Darrell Hammond, a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, portrays a cartoonish Colonel Sanders in KFC’s current advertising campaign. Still, the fast-food legend was really an honest guy who took an unexpected route to founding a multibillion-dollar global corporation.
The actual Col. Sanders was an entrepreneur who didn’t start Kentucky Fried Chicken until he was 62 years old, didn’t become a professional cook until he was 40, and didn’t become an iconic figure until he sold his business at 75.
The following highlights of the Colonel’s astonishing journey to prominence are based on a 1970 William Whitworth New Yorker feature as well as bios from Bio and the University of Houston.
In 1890, Harland Sanders was born and raised in Indiana on a farm. When Sanders was 6 years old, his father passed away, leaving him to care for his younger sister and brother while his mother worked long hours. One of these duties was feeding his siblings, and the New Yorker reported that at the age of 7, he was already a capable chef.
When he was twelve, his mother remarried. Sanders’ brother was forced to live with an aunt while he was sent to work on a farm approximately 80 miles away since his new stepfather didn’t want the boys around.
Sanders dropped out of school in the seventh grade after quickly realising he preferred working all day to attend school.
Sanders spent the first half of his life performing a variety of odd occupations, including fueling the steam engines of railroads across the South, selling insurance, selling tyres, building lighting systems, and managing a ferry boat, in addition to a brief Army assignment in Cuba.
In 1930, he bought a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky, and started serving tourists traditional Southern food. Sanders later removed the petrol pump from the service station and transformed the area into a full-fledged restaurant after the place gained a reputation for its meals.
His discovery that he is cooking his chicken with its distinctive “11 herbs and spices” in a novel appliance, a pressure cooker (different from those used today), produced the exact consistency he had been seeking, marking the beginning of his breakthrough in 1939.
Over the next ten years, Sanders’ restaurant saw tremendous success. In 1950, the Kentucky governor awarded him the highest accolade the state could bestow upon a person: the rank of colonel. Sanders started wearing the role, donning the Kentucky colonel tie and white suit that helped make him a cultural figure.
He agreed to market his chicken dish under the name “Kentucky Fried Chicken” in 1952 in return for a 4-cent royalty on each serving sold with his friend and fellow restaurateur Pete Harman. After its success, Sanders agreed to the same terms with several other nearby establishments.
Even though everything was going well, Sanders’ restaurant was doomed when a new freeway bypassed it.
In 1956, he lost money on the sale of the property and was left with nothing except his $105 Social Security cheque each month. Sanders then made the decision that he would not accept a peaceful retirement.
The Colonel made the decision to completely commit to the franchise-related side business he’d begun four years ago after closing his restaurant.
Along with his wife, he set off on the road with the vehicle loaded with a few pressure cookers, flour, and spice mixtures. He would go into a restaurant and offer to prepare his chicken; if the owner liked what they tasted, he would strike a contract.
By 1963, Sanders had more than 600 restaurants selling Kentucky Fried Chicken across the US and Canada and could handle franchise inquiries without having to do the effort. The New Yorker describes John Y. Brown, Jr. as “an assertive young lawyer,” and a venture financier called Jack C. Massey, who wanted to purchase the franchise rights contacted him that October.
Despite his initial reluctance, Sanders eventually decided to sell his rights for $2 million ($15.1 million in 2015 USD) in January 1965 after many weeks of convincing. The transaction was completed in March.
As part of the agreement, Kentucky Fried Chicken agreed to open its own restaurants all over the globe while maintaining the integrity of the chicken recipe. In addition to becoming the company’s brand ambassador, Sanders was set to receive a lifetime income of $40,000 (later increased to $75,000), a seat on the board, and full ownership of KFC’s Canadian franchisees.
Although Sanders was reluctant to part with his beloved enterprise, he made the decision to let it expand beyond his limitations at the age of 75.
The New Yorker piece said that some of Sanders’ acquaintances thought he was shorted the sale, but it also reveals that Sanders declined the company’s shares and did not demand a greater price.
It seems that Sanders’ goal was never truly to get wealthy but rather to become well-known for his cuisine. He was continually complaining and swearing about the corporate KFC’s inferior quality, but more lucrative, gravy.
“The Colonel would think that you were brilliant and I was a bum if you were a franchisee churning out amazing gravy but earning very little money for the business and I was a franchisee generating lots of money for the company but providing gravy that was just decent,” a KFC official told the New Yorker. “With the Colonel, creative skill matters more than money.”\
In his latter years, Sanders appeared in ads like this one from 1969 and gave interviews on talk programmes.
Up until his passing in 1980, the Colonel reportedly flew 250,000 miles annually to visit KFC restaurants and promote the company in the media, according to the University of Houston, which inducts Sanders into the Hospitality Industry Hall of Fame.
Brown, who sold his KFC stock in 1971 for $284 million, was elected Kentucky’s governor in 1979. The New York Times noted that after Sanders passed away the next year, Brown referred to him as “a true legend” and “the soul of the American dream.”
The fact that Sanders is now well-known in 115 countries for his favourite fried chicken recipe is more than he could have imagined when he set out on the road at the age of 65 with a car packed with cooking supplies. It’s possible that Sanders lacked the drive to become as wealthy as he could have been.
