Is Chicken Salt Vegetarian?

What’s the story with chicken salt? For decades, takeaway stores have been dusting our chips, our potato cakes, and every other form of deep-fried food in this golden, umami-flavoured crack without anyone ever being able to give a satisfying answer to the question: what even is this stuff? Is it made from chicken? Made to taste like chicken? Or made to improve the taste of chicken? Is it vegetarian? Organic? Gluten-free?

Everyone has a theory—no one, it seems, really knows the truth. So we traced chicken salt back to its source, and lifted the lid on Australia’s most universally adored condiment.

“Chicken salt was originally developed as a seasoning for rotisserie chickens to provide colour and flavour—hence the name chicken salt,” Lewis Mitani, of South Australia’s Mitani Chicken Salt factory, told VICE over email. “Eventually, the seasoning became popular as a condiment for hot chips.”

The iconic Australian meal of deep-fried potato encrusted with canary-yellow seasoning, then, came about as something of a happy accident. It was the entrepreneurial takeaway shop owners who took this salt designed for chickens and recklessly threw it on chips. The rest, as they say, is history. Now chicken salt is a mainstay of fast food stores the nation over.

Lewis is pretty tight-lipped about the full list of ingredients that go into his product, and “closely guards” the recipe for fear that competitors might bastardise it with cheap knock-offs and imitations. Sea salt, rice flour, garlic, onion, paprika, and “a secret blend of herbs and spices” is about as much as he’s willing to divulge.

He can confirm, however, that chicken salt is vegetarian-friendly—as well as 100 percent gluten free, free from artificial colours and flavours, and without any added MSG. Staff down at the Mitani factory also take the necessary steps to produce a vegan-suitable product, apparently—although “strict regulations dictate that we cannot state that the product is vegan.”

Lewis almost makes the stuff sound healthy—and while he warns that chicken salt should probably be consumed in moderation, he also points out that “sodium and salt is needed by the body to regulate fluid levels.”

“It’s vital to the healthy functioning of our bodies, and plays several essential roles such as controlling blood pressure and regulating the function of muscles and nerves,” says Lewis—whom, it bears repeating, makes and sells salt for a living. Moreover, since chicken salt has been designed to enhance the natural flavour of food, he suggests that it might actually “aid in the reduction of use of traditional table salt.”

Good for vegos; good for celiacs; good for anyone wanting to cut down on their table salt without cutting down on “salt” altogether. And all that without any added colours, flavours, or MSG. It invites the question: is chicken salt actually a superfood?

“From a flavour perspective it is,” says Lewis. “Chicken salt is not considered a superfood. But it certainly holds a special place on the dinner tables of many Australians: bringing a little nostalgia and a lot of flavour to every meal.”