KFC Original Recipe

The KFC Original Recipe is a secret mix of ingredients that fast food restaurant chain KFC uses to produce fried chicken. The Claudia Sanders Dinner House is the only other restaurant that serves an authorized version of the recipe.

By the very late 1930s, Harland Sanders' gas station in Corbin, Kentucky was so well known for its fried chicken that Sanders decided to remove the gas pumps and build a restaurant and motel in their place. While perfecting his secret recipe with 11 herbs and spices, Sanders found that pan frying chicken was too slow, requiring 30 minutes per order. Deep frying the chicken required half the time but produced dry, unevenly done chicken. In 1939, he found that using a pressure fryer produced tasty, moist chicken in eight or nine minutes.[1] By July 1940, Sanders finalized what came to be known as his Original Recipe.[2]

After Sanders formed a partnership with Pete Harman, they began marketing the chicken in the 1950s as Kentucky Fried Chicken; the company shipped the spices already mixed to restaurants to preserve the recipe's secrecy. He claimed that the ingredients "stand on everybody's shelf".[3][4]

Sanders used vegetable oil for frying chicken. By 1993, for economic reasons, many KFC outlets had chosen to use a blend of palm and soybean oil. In Japan, the oil used is mainly the more expensive cottonseed and corn oil, as KFC Japan believes that this offers superior taste quality.[5]

History

Sanders' Original Recipe of "11 herbs and spices" is one of the most famous trade secrets in the catering industry.[6][7] Franchisee Dave Thomas, better known as the founder of Wendy's, argued that the secret recipe concept was successful because "everybody wants in on a secret" and former KFC owner John Y. Brown, Jr. called it "a brilliant marketing ploy."[8][9] The New York Times described the recipe as one of the company's most valuable assets.[6] The recipe is not patented, because patents are published in detail and come with an expiration date, whereas trade secrets can remain the intellectual property

Recipes

A copy of the recipe, signed by Sanders, is stored within a vault at KFC's Louisville headquarters, along with 11 separate vials that each contain one of the ingredients.[14][15] KFC employs two different firms, Griffith Laboratories and McCormick & Company, to formulate the blend; to maintain secrecy, each firm is given a different half of the recipe. Once the Griffith portion has been formulated, it is sent to McCormick and combined with the remaining ingredients there.[16]

In 1983, William Poundstone conducted laboratory research into the coating mix, as described in his book Big Secrets, and claimed that a sample he examined contained only flour, salt, monosodium glutamate and black pepper.[17] KFC maintains that it still adheres to Sanders' original 1940 recipe.[18]