KFC Resurrecting Old Kentucky Fried Chicken Name, With New Image

Same-store sales at KFC restaurants have been either negative or flat for most of the past year and a half, and the company’s effort to introduce healthier menu choices last year fell flat with customers. In recent months business has improved, partly due to the introduction of a 99-cent chicken sandwich, but the chain has decided a more aggressive approach is needed to revitalize sales.

As part of an aggressive plan to move the brand into the future, the company has begun by going back to the past to draw on its Southern roots, opening a new restaurant in its hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, under its former name of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The new Louisville store has a totally redesigned interior dining area, with low-profile tables and ottomans, a free digital jukebox, and a younger, apron-clad image of Colonel Sanders, the well-known founder of the original Kentucky Fried Chicken. The new Colonel is also slimmer, to appeal to a younger, on-the-go consumer who makes healthy eating a priority. The menu has been expanded and revamped to include new menu items not usually associated with fast food, such as collard greens, buttermilk popcorn shrimp, sausage bowls, chicken and rice, and sweet potato pie.

The company plans to open 50 more such restaurants across the country this year. Owned by Yum Brands, Inc., KFC has served as one of the corporations flagship chains, along with Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. But KFC has been a thorn in Yum’s side in recent years because of flagging sales and consumers straying to more trendy, health-oriented fare in fast food. So to meet the demand for new, upscale fast food, KFC is going to provide the public with hip, new restaurants and products. The restaurants opening this year won’t be brand new franchises; they’ll be existing stores remodeled with new looks. They will all display the Kentucky Fried Chicken name and hip new Colonel, as well as the updated menu. Although not all locations have been identified yet, the restaurants will be located in both suburban and urban neighborhoods, and they are planned present a mixture of the best aspects of the new Louisville store with those of a new store in Washington, D.C. that has proven to be a winner for KFC. The Washington store features the Kentucky Fried Chicken name in addition to a newly designed chicken bucket, and its new approach has increased business by more than 20 percent.

KFC has owns over 5,000 restaurants in the United States, in addition to hundreds worldwide. Colonel Harland Sanders offered the world a taste of his famous fried chicken almost 70 years ago in that first Louisville restaurant. His Original Recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken featured a secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, and since then millions of people throughout several generations have come to love his one of a kind chicken, homestyle side dishes, and hot, fresh biscuits. And now they will have even more to love, with KFC’s plans to become what the Colonel probably never even dreamed of: hip. The key concept ingredients for becoming hip with a decidedly Southern accent will be a noticeably more trendy store design, a jazzier menu, and an extreme makeover of the Colonel himself. According to Gregg Dedrick, KFC’s new president with an eye toward the future, the company is taking the best of the original idea and just improving it, to achieve "old-school cool."