The Story of Colonel Sanders

Colonel Harland Sanders, born September 9, 1890, actively began franchising his  chicken business at the age of 65. Now the Kentucky Fried Chicken® business he started has grown to be one of the largest retail food service systems in the world. And Colonel Sanders, a quick service restaurant pioneer, has become a symbol of entrepreneurial spirit.

The company the Colonel started nearly a half-century ago now serves nearly 6 billion pieces of the Colonel’s “finger lickin’ good” chicken annually in more than 84 countries around the world.

When the Colonel was six, his father died. His mother was forced to go to work and young Sanders had to take care of his three-year-old brother and baby sister. This meant doing much of the family cooking. By the age of seven, he was master of a score of regional dishes.

At 10, he got his first job working on a nearby farm for $2 a month. When he was 12 his mother remarried, and he left his home near Henryville, Indiana, for a job on a farm in Greenwood, Indiana. He had a series of jobs over the next few years, as a 15-year-old streetcar conductor in New Albany, Indiana, and then as a 16-year-old private, soldiering for six months in Cuba.

After that he was a railroad fireman, studied law by correspondence, practiced in justice of the peace courts, sold insurance, operated an Ohio River steamboat ferry, manufactured acetylene lighting systems, sold tires, and operated service stations.

When he was 40, the Colonel began cooking for hungry travelers who stopped at his service station in Corbin, Kentucky. He didn’t have a restaurant then, but served folks on his own dining table in the living quarters of his service station.

As more people started coming just for the food, he moved across the street and expanded the restaurant to seat 142 persons. Over the next nine years, he developed his secret combination of 11 herbs and spices and the basic cooking technique that is still used.

Although he dropped out of school in the sixth grade, practical experience qualified him to attend the famous restaurant school short course at Cornell University.

Sanders’ fame grew. Governor Ruby Laffoon made him a Kentucky Colonel in the 1930s   in recognition of his contributions to the state’s cuisine. And in 1939, his establishment was listed in Duncan Hines’ Adventures in Good Eating. Just before World War II, he built the first motel in Kentucky, next to his restaurant. World War II and gas rationing virtually ended tourist travel, and he was forced to close the motel. He reopened after the war, but in the 1950s a new interstate highway was planned to bypass the town. Seeing an end to his business, the Colonel auctioned off his operations. After paying his bills, he was reduced to living on his Social Security checks.

Confident of the quality of his fried chicken, the Colonel devoted himself to the chicken franchising business that he started in 1952. He traveled across the country by car from restaurant to restaurant, cooking batches of chicken for restaurant owners and their employees. If the reaction was favorable, he entered into a handshake agreement on a deal that stipulated a payment to him of a nickel for each chicken the restaurant sold.

By 1963, Colonel Sanders had more than 600 franchised outlets for his chicken in the United States and Canada.  In 1964, the Colonel sold his interest in the U.S. company for $2 million to a group of investors including Nashville financier Jack Massey and John Y. Brown Jr., who later became governor of Kentucky from 1980 to 1984.

Under the new owners, Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation grew rapidly. It went public on March 17, 1966, and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on January 16, 1969. More than 3,500 franchised and company-owned restaurants were in worldwide operation when Heublein Inc. acquired KFC Corporation on July 8, 1971, for $285 million.

Kentucky Fried Chicken became a subsidiary of R.J. Reynolds Industries, Inc. (now RJR Nabisco, Inc.), when Heublein Inc.was acquired by Reynolds in 1982. RJR Nabisco sold its restaurants in October 1986 to PepsiCo, Inc. for approximately $840 million.

In October 1997, PepsiCo, Inc. spun off of its quick service restaurants to form an independent restaurant company – Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc. Tricon now is the world’s largest restaurant system with nearly 30,000 KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants in more than 100 countries and territories.

Until he was fatally stricken with leukemia in 1980 at the age of 90, Colonel Sanders traveled 250,000 miles a year visiting the KFC empire he founded. And it all began with a 65-year-old gentleman who used his $105 Social Security check to start a business.

Reprinted with permission from the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation.