THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Tough-Talkin’, Finger-Lickin’ Legacy of Colonel Sanders is up for sale

Nearly a half-century after his death, Harland Sanders has one of the most recognisable faces in the world. They dress statues of him in Santa Claus costumes in Japan, where his fried chicken is the must-have Christmas dinner. Fans in China, home to the most KFC restaurants, regard him as a respected elder. He’s a symbol of quality and cleanliness in Nigeria and Kenya.

But at Blackwood Hall, the 19th-century plantation-style house in Shelbyville, Kentucky, where he once taught franchise owners how to pressure-cook chicken while his wife bagged his secret mix of 11 herbs and spices, people still remember the real Colonel Sanders: a generous, cantankerous perfectionist, with a talent for swearing, who regretted selling his company for $2 million in 1964.

That Kentucky connection is fraying. After safeguarding his legacy for 52 years, the family who bought the property from him has decided it’s time to move on. This week, they’ll auction off the house and remnants of his personal estate, along with the traditional country restaurant he opened in his former Kentucky Fried Chicken headquarters, which still serves hundreds of orders of chicken every week.

The items for sale included the Colonel’s Bible, a travelling knife kit and a black clip-on string tie he used to accent his white suit. A lucky bidder could go home with a birthday greeting from President Richard Nixon or one of the dusty pressure cookers Sanders used to perfect a fast-frying method so ingenious that KFC is now the world’s third-most-valuable restaurant brand.

The gem that auctioneers believed was going to fetch the highest price was his brown leather day planner from 1964. On one page, beneath the address of his dentist, the Colonel neatly listed precise measurements of 11 herbs and spices. (Jonathan Klunk, the Louisville real estate agent who is orchestrating the sale, said he couldn’t guarantee that it’s the vaunted secret formula and wouldn’t let a photographer shoot it before the auction).

The sale is the latest move in a slow retreat from Kentucky, where Sanders was once as big a part of the state’s identity as the famous horse race. In 1991, “Kentucky” was dropped from the company’s name as it rechristened itself KFC. Last year, Yum! Brands, which now owns KFC (along with Taco Bell), moved the chicken chain’s headquarters from Louisville to Plano, Texas.

The auction comes at a complicated moment for KFC. Although its chicken is a global hit, sold in 135 countries, business has been rocky in the United States, where only 13 per cent of its sales occur. Even as fast-food chicken outpaces burgers or pizza domestically, KFC sales fell 4.6 per cent last year, according to an April report from market research company Technomic. In 2024, they slumped more than 5 per cent.

Chicken on the bone, the company’s stock-in-trade, is losing popularity among younger Americans raised on nuggets. KFC was barely a player in the fried chicken sandwich wars of the early 2020s and is playing catch-up in the current tender-and-sauce battle led by relative newcomers like Raising Cane’s.

The company went on the offensive last year with a global comeback plan centred on boneless chicken served with a suite of sauces like chimichurri ranch and “sticky chicky sweet ’n sour.” It’s experimenting with high-tech stores and a sub-brand called Kwench by KFC, offering drinks like a Caramel Krunch Shake.

You can practically hear the Colonel slam his gold-tipped cane into the linoleum.

From the time he sold his restaurants until the day he died in 1980, Sanders remained harshly critical of the product marketed under his image — even as he stayed with the company as a paid brand ambassador.

“That extra-crispy recipe is nothing in the world but a damn fried dough ball stuck on a chicken,” he told the Louisville Courier-Journal in a 1976 interview, in which he also likened the gravy to wallpaper paste. A local franchisee group sued him, claiming that he had defamed the brand and damaged sales. A court ruled that his comments were protected speech.

That same year, New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton paraded the 86-year-old Colonel around a KFC in New York City. “That’s the worst fried chicken I’ve ever seen,” he said, adding, “there’s no way anyone can get me to swallow those potatoes.”

The headline on the article: “For the Colonel, It Was Finger‐Lickin’ Bad”.

A new advertising campaign by Yum! Brands capitalises on that image, showing an obsessive Colonel experimenting with exploding pressure cookers and throwing substandard pots of gravy onto the floor. In one music video-style ad, he’s portrayed as an anti-corporate “finger-lickin’ machine” who dances on a boardroom table and climbs a skyscraper to promote a value meal.

Chad Broude, a co-founder of Highdive, the Chicago-based agency that created the ad campaign, said the idea was to build it on the Colonel’s unbending drive.

“We understood we had a quality-perception issue,” he said. The campaign’s slogan is “The Colonel lived so we could chicken”.

“He’s our Michael Jordan, if you look at Nike as an analogue,” Mr Broude said.

Sanders was meticulous about the chicken-frying method he developed in the late 1930s while running a cafe, gas station and motel complex in Corbin, Kentucky. Making proper Southern fried chicken in a cast-iron skillet could take 30 minutes, longer than customers were willing to wait. His method required a dip in milk and egg, a generous coat of highly seasoned flour and about nine minutes in a pressure cooker with oil, shaving nearly two-thirds off the cooking time.

In 1952, his first franchisee changed everything. Pete Harman, who ran a popular restaurant in Salt Lake City, came up with the idea of packing several chicken pieces in a bucket, along with rolls and gravy. They coined the slogan “It’s finger lickin’ good” and the name Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Then he invented the persona, Sanders was in his early 60s, and his hair was white, so he bleached his goatee to match. He added a white suit and embraced the honorific “Colonel,” which had been bestowed upon him (and thousands of others, before and after) by a Kentucky governor.

In 1956, a new interstate rerouted customers miles away from Sanders’ restaurant and gas station. He sold it at a loss. The Colonel and his second wife, Claudia, packed a pressure cooker, a cooler of raw chicken and his spice mix into their Oldsmobile and travelled the country, adding franchises.

They moved to Shelbyville a few years later, when the business had become big enough — more than 600 franchises — to require a formal headquarters. Sanders was 73, and the growth was faster than his small team could keep up with.

A wealthy Nashville investor and John Y. Brown Jr., a young lawyer who would later become governor, persuaded Sanders to sell them the company and his likeness for $2 million in 1964. Seven years later, the two men sold Kentucky Fried Chicken to liquor giant Heublein for $285 million.

The Colonel remained with the company to promote the brand, collecting a lifelong salary that started at $40,000 a year. He took the job seriously, making hundreds of appearances and autographing buckets. But as the company grew and his recipes were changed, he became increasingly outraged. He sometimes walked into franchises, berated the manager and threw out food he thought was subpar.

“He was a stickler who wanted quality,” recalled Cherry Settle, a former Kentucky Fried Chicken employee who took over the Sanders home and restaurant in 1974 and has put them up for auction. “If somebody ordered hot tea, he wanted you to make sure you poured boiling water in the cup first so the teacup was hot. If you did things the right way, you didn’t have any trouble.”

Sanders had opened the restaurant in 1968 as a way to make use of his former headquarters and to thank his wife, who wanted to run a traditional Southern restaurant. But mostly, it was to show people how his chicken and gravy was supposed to taste.

He named it Claudia Sanders, the Colonel’s Lady Dinner House. Heublein threatened to sue him for using its intellectual property. Sanders responded by suing Heublein, which eventually paid him $1 million to settle out of court. He changed the name to the Claudia Sanders Dinner House.

Ms Settle and her husband, Tommy, ran it for 53 years, raising their two children in the former Sanders home. Tommy Settle died in 2005, and neither of the children wants the business or the house, which is filled with a truckload of artefacts the Sanders family left behind. Another expansive collection of memorabilia and KFC history can be found at the Colonel Harland Sanders Cafe & Museum, inside the restored 1940s roadside restaurant in Corbin where he invented his method.

The restaurant in Shelbyville can hold 700 people if you include the event space. Customers line up on Sundays for a proper Southern supper and take home endless orders of his chicken and yeast rolls the size of muffins.

The hope is that the new buyers will want to keep it going.

“It’s heart-tugging,” said Jasmine Wright, who has been waiting tables there for 12 years. Her mother was a server there for 15 years before her. “People would be so upset to see it close.”

It may be the last place on Earth to eat chicken just as the Colonel intended. Cherry Settle buys the seasoning mix called 99-X from Marion-Kay Spices, which started blending it for the colonel in the 1960s. It has more powdered ginger than you might expect, along with marjoram, sage, coriander and MSG.

Is it the secret recipe?

“Many people have made similar claims over the years, and no one has been accurate — this one isn’t either,” a Yum! Brands spokesperson wrote in an email. “The original handwritten 1940 recipe is locked in a digital safe encased in 2 feet of concrete and monitored 24 hours a day by video and motion-detection surveillance.”

Ms Settle doesn’t want any trouble. “This is the recipe that he’s always given us and we’ve always used,” she said. “We would never change that.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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