KFC supporters are outraged by the modifications the fast-food chicken restaurant is making to enhance its bottom line. The fast food chain restaurant will discontinue popular menu items like as popcorn chicken and wings, as well as Nashville Hot sauce, strawberry lemonade, and chocolate chip cookies. While many things may change at a KFC near you, particularly the menu selections, the classic Colonel Sanders recipe with eleven herbs and spices will remain unchanged.
KFC is owned by YUM! Brands. The company made the announcement that their “menu simplification” will be going into effect very soon because the restaurant chain wants to increase their workers’ efficiency and make it easier for customers to place their orders by reducing the number of options available to them.
One additional reason KFC will be slimming down its menus is to allow for the fast-food restaurant to focus on innovative solutions that could be appetizing to the American consumer marketplace.
“It’s really to deliver our most popular products perfectly each time and to actually make room for new products.” KFC U.S. Director Brittany Wilson told Yahoo Finance.
The menu at your local KFC restaurant will likely be changing in the next month or so. The company is trying to get rid of its popular menu items in order to “make room for this big spring of innovation that KFC has coming.”
The items that were removed from the menu were chosen for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they “weren’t available on a national scale or that [they] haven’t necessarily been growing on a national sales mix,” Wilson explained.
Some franchise owners appear to be benefiting from the menu revisions. Justin Stewart, a KFC franchise owner and COO of Stewart Restaurant Group, says his staff are already seeing the benefits. The staff were able to reduce the time it takes personnel to package orders while also improving drive-thru rates.
“Our team members have been able to package orders more quickly due to having less items on our pack line. As a result, we’ve reduced our drive-through order time by 11 seconds.”
Data from Intouch Insight’s 2022 Annual Drive-Thru Study saw that the average KFC drive-thru customer has to wait about 63.6 seconds for their order. The total service time was roughly four minutes in length, or 239.02 seconds. And there were usually two cars in a line.
Stewart claimed that order accuracy has also improved by simplifying the menu.
“By removing less popular menu items, we’ve improved order accuracy and product availability overall and created space in the back of the house. We’ve also reduced our controllable costs because of less waste, less prep, and less cleanup time.”
Stewart claims that his customers have had a “positive” experience with the menu change because they are able “to navigate the new menu board more quickly and easily.”
What do you think about the KFC menu changes?
