A new KFC restaurant in McKinney, Texas, is about much more than debuting a new design.
“This is the Kentucky Fried comeback made real in one restaurant,” KFC U.S. President Catherine Tan-Gillespie told Fox News Digital.
The restaurant, dubbed Open House, serves as a testing ground for how the 75-year-old fast-food chain that Colonel Harland Sanders founded might modernize without abandoning the things that made it famous.
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KFC’s challenge isn’t necessarily getting Americans to remember the brand. It’s getting them to think about it when deciding what to eat today.
“There is a massive love for this American icon,” Tan-Gillespie said. But in the U.S., she added, “we tend to be thought about in people’s memories. We’re not actually being considered in eating moments of today.”
That tension between nostalgia and relevance helped shape Open House. In developing the restaurant, KFC started with a question.
“We sat back and said, you know, if the Colonel were building a restaurant from scratch today, what would this look like?” Tan-Gillespie said.
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The answer incorporates Art Deco and mid-century modern influences alongside large glass windows, digital ordering and drive-thru technology. At the same time, the restaurant features lobby hosts, table service, booths and outdoor dining designed to encourage customers to gather.
“For me, the philosophy is that we should be digital where it’s helpful, but human where it matters,” Tan-Gillespie said.
The menu follows a similar philosophy: Hold onto KFC’s most recognizable products while experimenting with how customers want to eat chicken now, Tan-Gillespie said.
Buckets and the chain’s original recipe remain central, but Open House expands into tenders, wings, sandwiches, wraps and nuggets, along with new sauces, drinks, snacks, sweets and sides.
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Breakfast is part of the experiment, too. Open House is scheduled to operate from 6 a.m. to midnight, giving KFC an opportunity to test breakfast and late-night occasions that traditionally haven’t been a major part of its U.S. business.
“We will see if those shoulder day parts work commercially for us and work for the guests, work for our team members,” Tan-Gillespie said. “If they don’t, we’ll cut them back. And if they do, then we can look to scale them nationally.”
KFC also chose McKinney with scalability in mind. Tan-Gillespie described the Dallas-Fort Worth area as a fast-growing and competitive restaurant market, while McKinney provides a mix of existing KFC customers and consumers the chain hopes to attract. The suburban setting also gives KFC a test that could potentially translate to similar markets elsewhere.
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But even as KFC experiments with new formats, flavors, technology and dayparts, Tan-Gillespie said some pieces of the brand aren’t up for reinvention.
“Buckets of original recipe fried chicken should not change,” she said. “I think the things that should change is making sure that we expand into the ways that customers want to eat fried chicken today.”
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And what would Sanders make of that balance between the KFC he created and the one the company is trying to build?
“I think he would feel really proud, actually,” Tan-Gillespie said. “I think he would say, ‘This feels like me. This feels like what I was trying to do.’ But for today.”
