Open the Weekly National Chicken Report and count the lines. Whole birds by size, then breast, tenders, wings, thighs, legs, drumsticks, leg quarters, frames, backs and necks, livers, gizzards, mechanically separated chicken. No paws. The export section at the bottom of the report carries one product, mechanically separated chicken, fresh and frozen. Chicken feet, one of the most valuable export items on the bird, have no public US price at all.
This article is about why that is, what the public record does show, and why it matters to a buyer who never touches a paw.
Where paws go
Paws are eaten across East and Southeast Asia and barely at all in North America, so the US supply is an export product by default. The US poultry export council names China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam as the largest markets. Because there is almost no domestic bid, the paw's value is set by whether the door to those markets is open, which makes it a trade-policy product more than a commodity.
That door has opened and closed several times. China banned all US poultry in 2015 after highly pathogenic avian influenza was detected. Access was regained under the Phase One trade agreement, with a regionalization protocol signed in March 2020: an HPAI detection triggers a statewide ban, lifted 90 days after the virus is eliminated at all affected premises in that state. Under that protocol, most of the US broiler belt has spent long stretches locked out. On May 15, 2026 China lifted HPAI restrictions on 17 states; 27 states, including Georgia, Mississippi, and Missouri, remained restricted at that date.
The heat-treated workaround
Heat-treated poultry from plants in HPAI-affected areas is permitted under the US-China terms even when raw product is not, and that rule reshaped the paw trade. US processors began cooking paws before export so that plants in restricted states could keep shipping. In 2025 China imported 80,447 metric tons of US heat-treated paws worth 252.8 million dollars, up 82.9 percent in volume and 53 percent in value on the year, according to the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service post in Guangzhou. From January through August 2025 alone the figure was above 54,000 tons and 185 million dollars.
The same post warned that heat-treated paws were facing stricter inspection and higher rejection risk on arrival, with non-tariff barriers expected to cap further growth in 2026. And the wider picture is that total US broiler shipments to China in 2025 were 86 percent below 2020, per USDA's Economic Research Service. Paws grew inside a trade that shrank.
Why a breast buyer should care
A broiler is sold as the sum of its parts, and the packer's return on the bird includes the paws the way a beef packer's return includes the drop credit. When the export door is open the paw carries real value; when it closes, that value falls toward zero and the packer has to recover the bird's cost on the parts that do have a domestic bid. USDA does not publish that arithmetic for chicken, and this article does not put a number on it. But the direction is not in doubt, and it is the reason a China regionalization headline belongs on a chicken buyer's screen even though the buyer has never bought a foot.
The visible proxy is leg quarters. They are the other export-dependent line on the bird, and unlike paws they are in the report every week, in the domestic table and, for mechanically separated product, the export table. When access to Asia changes, leg quarters are where the public data shows it first.
What you cannot get from USDA
There is no weekly USDA paws price, no volume line, and no cold storage breakdown for paws. Anyone quoting you a paws price is quoting a private trade or an export contract. The public numbers in this article are annual trade statistics from the Foreign Agricultural Service and dated regulatory decisions, and they are the only public figures the trade has.