KFC’S finger-lickin’ foul-up
It was irksome enough when the supermarkets ran out of hummus last year. But KFC has just one job: to sell us chicken. That an outfit of its size should run out of its only product, forcing the temporary closure of 646 UK shops last week, was “more than a little unusual”, said Coco Khan in The Guardian. You might call it a cock-up. KFC fans were up in arms. Some dialled 999 to report a crime against finger-lickin’ goodness; others spoke to their MPS; several consulted Citizens Advice. “I’ve had to go to Burger King,” ranted one irate woman to a TV crew. KFC has since issued a jokey apology featuring its letters rearranged as FCK. But this light-hearted story has a serious “zinger”. The fast-food giant said it had been unable to get chicken to its shops because of “teething problems” at DHL, its new carrier. DHL won the contract by undercutting Bidvest – a specialist food distributor that had worked with KFC for years. Union leaders claim KFC was warned that DHL’S cut-price service wouldn’t deliver, and so it has proved. When Bidvest lost its contract, 255 workers lost their jobs. Now KFC is also feeling the effects of a dismal, “race to the bottom” corporate culture.
Yet KFC is all about cost-cutting, said Chas Newkey-burden in The Independent: its whole business model is predicated on selling cheap meat – and that means using chickens that have been industrially reared, with minimal concern for their welfare. As a BBC documentary revealed in 2015, the birds destined for KFC’S buckets live for only 35 days, crammed together in vast sheds, stinking with ammonia, before being gassed, cut into nine pieces and shipped off to branches for basting and frying in Harland (Colonel) Sanders’ secret blend of 11 spices. This is cruelty on a vast scale: every year KFC gets through 23 million birds in Britain.
And that’s just the tip of an iceberg, said Jane Fryer in the Daily Mail. KFC is the market leader in Britain, selling 400 pieces of chicken a minute, but it has countless imitators (Dallas Fried Chicken, Tennessee Fried Chicken, Southern Fried Chicken etc.), all trying to grab a slice of the £4bn-a-year fried-chicken market. And in many cases, they do this by cutting prices even further. Some offer a “meal deal”, with a fizzy drink, for under a £1, making these sugar, salt and fat-laden dishes a tempting option for teenagers and the hard-pressed. But despite efforts by some councils to cap their numbers, these shops keep proliferating: it seems our taste for fried chicken is just insatiable.