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Founder’s Beginnings
KFC was founded by Colonel Harland Sanders. At the tender age of 5, he lost his father, therefore, his mother had to take a job at a food processing factory. Because his mother had to leave home for work, this left Harland with no other choice but to care for his two other siblings. During this period, Harland learned how to cook and was reportedly skilled with vegetables and bread but was still improving with meat. During his early life, he took various jobs from being a blacksmith, an insurance salesman to running gas stations.
Early Stages of KFC
During Harland’s stint managing a shell service station, he started serving chicken along with other meals to customers who would drive through. Later, he opened a motel with a restaurant in it but it caught fire just three months later. Later though he had his motel reconstructed. Along the line, Harland was frustrated that his customers had to wait 30 minutes for their chicken to fry so he later devised a strategy where he could use a pressure cooker to drastically reduce the cooking time to about 8 minutes. He later termed it as “his secret recipe”. He would later move from restaurant to restaurant trying to convince the owners to buy into his chicken franchise which he would charge $0.04 per chicken sold. During the period of pitching his “secret recipe” to potential franchisees, Harland had to live in his car and survive by begging friends for food.
Growth and Subsequent Sale
The company grew very fast and later came to overwhelm Colonel Sanders so he sold it for $ 2 million in 1964. Currently, KFC operates in more than 100 countries and territories worldwide.
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