Today in 1890, the birthday of Harland Sanders.
He was the founder and public face of Kentucky Fried Chicken, the guy who came up with the famous secret recipe of herbs and spices, and the guy who, for a while, was also a pretty big critic of the fast food brand he started.
Sanders was about 40 years old when he started selling chicken at a service station in Kentucky.
Eventually he opened a full-service restaurant across the street; it was such a hit that the governor of Kentucky made him a colonel.
In the 1950s, Colonel Sanders started selling franchise rights to Kentucky Fried Chicken, and to do that he started wearing a white suit and traveling around the country to make chicken for potential franchisees.
It worked: in just a few years there were hundreds of KFC restaurants; a few more years and there were thousands.
By the 1960s, a now seventy-something Colonel Sanders decided to sell KFC operations to investors, but he stayed on as what we would now call a brand ambassador.
That’s when the story takes an unusual turn.
The New Yorker once called Sanders “one of the world’s foremost worriers.”
And as he traveled around the country visiting KFC locations, he worried about what he saw – and ate – as the franchise scaled up.
He’d even tell reporters about it!
Sanders once called a new crispy chicken recipe “nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken.”
And he complained that the way KFC made gravy at that point was “horrible… they buy tap water for 15 or 20 cents a thousand gallons and then they mix it with flour and starch and end up with pure wallpaper paste. And I know wallpaper paste, by God, because I’ve seen my mother make it.”
Wallpaper paste! The living embodiment of the chain wasn’t exactly singing its praises.
At first KFC’s spokespeople replied along the lines of, hey, that Colonel sure is feisty, isn’t he?
They tried to say that making huge amounts of food required these kinds of changes.
But all bets were off after Sanders opened up his own chicken place, named for his wife Claudia.
The company sued its founder for libeling its products; Sanders countersued, claiming that KFC was putting his face on products he didn’t develop.
The two sides eventually settled and, to at least some degree, reconciled.
Toward the end of Sanders’ life, KFC headquarters dedicated the Colonel Sanders Museum, and as part of his funeral services, the HQ included an open casket wake for the man who had started it all.
Colonel Sanders is still a big part of the branding around KFC, which sometimes heads in some unexpected directions.
Back in 2020, they announced a short movie called “A Recipe For Seduction,” with the part of Colonel Sanders played by “Saved By The Bell” star Mario Lopez.
Was Daniel Day-Lewis not available?
Colonel Sanders Once Competed Against KFC And Got Sued (Tasting Table)
Mario Lopez will play Colonel Sanders in KFC-Lifetime original movie ‘A Recipe for Seduction’ (FOX 2 Now)
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