[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] The year is 1972
and Kentucky Fried Chicken has just been sold
for $285 million,
the equivalent of 1.6 billion today.
Despite the sale, the founder, Colonel Sanders,
has stayed on as the brand mascot.
[dramatic music]
[pounding] [gagging]
Whether he likes it or not.
- Those goddamn sons of bitches!
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] He built a chicken empire from the ground up.
- The quintessential American fast food
was defined by that burger joint menu,
you know, fries, shakes, burgers.
Nobody was thinking about chicken in this space.
- By 1970, there's a KFC there in every state in the union.
- [Narrator] He became an icon known around the world.
- Sanders changed the image of fried chicken in America
by creating a folklore around it
and centering himself in the middle of that folklore.
- You serve fried chicken?
[chuckles]
- Do we serve fried chicken?
Ooh-wee, we do serve fried chicken.
- So prior to Colonel Sanders,
there were all kinds of brand mascots.
There's the Sun-Maid girl, there's Aunt Jemima,
there's Mr. Peanut,
but he is really first to be the kind of
human incarnation of his brand.
- [Narrator] But the real man behind the iconic image
is more complicated than you know.
- So you have to remember,
Colonel Sanders was not a real colonel.
The truth is this was a very carefully cultivated persona
that he used to his advantage.
- Harland Sanders's alter ego, Colonel Sanders,
although it comes across as this really like warm
and fuzzy grandpa-like guy,
he had quite a volatile personality.
- [Narrator] This volatile personality would one day ignite
a bitter war between Kentucky Fried Chicken
and the man who created it.
- I'm gonna sue Kentucky Fried Chicken
for every last goddamn penny they're worth!
[dramatic music]
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] It's the early 1930s,
and the Great Depression is gripping rural areas
of the United States.
In a rough area of Corbin, Kentucky,
a gas station owner named Harland Sanders
is struggling to keep his business afloat.
- The tract of land just north of the gas station
is referred to as hell's half-acre.
It's a dangerous place.
The police are always coming in.
Sometimes the police don't wanna come in.
So Harland Sanders is running a gas station
in a pretty rough and tumble area.
[Harland breathing heavily]
- [Narrator] The depression has left Americans impoverished,
and gas sales are down.
- Thanks to the economic shock of the depression,
people were buying fewer cars,
and those who had cars were driving a lot less
to conserve gas.
- [Narrator] To make ends meet,
Sanders has begun cooking up a chicken recipe
he learned when he was just a boy.
- When Harland Sanders is five years old,
his father dies of a fever, so his mother has to take a job.
She takes a job in a canning factory
to provide for her family.
Harland Sanders is a kid, but he's the oldest sibling,
and this is where he first starts to learn how to cook.
[dramatic music]
- At the time, the major proteins in the country
are beef and pork.
Chicken, not so much.
- Who is cooking fried chicken in this country first?
It's going to be the enslaved people
who are brought over from West Africa
and working in the kitchens, in plantations, in restaurants,
in people's homes, in their own home,
making special dishes of fried chicken.
That's where it first comes to be a celebrated food,
considered an American one.
- [Narrator] Now Sanders is applying
those same survival skills from childhood
to weather the Great Depression by selling fried chicken
out of his gas station.
- Sanders realizes that he can use chicken
to entice customers because first of all,
it was inexpensive.
And therefore he could sell it to the customers
at a lower price than beef and pork.
- Got another two orders, boss.
- Yeah, two more coming up!
- [Narrator] Sanders' chicken soon gains a loyal following
among locals drawn to its inexpensive price
and a carefully honed recipe that Sanders keeps
only to himself.
- The real key to Sanders' early success was
the secret recipe, of course.
It was something that made his chicken memorable
and made people wanna find out what it was.
- [Narrator] But with the rise in popularity
of Sanders' chicken, he gains unwanted attention
from a local rival.
[dramatic music]
- Right down the road from Colonel Sanders's gas station
is another gas station.
And this guy says,
"I don't want people going to the Sanders' gas station.
I want them to go to my gas station."
So when he goes up to Sanders's signs, he paints over them.
So people don't even know that Sanders gas station exists.
[men laughing]
- Sanders naturally is upset by this.
He feels like he's losing money, he's losing business,
and it's all because of this rival down the street.
So they keep getting into it.
They keep butting heads, and they're not getting along.
- Afternoon fellas.
Last time I caught you out here, I made you a promise.
Do you remember what I said?
- Honestly, I don't care much that comes out your mouth.
[man spits]
- Sanders, he doesn't back down and he and two friends
actually catch the rival gas station owner
in the act painting over his sign.
- You hear that?
This son of a bitch here
thinks he can talk all this garbage.
[dramatic music]
[gun shooting]
- The rival ends up shooting
one of Sanders' associates, killing him.
Sanders shoots his rival, shoots him in the shoulder,
but he lives.
When the authorities sort it all out,
they determined that Sanders acted in self-defense,
and his rival ends up getting convicted of murder
and getting a long jail term,
which I suppose solves rather nicely
the problem of getting your signs painted over.
- Sebastian, get help.
Get some help!
- [Narrator] With his competitor eliminated,
Sanders can focus on selling his fried chicken.
And by the 1930s his gas station is turning a profit.
- How long til some more's ready?
- Hell, you only asked me that like two minutes ago.
So roughly we're two minutes closer.
- [Narrator] But pan frying his chicken,
is proving too time consuming.
- Well, there's a load of people out there,
and they're antsy.
- Most people cook chicken in a frying pan,
and it takes 30-40 minutes to cook chicken.
But you got road travelers,
and the road travelers didn't have 30-40 minutes.
So he started to experiment with ways to get consistency
and speed at the same time.
[light music]
- [Narrator] Sanders begins tinkering with modifications
to a French cooking device called the pressure cooker.
- Pressure cooker just literally puts a lot of pressure
and not a lot of heat curiously onto what is cooking.
- [Narrator] While the traditional pressure cooker
used water, Sanders wants his chicken
to have a crispy exterior.
So he experiments using cooking oil.
- Rather than using water in it,
actually putting vegetable oil in the pressure cooker,
in the pressure fryer,
it was able to cook the chicken very uniformly
with a very light outer crust
in a very short amount of time.
- [Narrator] The only problem,
the heated oil in a pressure cooker
could get too hot for the device itself.
- It was dangerous.
It has to be monitored.
Sanders used talk a lot about
how often those pressure cookers exploded.
- [Narrator] To fix this problem,
Sanders swaps metal washers for the cooker's rubber O-rings,
allowing him to superheat oil without risk of explosion.
- So he's now taken a chicken
that he's having a difficult time getting consistency out of
in a 30 to 40 minute timeframe,
and he is reduced the time to nine minutes.
The pressure is now forcing
the flavors back into the chicken.
It is crisp, it is easy to make,
and he can cook a lot of it very quickly.
- [Narrator] Using the pressure fryer,
Sanders perfects his chicken recipe
creating a crispy on the outside,
juicy on the inside fried chicken.
- What the advantage of that was,
one, the product tasted very good,
and two, he could actually produce it very quickly
for his customers.
So his customers could get in and get out very quickly
with a freshly cooked meal.
- [Narrator] With this chicken,
Harland Sanders will one day build a $5.4 billion empire
known as Kentucky Fried Chicken,
and a world renowned persona that will eventually
consume him.
aBy the mid 1930s, Harlandna Sanders's gas station
fried chicken is doing so well
that he purchases a new restaurant to serve his recipe.
- Harland Sanders was a neerdowell.
For the first 40 years of his life,
he shucked around from job to job.
Nothing seemed to go real well in his life
except that people liked the chicken that he cooked.
So just logically said,
okay, I'll put both feet into the restaurant business.
- [Narrator] Sanders' restaurant soon receives accolades.
- In mid 1930s, his restaurant was written up
in what was called the Duncan Hines
Adventures in Good Eating Travel Guide.
- [Narrator] The Travel Guide brings customers
from far and wide to the state of Kentucky
to try Harland Sanders's chicken.
- Getting a mention in the Duncan Hines travel guide,
it's kind of like getting a call out
from a social media influencer today.
You can be a hole in the wall spot,
which Sanders' chicken was,
and by getting this write up,
more and more people started to visit it
because it said, "Hey, this place has great fried chicken."
- [Narrator] In honor of this, in 1935,
the governor of Kentucky grant Sanders
the title of Kentucky Colonel.
- Colonel Sanders, he did not get this title
during his military service.
Colonel Sanders got this from Kentucky.
There's a thing called the Kentucky Colonelcy,
which is essentially an honor
that Kentucky has been offering since the 1800s.
It's almost like getting a key to the city.
- [Narrator] With his new title, a new Persona is born.
Colonel Sanders.
[dramatic music]
- For someone like Harland Sanders
who had gone through countless jobs
and had even gotten to a literal shootout
with one of his business rivals,
for him to still receive the title of Colonel
from the Governor, that speaks a lot to
what he'd really done for the state of Kentucky
and the state of fried chicken.
- And folks, how's everything?
- Great, thank you.
- Thanks for dining with us.
- With Colonel Harland Sanders's new persona,
there comes an opportunity to sort of turn over a new leaf.
He's now this profoundly respectable member of society,
and it's a profoundly legitimizing aspect for him,
for his business,
and really begins to craft this image
that he uses very much to his advantage
in his business life.
[gentle music]
- [Narrator] By 1950, Harland Sanders
has been running his restaurant for over a decade,
and with time he's become increasingly obsessed
with protecting his secret recipe.
- Sanders did not trust people easily,
and that includes people he did business with.
- This 11 herbs and spices perfect seasoning blend
that Harland comes up with is his life's work.
- He was so secretive about how exactly he made his chicken,
that there's a story that he had written down
the ingredients and then hid it above the door jam
and only told his young daughter where it was.
So if there was an emergency, if he had died,
if he was in the hospital,
only she would be able to find it.
It makes a lot of sense that Colonel Sanders
was so protective of his recipe.
If he did not protect it, it would've been so easy
for other people to copy it.
- [Narrator] As his restaurant continues to thrive,
Sanders befriends another restaurateur
who he does trust.
- So you see, Pete,
you add my secret blend of 11 herbs and spices,
dust it on the chicken kinda like so.
Like this, right?
- Harland Sanders meets Pete Harman
at a restaurateur convention in 1950,
and they hit it off immediately.
Colonel Sanders offers him to sample his fried chicken.
- Pete Harman had never sold fried chicken
at his Salt Lake City restaurant,
and it's possible he'd never even tried it.
He definitely had never had chicken like this.
- Hmm.
- Crispy on the outside.
Juicy and tender on the inside. - Mmm.
- Hmm.
- That's the best chicken I ever had.
It is finger-licking good.
- As the legend goes, he's the guy who coined the term,
"It's finger-licking good."
[suspenseful music]
Which if there's anything associated with KFC,
it's gotta be that phrase.
You know, nothing's more KFC than that.
- Finger-licking good.
Well, I like the sound of that.
- [Narrator] It's a phrase that will one day be known
around the world.
- Hey, looka there.
Didn't I tell you it was finger-licking good?
[Colonel Sanders laughs]
- [Narrator] And that won't be Pete Harman's
only contribution.
- You know, Colonel, I've been thinking about
adding a new menu item to my restaurant.
What would you think about me selling your chicken?
Well, you'd get a cut, of course.
- Harman gets interested in selling the chicken at his place
back in Utah, but Sanders is very nervous about that.
He has never shared his chicken recipe with anybody.
- You wanna sell my chicken in your restaurant?
- Well, yeah.
- And so part of the deal they end up making is,
I'll send you the spices.
I'm not gonna let you blend it out there yourself.
So he sends him the spices, and they work out a deal.
For every piece of chicken Harman sells in his restaurant
in Utah, he has to give the Colonel four cents.
- The two friends were happy with the deal.
For Sanders in particular, it gave him another source
of income while he was also running his restaurant.
- [Narrator] Sanders doesn't know it yet,
but this deal will not only change
the trajectory of his own life,
but that of the fast food landscape in America.
- [Narrator] In June of 1956, president Dwight D. Eisenhower
signs the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act.
This groundbreaking act
authorizes a spend of $25 billion
to build 41,000 miles of new interstate highway
connecting the entire nation.
- Eisenhower thought this would be useful for
bringing the country together, industrially,
economically, culturally,
much like the railroads in the 19th century.
- [Narrator] But for Harland Sanders,
the new infrastructure spells disaster.
- Sanders is at a bit of a difficult place
in his business life.
The New highway has been erected in Kentucky,
and it completely bypasses the location of his restaurant.
So his sales are falling.
He doesn't think there's a future
in his restaurant anymore.
So, he sells it
and then all he has is his savings
and his social security check, which is about $100 a month.
So, he needs to find another way to make money.
[light music]
- [Narrator] But he still has one lifeline,
his old friend Pete Harman.
- What's this?
- Well, it's the proceeds from the sale
of your chicken at my restaurant.
- Ooh Lord, that's a lot of chicken.
- Oh, it sure is.
You know, I've been calling it
the Colonel's Kentucky Fried Chicken.
[suspenseful music]
- Harman put up a sign outside of his own restaurant
that said Colonel Sanders' Kentucky Fried Chicken,
which piqued the interest of his customers,
and they would come in asking for this fried chicken
based on that sign.
- Harman has this way of seeing things in the Colonel
and in his chicken
that are the same things the public would wanna see too.
And Sanders just has this sixth sense.
He knows a good thing when he hears it.
[light music]
- [Narrator] Pete Harman is also selling the chicken
in white buckets,
which allow the steam to escape so the food stays crispy.
- The bucket of fried chicken goes far beyond a gimmick.
It becomes a bit of an icon and
I think it's more groundbreaking than people realize.
So, for example, if you see a flat square box
with nothing on it, you know it's pizza.
If you saw an unlabeled geometric little oyster pale,
you'd still know it was Chinese food.
You saw a little clamshell box,
you probably think it's a hamburger.
Well now you see a paper bucket,
you're thinking crispy fried chicken.
And I don't blame you one bit.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] Thanks to Pete Harman,
Sanders is inspired to hit the road
selling area restaurants on the idea
of featuring his Kentucky Fried Chicken.
- When he was facing financial hardship,
he literally got in his car one day
and started driving around to area restaurants
and saying, "If you sell my chicken,
and if you give me four cents per chicken,
I will teach you my preparation technique."
- [Narrator] While Sanders would never share the secret
behind his proprietary blend of 11 herbs and spices,
he would provide it pre-mixed.
- He would make it for the restaurant owner.
He would actually demonstrate how it was cooked.
- So nowadays when we think of franchising,
we think of say something like McDonald's
where if someone buys a McDonald's franchise,
they basically open up a restaurant
with the golden arches,
and they sell a standardized menu.
That's not how Colonel Sanders did it.
He went to preexisting restaurants,
which had their own menu,
and he was essentially just asking them as part of the deal
to add something to their menu.
- [Narrator] Colonel Sanders's new business plan
is unconventional.
- When you franchise Kentucky Fried Chicken,
you are not necessarily opening a brick and mortar store.
You're licensing the Colonel's chicken recipe.
So you're not getting a store,
you're getting intellectual property.
You're not getting a sort of building aesthetic,
you're getting a taste aesthetic.
- [Narrator] Sanders goes on to franchise his chicken recipe
to over 200 restaurants across the country.
- He never actually owned restaurants.
These were other people's restaurants
and other people actually making the product
on a daily basis.
Four cents of chicken doesn't sound like much
until you're selling tens of thousands of chickens a year.
And in 1950s money, that was an extremely healthy income.
- [Narrator] One of these restaurants is located
in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
It's called Hobby House.
- Hello young man.
My name is Colonel Harland Sanders,
and you're going to be here making my chicken recipe
in this establishment.
So I need to show you how it's done.
- So you have to remember,
Colonel Sanders was not a real colonel,
but he used it to his advantage
and was known for something called colonelling.
And colonelling was Harland Sanders showing up
at the different locations in his iconic suit
and his string tie.
- What's your name?
- My name's Dave, sir.
- Oh, it's Colonel, son.
So lemme show you how we do it here.
- And he spoke in this incredibly folksy way.
- That's how you do it.
That's good.
- And notoriously would kind of charm the pants
off of anyone he came in contact with.
But the truth is, this was a very carefully
cultivated persona.
- You take our patented blend of 11 herbs and spices,
and you dust the chicken like so.
- Colonel Sanders was a notorious stickler for quality.
And so when he went around to mom and pop shops
and small restaurants making handshake deals
to sell chicken, he always doubled back to make sure
that whenever he appeared,
the chicken was being made exactly the way he wanted it to.
- Sit it over there, that's good.
Just put it right here on the tray.
That's right.
- There's a story about a young head cook
at the Hobby House restaurant in Indiana
that Sanders was supposedly very hard on
when teaching him how to make his chicken.
- The young cook realized that he had met somebody special.
And he said at the time,
"I knew this guy was gonna change my life."
- [Narrator] This young cook will go on
to help Colonel Sanders build Kentucky Fried Chicken
into a five and a half billion dollar-
- And what's your name again, son?
- Dave.
Dave Thomas, Colonel.
- If that name sounds familiar,
it's because he's the founder of Wendy's.
- Nice to meet you, Dave Thomas.
- [Narrator] Thomas will give Sanders the tools
to create the most successful chicken restaurant in America
only to then become one of his greatest competitors.
- [Narrator] In 1962, a talented young line cook
is asked by his boss to oversee
four struggling restaurants in Ohio,
all serving Colonel Sanders' Kentucky Fried Chicken.
His name, Dave Thomas.
- Dave makes these restaurants super profitable,
and he has a real knack for running the business.
And Colonel Sanders takes notice.
So he sort of takes Dave under his wing
and becomes something of a mentor to him.
- Dave Thomas realized a few things.
Number one, you gotta simplify the menu.
Number two, make the chicken the star.
Number three, make the bucket iconic.
- Colonel, lemme show you something.
We've updated the chicken bucket.
- You mind holding this for me, Dave?
Well, will you look at that?
[Colonel Sanders laughs]
- So even though it was Pete Harman
that created the bucket of fried chicken,
it was Dave Thomas who created the iconic
red and white bucket,
solidifying one of the most iconic
elements of fast food branding.
- So Dave Thomas comes up with an amazing idea.
He wants to put Colonel Sanders's picture
on the buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
And from that point on,
Colonel Sanders became a fast food icon.
- Thomas sees Sanders as a symbol
for Kentucky Fried Chicken,
and it's something not that many fast food restaurants have,
where you have someone who is this very stylized mascot,
but also a real person.
Like you don't have Ronald McDonald
as a real person who has like lived their entire life.
- Kentucky Fried Chicken's our bestselling item,
and there's no question that your chicken is amazing,
but you Colonel, you're the legend.
- Thomas sees Colonel Sanders as the ultimate advertising
for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
- I might just have to agree with you, son.
- [Narrator] Along with the new branding of the buckets
featuring the Colonel's likeness,
Thomas also encourages Sanders
to begin a wide scale marketing push.
- Dave Thomas recognized that Colonel Sanders
was an incredible salesperson.
He could sell anything to anyone,
but he was limited in what he could do person to person.
And what Dave Thomas really pushed Colonel Sanders to do
was to get himself out there on radio, on television,
to really cash in on his asset of being
this charismatic pitchman
and turning him into a bonafide star.
- [Narrator] Following Thomas' advice, in 1963,
Sanders makes his first national television appearance
as the mystery guest on an episode of What's My Line,
a popular quiz show of the 1950s and 60s.
[audience applauding]
- He was selected for the show specifically
because he was still a relatively obscure character,
and the panelists had trouble guessing who he was.
- Colonel, I don't know what you do,
but I think you look too beautiful to work.
[audience laughing]
- The brilliance of a TV appearance like this was that
it was basically free advertising
for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
He didn't have to pay for a commercial.
Instead, he got to talk about how great his chicken was
to a national audience.
- [Narrator] The panelists on What's My Line,
may not have known Colonel Sanders
and his fried chicken yet, but America soon would.
- The TV appearance really helped
the KFC brand get national recognition
and also helped Colonel Sanders get national recognition.
- [Narrator] The media push is working,
and Sanders's empire is expanding.
- Harland Sanders gets to a point where
he's licensed his recipe to 600 restaurants
across the country,
and he's making about $300,000 a year,
but he doesn't own a single one.
- By this time, Colonel Sanders is a 74-year-old guy
who knows chicken, but he's not a business guy.
There is no way he knows how to make it standardized
across 600 plus restaurants,
at least not without professional help.
- [Narrator] In 1964, Sanders seeks out that help
and meets with Kentucky businessman John Y. Brown.
Brown and his partner Jack Massey
believed they can take Sanders chicken
from a licensed product to a brick and mortar franchise.
- John Brown is a salesman.
He is a lawyer.
He ultimately becomes a politician.
And Massey was a financier.
He's a money man.
They see the huge success Colonel Sanders is having,
and they know that if we actually use
solid business practices,
that even more money is going to be made.
- [Narrator] Brown presents Sanders with an offer
to buy Kentucky Fried Chicken.
- Colonel Sanders is an icon.
He has the recipe, he has the pressure cookers,
but he doesn't have a ton of experience
running a massive, massive fast food empire.
So as he's getting older, he's in his 70s,
he starts to think about is it time to maybe sell KFC?
- Brown's offer is appealing,
but Sanders has one non-negotiable condition.
- I'm willing to make this here deal,
but I need you to promise me one thing,
you won't change my original recipe.
- I am never gonna mess with perfection.
It's a deal, Colonel.
- [Narrator] Sanders is given a $2 million buyout
worth more than 17 million today.
- And in addition to that, they offer him a salary,
which initially was 40,000 a year
to continue to represent the brand.
- [Narrator] While it seems like an altogether
lucrative deal at the time,
there's one thing the contract doesn't offer Sanders.
- The contract had no end date.
So Colonel Sanders was contracted
basically on terms that would last
until the end of his life.
- [Narrator] Now controlling the business elements
of Kentucky Fried Chicken,
Brown and Massey begin giving franchisees the option
to convert to Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants.
At the same time, they continue to launch
new franchises.
- Once Brown takes control, that's when we start seeing
more of a standardization of restaurants
where freestanding Kentucky Fried chicken restaurants
start being open and becoming the norm.
They basically started sending out facades of a building.
So you could put this facade
on top of your preexisting building
so it would look like every other Kentucky Fried chicken
in the country.
And that it proved to be a successful strategy
because people would see that,
and they would recognize,
that's a place I wanna go to get some quality chicken.
- [Narrator] In addition to expansion,
intent to build on Sanders's previous television success,
Brown leans into the influence of free advertising.
- You serve fried chicken?
[Colonel Sanders laughs] - Do we serve Fried chicken?
Ooh-wee, we do serve fried chicken.
- Colonel Sanders basically becomes a national celebrity.
He's on shows like The Tonight Show
with a box that allegedly contained $2 million.
He's also on the Merv Griffin Show,
and they have an actor come down into the audience saying,
"Looking for the colonel that stole my wife."
So there's a lot of gimmicky things that went on
around this time where Colonel Sanders is just serving
as the face, the spokesperson,
to get people excited about KFC.
- [Narrator] Colonel Sanders is fast becoming
a household name across the United States.
And the once rough and rowdy brawler is now known to most
as a down-home southern gentleman.
- Brown and Massey now have this national celebrity
who was associated with the brand.
That's huge.
- [Narrator] In the mid 1960s,
Sanders begins appearing in commercials
for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
- [Colonel Sanders] Folks call it finger-licking good.
The best compliment you can pay a man for cooking.
- You know, it's really important to understand
where America was in the 60s and 70s
as the Colonel's getting a traction.
It was a contentious decade in the 60s,
and a lot going on in the 70s.
And the Colonel looked like he stepped out of a time machine
of the late 1800s
and was like your great-grandpa
making you this incredible recipe.
It made America feel warm, it made America feel safe,
and most of all, it made America buy his chicken.
- So prior to Colonel Sanders,
there were all kinds of brand mascots.
There's the Sun-Maid girl, there's Aunt Jemima,
there's Mr. Peanut,
but he is really first to be the kind of
human incarnation of his brand.
He is Colonel Sanders.
He's that white bearded man who's on the package
and who's selling you your chicken.
- I think when we see the founder connected to a brand,
it helps us trust that brand a little bit more,
and it also inspires more loyalty.
I mean, we're humans.
We wanna connect with people.
So I think we kind of can see them as part of our tribe,
and it just feels more real and organic
and something we wanna be a part of.
- [Narrator] With their spokesman now known nationwide,
KFC is a massive success.
But the Colonel's good fortune would soon be coming to an end.
- I'm gonna sue Kentucky Fried Chicken
for every last goddamn penny they're worth!
- [Narrator] In 1966,
just two years after buying Kentucky Fried Chicken
from Colonel Sanders,
new owners Brown and Massey take the company public.
- The Colonel actually appeared on the floor
of the New York Stock Exchange for the IPO
where he bought the first 100 shares of KFC for $10 a share.
By the end of the day, the stock split,
and he was selling those same shares back for $400 a share,
making him a nice windfall.
- [Narrator] So successful is KFC's expansion
that they even surpass one of the biggest names
in fast food.
- KFC experiences just amazing propulsive growth
under Brown and Massey.
By 1970, there's a KFC in every state in the union.
And for a period, KFC is actually a bigger chain
than McDonald's.
- [Narrator] By 1971, there are 3,500 Kentucky Fried Chicken
restaurant franchises making $700 million annually.
That same year, Brown receives an offer
from a Connecticut based food and alcohol conglomerate
called the Heublein Corporation.
They wanna buy Kentucky Fried Chicken
for a staggering $283 million,
the equivalent of 1.6 billion today.
- When Brown and Massey sell, they sell it for $283 million,
which is way more than the price they paid to purchase it
less than a decade before, which was just $2 million.
So Colonel Sanders, I mean, that hat to sting
to watch the company that he founded
that he's still representing,
but he's not getting a piece of that $283 million pie.
- And Heublein is known for selling alcohol.
They have brands like Smirnoff Vodka, Jose Cuervo, Bass Ale,
and Colonel Sanders doesn't drink.
So he's not too happy about
his brand being associated with that company.
- [Narrator] Despite his discontent,
Sanders is still locked into his contract
to represent the brand as the Colonel,
now making just $75,000 a year.
- The Colonel was expected to keep up this lovable,
grandfatherly persona after the sale,
but in reality, he was really upset about it.
- The upside of having a founder who's almost a mascot
is that it's amazing marketing.
The downside is that if this founder
has anything negative going on,
has anything negative to say about business decisions,
they can do an immense amount of reputational damage.
- [Narrator] To make matters worse,
in an effort to boost profits,
Heublein implements a series of cost-cutting measures.
- In the sale of KFC to Heublein,
Colonel Sanders's original recipe gets completely scrapped,
and that was essentially his life's work.
He'd worked really hard on developing that recipe
and that combination of flavors.
So of course he's none too happy about that.
[pounding on the table] [gagging]
- Those goddamn sons of bitches!
I'm gonna sue Kentucky Fried Chicken
for every last goddamn penny they're worth!
- [Narrator] A frustrated Sanders turns to
a trusted friend and former protege.
[suspenseful music]
- Hello?
- Dave, those bastards changed my recipe.
This chicken ain't fit for my dogs.
No way in hell I'm gonna put my name, my face on that slop,
not for one more day.
- So after the sell to Heublein,
Colonel Sanders is obviously upset,
and he turns to his friend
and longtime confident Dave Thomas.
Harland, I'm in no position to stop them.
- But Dave Thomas owned shares of KFC.
So during that sell, he made a pretty nice amount of money,
and he was using that money to open up his own business.
So he was kind of busy, and that business was Wendy's.
- Between 1989 and 2002, Dave appeared in over 800
Wendy's TV commercials,
following in Harland Sanders footsteps.
- [Narrator] As his former apprentice begins his rise
in the fast food world, Sanders prepares to declare war
on the company he himself created.
in the fast food world, Sanders prepares to decnseful m]
- Narrator] In 1973, feeling the sting of corporate betrayal,
Colonel Sanders goes on the offensive
in the best way he knows how, through the media.
- Harland Sanders essentially has to watch
the company that he built fall apart
in front of his own eyes
because of how Heublein's treating his recipe
and his chicken.
The chicken's dropping in quality,
and people are going so far as to stopping him on the street
to tell him how bad this chicken has gotten.
So he decides to go scorched Earth.
- [Narrator] Sanders gives an interview to a food critic
in the New York Times,
eviscerating his own company.
- He is telling everyone how bad the chicken is.
He's saying he wouldn't even feed it to his dogs.
So for the symbol who represents KFC to just be
really saying all of these negative things about it,
it's really, really rough news for the company.
He was completely beloved by Americans,
and they trusted him.
So him shouting from the rooftops that KFC's food was bad
was obviously not great for business.
- It's almost as if Ronald McDonald was out going on TV
and giving interviews about how bad McDonald's food was.
What it boils down to is the Colonel wasn't really
a businessman at heart.
He had the soul of an artist,
and his art was his chicken and his food,
and that was more important to him than the bottom line.
- [Narrator] In addition to his public outrage,
Sanders sues Kentucky Fried Chicken for $122 million
for misusing his image
and promoting products that he hadn't developed.
But he's not done yet.
In 1974, Colonel Harland Sanders announces
that he plans to open the Colonel's Ladies Dinner house,
an antebellum themed restaurant
in honor of his wife, Caludia.
- He says, I'm gonna go open
my own chicken restaurant again,
and I'm gonna name it after my wife this time.
And of course, Heublein,
who had just purchased KFC for a boatload of money,
they weren't too excited about the idea
of Harland stepping out on his own
and opening yet another chicken restaurant,
but Harland would not be told no.
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] Recognizing the PR disaster on their hands,
Heublein approaches Sanders with an offer.
- Mr. Sanders, Heublein is offering quite a generous amount
in exchange for your cooperation.
- In response, Heublein says, we'll do you one better,
and we'll give you a million dollars.
- In exchange, they required that the Colonel
cease and desist any criticism of KFC in the press.
In other words, they begged him to keep his mouth shut.
- I don't think I can sign this,
not unless you go back to my original recipe,
and I get to teach those people how to make my chicken.
- Heublein extended the olive branch
and offered to remedy the situation
by inviting Colonel Sanders down personally
to meet with the senior leadership team
and help them correct any recipe changes
that may have happened since they took over the company.
- Well, okay then, yes, that can be arranged.
- Finally, Heublein asked him to change the name
of his wife's restaurant.
Because they own the Colonel and his likeness,
she definitely couldn't go naming her restaurant,
the Colonel's Ladies Dinner House.
So the Colonel agrees to change the name
to the Claudia Sanders Dinner House.
- Ultimately, Colonel Sanders walks away with a cool million
and his recipe intact.
He didn't get the 122 million he was originally suing for,
but honestly, that number might have been a little inflated.
- [Narrator] By this time,
Colonel Sanders health is beginning to deteriorate.
He suffers from diabetes, cataracts, arthritis,
and general weariness.
And just a few years later, in 1980,
the fiery Colonel, now 90 years old, dies from pneumonia.
Despite Sanders's death, his iconic image lives on
as the beaming Colonel of KFC.
- To this day, Colonel Sanders has been portrayed in KFC ads
by at least 18 different celebrities,
from actors to musicians to comedians,
Darrell Hammond, Norm Macdonald, Ray Liotta, RoboCop,
Mario Lopez, Reba McIntyre even.
- We are about to go into the next two, three decades
where people are gonna realize personal brand,
consumer packaged goods is the future.
The Mr Beasts, the Logan Pauls, the Kim Kardashians.
I would argue that Colonel Sanders
was one of the first personal brand consumer products.
That is the legacy of KFC.
- There's a lesson there that no matter how old you are,
no matter how much failures you've experienced,
if you keep trying and keep working to perfect something,
there's always the possibility
that your wildest dreams will come true.
- [Narrator] With more than 20,000 KFC franchises
in over 125 countries,
Kentucky Fried Chicken is currently valued
at over $5.4 billion
and is one of the largest quick service chains in the world.
- It became such an American cultural phenomenon
that I had KFC when I was in Iran.
I have been to Vietnam,
and there is a Colonel Sanders statue
that is outside the KFC.
I posed with it.
He looks kind of strangely like Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam,
but that's neither here nor there.
The point is, America exported its culture in a lot of ways,
and a lot of it was through food.
- The legacy of KFC is really significant.
Before him, there were no chicken chains.
Today, we wouldn't have Chick-fil-A,
we wouldn't have Popeye's
if it wasn't for that first little chicken shop
by the side of the interstate.