Taco Bell's Chicken Nuggets Are Finally Being Released — Here's When

After months of anticipation and regional testing, Taco Bell is finally coming out with its own take on one of fast food's most popular items. Taco Bell's Crispy Chicken Nuggets will arrive on December 19th at the chain's 8000+ locations nationwide. The item was first announced earlier this year, but the California-based fast food chain kept us waiting until the final weeks of the year to release it as a limited-time meal on the nationwide menu.

If you were worried that Taco Bell was going to produce your run-of-the-mill chicken nuggets and sell them to the masses, then you'll be happy to know the fast food restaurant went out of its way to make its take on the classic item as unique as possible. To start, Taco Bell marinates its crispy chicken nuggets in jalapeño buttermilk, adding that subtle spice fans of the chain have come to expect from taco Bell food. Furthermore, by mixing tortilla chips with breadcrumbs in the breading, Taco Bell's crispy chicken nuggets will present a fascinating new take on the Cornell University-invented fast food item.

While the crispy chicken nuggets are clearly the star of the show, a chicken nugget can only be as good as the sauce it's dipped in. That's why Taco Bell has come in swinging with three sauce options for its new menu item.

The first sauce is a craveable mashup — Taco Bell has partnered up with Hidden Valley to combine Taco Bell's Fire Sauce and Hidden Valley Ranch to produce a spicy ranch dipping sauce, appropriately named Hidden Valley Fire Ranch Sauce.

The other two dips, known as Bell Sauce and Jalapeño Honey Mustard, should be familiar to those of us who have been following Taco Bell's chicken nuggets will-they-won't-they saga; the two sauces appeared during the crispy chicken nuggets' Minneapolis, Minnesota trial run back in October 2023. It remains to be seen how these three sauces will stack up against the best chicken nugget dipping sauces of all time.