Marketing to aliens, giving out sadness bowls and finger-licking germs? KFC isn't
as popular anymore for some pretty surprising reasons. Here’s the chick on KFC’s chicken!
Colonel Harland Sanders first started selling fried chicken at a small motel restaurant in
Kentucky, where he perfected his secret fried chicken recipe with 11 herbs and spices. In 1952,
he thought he had a product good enough to franchise. However, when he barreled into
franchises to visit, he was known to give terse criticisms of the gravy, such as:
"How do you serve this God d----- slop? With a straw?"
Or he'd declare the biscuits and gravy too horrible to feed his dogs,
according to the New Yorker. Unfortunately, the food quality began to decline after Sanders
sold the chain to investors in 1964. When Heublein later acquired KFC in the 1970s,
the food quality began to spiral. In a post on Quora, a former employee from the 1970s said,
"The gravy came as dried grease in huge barrels and was referred to as 'sludge'".
In 1978, the KFC in Bowling Green, Kentucky, tried to sue Sanders for libel in connection
to his condescending comments about the quality of the food. Sanders compared the gravy to quote,
"wallpaper paste" and called the new crispy chicken "a d--- fried doughball stuck on
some chicken." However, the court threw the case out, saying that Sanders was talking in
general about the decline of the food at all KFCs and not just the one in Bowling Green.
"Kentucky Fried Chicken! In Kentucky! When's that ever gonna happen?!"
We don't want to imagine what Colonel Sanders would think about the food at KFC today,
let alone what he would say. In short, it wouldn't be anything nice. If you'd like
to taste fried chicken the way the Colonel intended, you can visit the Claudia Sanders
Dinner House in Shelbyville, Kentucky, where the Colonel developed his original chicken recipe.
Despite being labeled "original recipe," KFC chicken barely resembles the original
chicken anymore. Still, companies that have owned KFC have gone to great lengths
to keep the recipe secret, even by buying spices from different vendors.
When Mashed visited KFC to determine how much food $10 would buy, we discovered that the
flavor of 11 herbs and spices had devolved into nothing but an overwhelming amount of salt. So,
if they're still using the special spice blend, it's a minuscule amount compared to
the salt they use. The gravy was bitter, and the biscuits were practically dough balls.
It's not just us who think the food has gone downhill. All you have to do is take
a look at Reddit or Quora, and you'll find everyone asking what happened to KFC and why
the chicken has gotten so bad. Some people think that part of the problem is that KFC
changed from lard to trans-fat-free oil in 2007. However, the company claimed the new
soybean-based oil would keep the chicken flavor the same. Spoiler alert: it didn't.
Back in 2016, QSR Magazine's drive-through study of 15 fast-food restaurants revealed
an average 203.91-second wait time at KFC. Three minutes and 23 seconds wasn't too bad compared
to Chick-fil-A's four minutes and 17-second wait. But, by 2021, CNN Business said that the
average drive-through time at KFC had grown to a yawning chasm of six minutes and 30 seconds.
One thing that seemed to clog up drive-through lanes was people there to pick up orders from
the app and internet that were already ready. In 2020, KFC revealed two new restaurant designs
for new restaurants that would feature one drive-through lane for regular customers and
another for picking up items from a food pickup rack for orders made online or through the app.
However, by 2021, KFC was advocating for online and app orderers to come inside
to pick up their orders from a Quick Pick-up location in the
restaurant. As an incentive to come inside, KFC offered free large fries
to anyone who ordered at least $5 worth of food and came inside to retrieve it.
One of the most infuriating things that can happen when ordering fast food is to get home
and realize your order isn't correct. In 2016, KFC was only accurate on drive-through orders an
average of 88.6% of the time. The percentage was worse than nearly every top burger place
where the employees were having to mind condiment and topping changes, according to QSR Magazine.
By 2019, the accuracy at KFC had dropped even further to a dismal 66.1%,
according to QRS Magazine. That means you had more than a three out of 10 chance in
2019 of your order being wrong or even getting someone else's order
rather than your own. If KFC were a school subject, the employees would have failed.
When QSR Magazine did its drive-through accuracy study again in 2021,
KFC had made vast improvements, bringing its accuracy report card to a solid A-,
with 92.3% accuracy. Unfortunately, a Statista study shows KFC is back to its
old ways with a B- score of 82.6% in 2022. Ruin someone's supper order enough times,
and they're not coming back. That's just the way the fried chicken crumbles.
Over on CustomerService Scoreboard, KFC is ranked 783 out of 1009 companies
for customer service quality. Their rating falls in the "terrible" range,
with a score of 24.24 out of 200 possible points. An anonymous commenter said they spent over $50
on their food only to have an employee give away part of their order to someone else.
When they realized what had happened, the KFC employee they talked to didn't even bother
to apologize. And many commenters complain about employees being downright rude to them.
One employee on Reddit explained that being paid so little and having to handle disagreeable
customers, in their words, "does something to a person," and it can be "too much to handle."
Another Redditor explained that not making much and being treated poorly by customers
causes them to work more slowly and care less about everything. According to Indeed,
the average employee at KFC that's not a manager makes between $12.73 and $14.39
per hour. With that type of pay, you shouldn't be surprised that most employees aren't giving
you the royal treatment when they simply aren’t paid enough to do so.
A Mashed poll found that around 28% of customers think the Pot Pie is the worst item KFC currently
has on its menu. All that buttery crust and creamy filling provides you with as much saturated fat,
25 grams, to be exact, as if you sat down and ate 17 and a half chicken legs. Another menu
item you should probably never order at KFC is its Famous Bowl. We've heard this monstrosity
referred to as a "sadness bowl," and it honestly looks like a slop bucket ready to feed hogs.
"Just make me a f------ failure pile in a sadness bowl. That's what I want."
When Reddit wanted to know which menu item you should avoid,
one employee made some claims that are tough to believe - considering it could make people
sick - but nevertheless makes us glad the BBQ sandwiches are gone. They claimed,
"[The sandwich was] made from chicken too old and stale to give to the homeless shelters, so
they soak it in BBQ sauce until it can be pulled, and then they keep it on the heater for a month."
One failed item that many of us miss is the grilled chicken. If you got it fresh,
it was as good as at any charbroiled chicken place. Unfortunately, a former KFC general
manager says on Quora that it didn't sell well since people tend to come to KFC for fried
chicken. When customers ordered grilled chicken, it had been sitting around for hours getting dry,
which hurt the overall perception of an otherwise tasty menu item.
In 2006, KFC decided global fame wasn't enough and decided to advertise to aliens in the
UFO-enthusiast tourist destination city of Rachel, Nevada. To do so,
they made an 87,500-square-foot Colonel Sanders out of tile in the desert. As far as we know,
no extraterrestrials responded to the ad.
In 2015, KFC created an ad campaign featuring a
caricature version of Colonel Sanders played by a variety of celebrities,
but viewers didn't care for it. Yum! Brands CEO Greg Creed told Entrepreneur,
"[I am] very excited that this work is really distinctive and disruptive. And I am actually
quite happy that 20 percent hate it because now they at least have an opinion. They're actually
talking about KFC, and you can market to love and hate; you cannot market to indifference."
For years, KFC ads have told us that its chicken is "finger-lickin' good." However, when the
Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, licking fingers did not seem so appealing anymore when we were
obsessively sanitizing our hands. As a result, the company retired the slogan, at least temporarily.
On November 9, 2022, KFC sent a text message to German KFC customers inviting them to eat
at KFC to celebrate Kristallnacht, which was a night Nazis initiated attacks on Jews
during World War II. KFC apologized, saying that a bot sent it, adding,
"We use a semi-automated content creation process linked to calendars that include
national observances. In this instance, our internal review process was not properly followed,
resulting in a non-approved notification being shared."
"Needless to say, Kristallnacht is not an appropriate place to be pushing fast food."
The adage "change or die" holds true now more than ever when it comes to restaurants. There's
so much competition that staying relevant is a must to keep customers. Currently,
it's not uncommon to drive down the main strip in a city and see
five or six chicken restaurants, all within a mile, including KFC.
QSR stats from 2021 shows that KFC was number 14 when it came to how many millions of dollars
it was making in sales. Still, Chick-fil-A made over 2.7 times more money than KFC did. However,
when you look at their actual unit sales, KFC was way down the list at No. 29,
beat out by Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane's, Zaxby's, Popeyes, Bojangles, El Pollo Loco, and Wingstop.
KFC has been attempting a comeback for years. In 2014, it offered grilled chicken
as a healthier option. In 2016, KFC retrained its employees and guaranteed to remake any
food that customers did not like. In 2017, KFC's started using antibiotic-free chicken. In 2022,
they tested wraps for the first time, offered finger sporks, debuted Beyond Meat nuggets,
and revamped 70% of its stores with a Next Generation design. None of these plans have
worked because KFC has not gotten to the heart of what customers are looking for in
a chicken restaurant: good chicken, a clean restaurant, and reliable, friendly service.
There once was a rumor that Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC to make people forget it
was fried. Yes, It's true that KFC has made some valiant attempts to appear more health-conscious,
but that wasn't one of them. In 2004, KFC actually had to defend itself in court when
it falsely claimed its food was a healthy choice for a low-carb diet plan. However,
KFC did switch to trans-fat-free oil in 2007, unsuccessfully tried out sodium-laden grilled
chicken in 2014, started using antibiotic-free chicken in 2017,
and offered unhealthy vegetarian fried chicken nuggets briefly in 2002.
Unfortunately, KFC has yet to hit the mark. There's very little on the menu you can order
if you're health-conscious other than maybe a side of sweet kernel corn since grilled
chicken is off the menu. When you look at the nutritional information for everything,
you'll notice that the fat and sodium content is through the roof. If you get two pieces of
dark meat chicken, a side of mashed potatoes and gravy, a biscuit, and a small beverage,
you'll end up consuming 870 calories, 39 grams of fat, and 2410 milligrams of sodium.
According to the FDA, that's 50% of the fat and 110 milligrams more
sodium than you should be consuming for the whole day in just one meal.