Tonight, there was a documentary on TV regarding the CONFIDENTIALITY of the KFC recipe. I thought it was interesting, so I decided to dig a little deeper to find out more information. This is what I found…
—————————————————————————
Harlan Sander, better known as Colonel Sanders, began selling chicken in the small front room of a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky. His cooking quickly gained a strong following, and in 1936 Kentucky Governor Ruby Laffoon made Harland Sanders an honorary Kentucky Colonel to recognize his contributions to the state’s cuisine. Over the next 9 years, Sanders stealthily worked on his method of cooking chicken. He eventually developed his signature, multi-million dollar recipe, a tasty blend of 11 herbs and spices. It was1940.
“In those days, I hand-mixed the spices like mixing cement on a specially cleaned concrete floor on my back porch in Corbin,” the Colonel recalled. “I used a scoop to make a tunnel in the flour and then carefully mixed in the herbs and spices.”
It was also during this time that the pressure flyer was introduced. Sanders utilized this to deliver fresh chicken to his customers faster when he discovered it was much quicker than pan frying.
In 1950, Colonel Sander’s notorious wardrobe also began to take shape: the trademark mustache, the goatee, and a white suit and string tie. Although he had been a colonel for 9 years now, he finally began to look the part.
It was at this time that the Colonel began actively franchising his chicken business by traveling from town to town and cooking up chicken for restaurant owners and employees. His work on the road paid off, as his success eventually landed 190 KFC franchisees and 400 franchise units in the U.S. and Canada.
The recipe:
“Today, the recipe is protected by some pretty elaborate security precautions. One company blends a formulation that represents part of the recipe while another spice company blends the remainder. As a final safeguard, a computer processing system is used to standardize the blending of the products to ensure neither company has the complete recipe.” (Information gleaned from www.kfc.com)
—————————————————————————
I think one of the reasons why I find this so fascinating is because you never really question the origin of fast food restaurants. You just figure they’re these sinful entities whose mission all along was to “become a fast food restaurant.” You don’t realize that some of the more common household food brands were IDEAS that were capitalized on. Good ideas. Good recipes, that prospered….in the form of a restaurant….and then revolutionized into a fast food chain. For me, it really reinforces the essence of capitalism: social darwinism - if a business is meant to succeed, it will.
So even the most common things we take for granted: El Pollo Loco, Carl’s Jr., Mrs. Field’s Cookies, etc. etc., for the most part had modest beginnings. It was the popularity of taste and the prudence of its founders that set them apart and allowed them to prosper.
It’s funny how the idea of being exceptional can lead to the field of normalcy and still be considered a success.
