KFC expands reach after scaling delivery ‘dramatically’

Restaurant Conf 391

KFC UK has grown its national reach by some 10 percentage points after scaling delivery “dramatically”, MD Paula MacKenzie has told MCA.

Mackenzie said in 2017/18, only two thirds (66%) of the population could order a KFC if they wanted one.

“That’s a good number, but it’s not enough. That’s a whole third that can’t get one,” she told MCA’s Restaurant Conference.

Having scaled delivery to nearly 1,000 restaurants, KFC has now got that number north of 75%.

“Now, over three quarters of the UK population can get a KFC if they want one. That’s great. But it also shows you the headroom for growth.”

Chicken crisis

MacKenzie also spoke of how the “muscle memory” of the chicken distribution crisis of 2018 helped KFC deal with the lockdowns of 2020.

The episode saw the brand’s supply chain break down and forced it to shut large part of its estate.

“How does the unthinkable happen to a very capable, very experienced business with 980 stores, so they basically have to close all of those restaurants?

“And can you imagine being the MD of that company, and doing it within the first nine months of your watch?”

She said the pandemic was in some ways easier to deal with, as the whole sector was going through it together, whereas the chicken crisis, was “way harder”.

“It was horrendous, and I don’t want to make light of that,” she said. “To have to close your restaurants when you spend every living, waking, breathing moment thinking how to grow them, to be the leader of 27,000-plus people knowing that you’re going to have to do that, it’s heart-breaking.

“I probably lost a year of my life. We switched distributor on Valentine’s Day 2018, and I gave my husband a Valentine’s Day card a year later.”

She said the one lesson to come out of the crisis was “culture trumps everything”.

“People would volunteer to spend the night in restaurants in sleeping bags, sleeping there in the hope that a delivery turned up.

“If you’d have told me in 2018, that there would be a silver lining to that experience for the whole of KFC, I would have said, it’s not worth going through

“But it was that silver lining of learning, of the muscle memory, that when 2020 hit, it felt like almost like déjà vu.”

She said the experience gave the team “inner conviction and knowledge and confidence” to know when it was untenable to remain open.

“We knew what we are doing in that situation, and that was everyone from our operators, to our supply chain to our menu management to logistics. I was like, we’ve got this, and the whole organisation was like, we’ve got this.”

Reopening

Having closed, attention quickly turned on how to safely reopen safely, MacKenzie said.

“You can be such busy fools relatively staying closed, and the whole premise of capitalism and trading is everything needs to be open, the fixed cost base of the industry is just phenomenal.”

She cited Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan theory and the idea that serious unexpected events happen as a useful concept when dealing with the crises.

“That’s been a real good life lesson for me personally and I know for the organisation, so that when we’re looking at a project or a recommendation, we are seriously kicking the tires.”

Marketing

Meanwhile, she spoke of the business’ celebrated marketing efforts, which have helped KFC’s turnaround, and won it Marketing Week’s brand of the year.

MacKenzie said this work began in 2016/17 and interrogating the anxieties consumers had about KFC as a brand.

“You’ve got to stare in the mirror sometimes. We did a deep piece of research to ask, what do people think about KFC and what are their anxieties about it.

“When you really understand that stuff, as hard as it is to hear, you can then do something about it and what you then see in 2021 is the fruits of that labour.”

She said the ‘FCK bucket’ campaign, the celebrated apology ads with agency Mother, as one that will go down in history.