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Reflections November 2014

Colonel Sanders and His Famous Fried Chicken

By Tait Trussell

Today, the recipe is protected by elaborate security precautions. One company blends a formulation that represents part of the recipe while another spice company blends the remainder. As a final safeguard, a computer processing system blends the products to ensure neither company has the complete recipe.

When my wife has had a particularly busy day, she may ask me if I have any ideas for dinner. I often say, “Let’s just get some ‘Yucky Fried.’”

We, and millions of others around the world, have been eating Kentucky Fried Chicken for generations. In 1930, Colonel Sanders developed the formula that made it one of the most popular dishes across the U.S.

But as one of my sons recently reminded me, the all-time fried chicken in taste and smell was produced by our maid, Viola, who had developed in her 60-odd years a unique skill for creating fried chicken that would challenge a Col. Sanders Kentucky Fried chicken.

At age 40, Sanders was running a service station in Kentucky, where he would also feed hungry travelers. Sanders eventually moved his operation to a restaurant across the street, and featured a fried chicken so notable that he was named a Kentucky colonel in 1935 by Governor Ruby Laffoon.

After closing the restaurant in 1952, Sanders devoted himself to franchising his chicken business. He traveled across the country, cooking batches of chicken from restaurant to restaurant, striking deals that paid him a nickel for every chicken the restaurant sold. In 1964, with more than 600 franchised outlets, he sold his interest in the company for $2 million to a group of investors.

Sanders developed his secret seasoning formula in the 1930s when he operated the Sanders Court & Café restaurant and motel in Corbin, Kentucky. That’s when his blend of 11 herbs and spices first developed a loyal following of customers.

“In the early days, I hand-mixed the spices like mixing cement on a specially cleaned concrete floor on my back porch ,” the Colonel recalled. “I used a scoop to make a tunnel in the flour and then carefully mixed in the herbs and spices.”

Today, the recipe is protected by elaborate security precautions. One company blends a formulation that represents part of the recipe while another spice company blends the remainder. As a final safeguard, a computer processing system blends the products to ensure neither company has the complete recipe.

“It boggles the mind just to think of all the procedures and precautions the company takes to protect my recipe,” the Colonel once said.

In the early years: “After I hit the road selling franchises for my chicken that left Claudia behind to fill the orders for the seasoned flour mix. She'd fill the day's orders in little paper sacks with cellophane linings and package them for shipment. Then she had to put them on a midnight train.”

Little did the Colonel and Claudia dream in those days that his secret recipe of herbs and spices would become famous around the world.

After being recommissioned (he had been so-commissioned earlier) a Kentucky colonel, in 1950 by Governor Lawrence Wetherby, Sanders began to dress the part. He grew a goatee and wore a black felt hat (later switching to a white suit), a string tie, and referred to himself as "Colonel.” His associates went along with the title change, "jokingly at first and then in earnest,” according to a biographer.

He never wore anything else in public during the last 20 years of his life, using a heavy wool suit in the winter and a light cotton suit in the summer. He bleached his mustache and goatee to match his white hair.

Sanders later used his stock holdings to create the Colonel Harland Sanders Trust and Colonel Harland Sanders Charitable Organization. It used the proceeds to aid charities and fund scholarships. His trusts continue to donate money to groups like the Trillium Health Care Centre; a wing of their building specializes in women's and children's care and has been named after him.

The Sidney, British Columbia-based foundation granted over $1,000,000 in 2007, according to its 2007 tax return.

In 2009, the secret formula was back in its Kentucky home after five months in hiding while KFC upgraded security around its corporate secret. Nothing went afoul when the recipe was returned from an undisclosed location to KFC's headquarters late in a lockbox handcuffed to the wrist of a security consultant.

KFC President Roger Eaton was visibly relieved when the door to a new electronic safe was shut with the single sheet of yellowing paper stashed inside. "Mission accomplished," he said.

"It was very nerve wracking," Eaton said later of the recipe's hiatus from a vault where it has been kept for many years. "I don't want to be the only president who's lost the recipe."

Thomas P. Hustad, professor of marketing at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, said the recipe "goes to the core of the identity of the brand." The recipe, along with the man who created it, conjure images for the chain that set it apart in the minds of customers, he said.

"I would say that the heritage value is just as high for this secret recipe as the stories around the Coke formula," Hustad said, "I guess I'd put the two of those at the top of the pyramid."

Whatever the secret formula is, the KFC is a mighty tasty dish, even though it can’t beat Viola’s.

 

Tait Trussell is an old guy and fourth-generation professional journalist who writes extensively about aging issues among a myriad of diverse topics.

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