History of KFC

The Kentucky Fried Chicken® was founded by Colonel Harland Sanders (born on September 9, 1890) at the age of sixty-five. KFC® is currently one of the largest businesses of the global food service industry and is widely known around the world as the face of Colonel Sanders.

Every year, over a billion KFC® chicken dinners are served featuring the Colonel’s “finger lickin’ good” special recipe. The Colonel has spread his industry currently to more than eighty countries and territories globally.

At the age of forty, Colonel Sanders began cooking for travelers in his service station located in Corbin, KY. However, rather than coming in for service for their cars, hundreds of people began coming to the Colonel’s station specifically for his food. So he expanded his new up-and-coming business by moving across the street to a hotel and restaurant that seated one hundred and forty-two people. While cooking here, Colonel Sanders perfected his secret blend of eleven herbs and spices for his special recipe that is still used today.

With his special cooking techniques, Sanders’ station became famous and he was recognized for his amazing cuisine by the Governor at the time, Ruby Laffoon in 1935 when he was made a Kentucky Colonel; hence the name Colonel Sanders. In 1939, Colonel Sanders’ restaurant won the top spot on Duncan Hines’ “Adventures in Good Eating.”

After his amazing start-up in 1952, the Colonel devoted himself for the rest of his life to his chicken franchising business. To spread his famous recipe, he spanned the country in his car from his small business in Kentucky to cook his chicken for restaurant owners and their employees. If his subjects loved it like his other customers had, the Colonel made a deal with the establishment, saying that they would pay him a nickel for each chicken they sold in their restaurant. So many restaurants agreed that by 1964, the Colonel had over six hundred franchised outlets in the United States and Canada for his chicken. Also in 1964, Colonel Sanders decided to sell his interest in the United States company for small change (only $2 million) to a small faction of investors, such as John Y. Brown Jr., the governor of Kentucky from 1980 to 1984. However, Colonel Sanders continued to be the public spokesman for KFC® and in 1976, he was named the world’s second-most identifiable celebrity by an independent survey.

With this new group of investors undertaking the Corporation, KFC® expanded and matured quickly. The Corporation was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on January 16, 1969, only three years after it had gone public on March 17, 1966. Then, after the KFC Corporation® was acquired by Heublein Inc. on July 8, 1971 for $285 million, the company grew to an enormous three thousand and five hundred franchised and company-owned restaurants world-wide.

Subsequently, Heublein Inc. was next acquired by R.J. Reynolds Industries, Inc. (currently RJR Nabisco, Inc.) in 1982, making Kentucky Fried Chicken® a subsidiary of Reynolds. After that, in October of 1986, PepsiCo, Inc. made a purchase of $840 million from RJR Nabisco, Inc.

However, in January of 1997, PepsiCo, Inc. revealed that it would be making KFC® and its other small quick service restaurants – Taco Bell and Pizza Hut – into an independent restaurant company known as Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc. The company also stated that it would change the corporation’s name to Yum! Brands, Inc. in May of 2002. This corporation, which currently owns A&W All-American Food Restaurants, KFC, Long John Silvers, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants, is the world’s principal restaurant corporation in terms of system units, having a stifling thirty-two thousand and five hundred units in over one hundred countries and territories.

Sadly, after traveling two hundred fifty thousand miles every year visiting his restaurants around the globe, Colonel Sanders died of leukemia at the age of ninety in 1980.

Interestingly enough, this enormous, global corporation all started with simply a sixty-five-year-old gentleman and a chicken.