozen wings. Cook up a batch of these, make some boxed rice pilaf, steam some broccoli, and you’ve got yourself a quick, wholesome meal.
Credit: Merc / Instacart
- Tyson Any’Tizers Wings Honey BBQ Seasoned
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These are the best frozen wings for the BBQ sauce lovers. They’re sweet and tangy, just like you want out of a good honey BBQ sauce. Plus, the sugar in the honey creates these crispy little edges on the wings themselves after they come out of the oven. These come fully cooked, so all you have to do is reheat them. That said, consider cooking these in the oven at a higher temperature than suggested. We cooked them to package directions and they were just fine, but the wings could have been a lot crispier. Enjoy the flavor and the tasty white meat, but it might take some noodling with the oven to get the right texture.
Credit: Liv Averett / Target
- Kirkwood Buffalo Style Chicken Wings
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“The meat tastes like it was marinated in garlic, almost like it’s brined,” remarked Sporked editor-in-chief Justine Sterling. Kirkwood frozen chicken wings are curious. The flavor is great, it contains the correct amount of sharp heat you come to expect out of Buffalo sauce, but the texture is a little peculiar. Judging by our experience, it’s best to jack up the heat or put them under the broiler at the end of the cooking process for a minute or two to get them nice and crispy. These aren’t the absolute best frozen Buffalo wings we tasted, but the flavor is hard to beat. And, since they’re from Costco, you get a lot of them for not that much money.
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
- Tyson Any’Tizers Buffalo Wings
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Tyson’s Any’Tizers Buffalo Wings may have a cringey name, but they’re some of the best frozen chicken wings you can buy if you’re looking for seriously big, meaty Buffalo wings that don’t pack too much heat. The meat is really good. It’s gorgeously white and flavorful. And they crisp up in the oven, too. Our only quibble is that the Buffalo sauce flavor is fairly mild. But some people don’t want to be walloped in the face with a ton of Buffalo tang. If you’re cooking for a crowd that includes some folks who fear too much flavor, cook up a batch of these and serve extra Buffalo sauce on the side. (Want a Buffalo sauce recommendation? We’ve got you covered with the best Buffalo sauce.) And skip the blue cheese dressing (it’ll overpower the flavor) and pair these with some tangy, herb-speckled ranch (perhaps one of our picks for the best ranch) instead.
Credit: Liv Averett / Walmart
- Kroger Garlic Parmesan Flavored
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Another Kroger brand frozen chicken wing makes an appearance! These garlic parm wings don’t taste like the garlic parm wings you get at Buffalo Wild Wings. They’re not flavor blasted. Instead, they taste like actual garlic and just a sprinkling of parmesan. The skin gets crispy in the oven and the chicken tastes great. These wings taste like a human person made them, rather than a robot. Sporked writer Ariana Losch thought the flavor was a bit too subtle for her taste, so be prepared to add a few extra shakes of parmesan and garlic powder if you really want to up the flavor. But if you’re into a naturally flavored wing, these are the best frozen chicken wings for you.
Credit: Merc / Instacart
- Tyson Buffalo Style Hot Wings
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Not to be confused with the Tyson’s Any’tizers Buffalo Style Wings, these Tyson wings have a loud Buffalo flavor that we enjoy. The tangy heat provides a bit more spiciness than the other wings on this list of the best frozen chicken wings, making them all the more delectable. The wing meat is no joke, either. These aren’t dry and thin; Tyson’s Buffalo Style Hot Wings feature big, honkin’ hunks of juicy wing meat. Meaty hot wings are a no-brainer to pair with a good blue cheese dressing, just like the good Lord intended. The skin on each wing is nice and craggy, too, with an even coating around every morsel of chicken—perfect for picking up those little hunks of blue cheese in the dip.
Credit: Liv Averett / Sam’s Club
- Trader Joe’s Hot & Spicy Wings
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“If I saw these at a Super Bowl party I’d be like, this party ‘bout to pop off,” Sporked’s Jordan Myrick said while eying these glorious wings. Trader Joe’s Hot & Spicy frozen wings are indeed a pleasure to behold. They glisten with lacquered sauce. If we judged by looks alone, these might be the best frozen hot wings. But they just didn’t have the crisp skin or ka-pow of flavor we were looking for to earn them the top spot. That said, the meat itself is really good. Out of all the frozen wings we tasted, these tasted the most like fresh-not-frozen chicken. If you’re a regular TJ’s shopper, pick up a bagful of these on your next stroll down the freezer aisle.
Credit: Liv Averett
- Foster Farms Take Out Crispy Classic Buffalo Wings
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These frozen wings come with Buffalo sauce, but you might not even need it. Foster Farms wings are perfect naked and plain; they are salty, meaty, and moist all by themselves. Jordan enjoyed these so much they said, “I kind of forgot I was on camera for a minute,” as they got lost in the taste. (Want to see them and the rest of us Sporked folks taste test in action? Check out our TikTok or Instagram.) Well-seasoned food wins out every time, and these Foster Farms wings score high on our list of the best frozen wings to buy because of it.
Credit: Liv Averett / Target
- TGIFridays Buffalo Style Wings
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These bone-in Buffalo wings can be pretty tough to find, but when you see them at a store, get a tattoo of the exact location so that you never forget. They are the best frozen Buffalo wings. These wings are perfectly crispy—astonishingly so. Even when we cooked them in an oven, they achieved an incredible crunch. The only knock on these wings is that there’s not a whole lot of Buffalo sauce flavor. What sauce it does have permeates the chicken, though. “The sauce feels like it’s baked into the wing,” Justine said glowingly. That said, you might need to apply your own Frank’s Red Hot if you want some extra heat.
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
- Foster Farms Hot & Spicy
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These wings take the title of not only the best frozen hot wings but the best frozen chicken wings, period, due to their even balance of crispy texture, tender meat, and amazing flavor. It should also be said that these were the only wings to not stick to the baking sheet. They were adequately crispy and evenly coated with sauce. That sauce, albeit not a traditional, buttery, restaurant-style Buffalo sauce, is tangy and hot just like we want it. Foster Farms Hot & Spicy wings uses aged cayenne peppers and a bit of vinegar to achieve that classically spicy, zesty flavor. This is a quality wing that scores high marks in both texture and flavor. For that reason, it alone sits in the top spot.
Credit: Liv Averett / Walmart
Best BBQ (Runner-Up)
Best BBQ
Best Buffalo Sauce
Best Mild Buffalo
Best Garlic Parm
Best with Blue Cheese
Best Chicken Quality
Best Plain
Best Buffalo Wings
Best of the Best
