Entertainment
Top 10 Disturbing Secrets KFC Doesn’t Want You To Know
We all know that the food at KFC is finger lickin good. No one knows the secret ingredients that go into the meat of the chain, but we keep coming back again to familiarize ourselves more with Colonel Sander’s popular restaurant. We know that clogging up all the delicious chicken in our guts frequently is not good for health, but we just can’t help it. Unlike the secret ingredients, lets indulge ourselves with the top 10 disturbing secrets KFC doesn’t want you to know and like other famous food franchises, it too has its fare share of skeletons in the closest. So sit back and grab your bucket, as the list unravels those secrets.
10. The Da Vinci Code of the KFC recipe
Ever wondered why KFC products are lip smacking good? Well keep wondering. Everyone and anyone who had paid a visit to one of the KFCs might have atleast once thought of what goes into the chicken that makes it delicious. Yes it is bathed in tons of oil and deep fried but what makes it stand out are the secret ingredients very few people in the company know. The precise recipe has never been revealed because the company thinks that people might try to duplicate its products, thus diminishing the franchise’s spotlight. It has been passed onto the trustworthy in hushed tones and references and is going to stay that way. Believed to be a complex mixture of eleven herbs and spices, the actual handwritten recipe is locked up and stored at the company headquarters in Kentucky, US. You might have heard about other popular food chains being imitated easily, but that’s not the case with KFC and this secrecy revolving around the recipe is proving to be working in the company’s favor as it makes it more exclusive as opposed to other fast food restaurant chains. Lets hope someone cracks the code or raids the secret ingredient vault so that we all can start making our own homemade KFC like chicken and save us all from a bit less calories.
9. The unfaithful Colonel
The recipe might have remained faithful to the core ideology of how the chicken should taste and keep the integrity of the Colonel’s specific taste and preference intact. The same cannot be said for the man with the glorious moustache who started it all. The man sure made the KFC brand reach global recognition and the chain might have sprinkled some positive information regarding the Colonel’s life, but it ‘forgot’ to mention his affinity for infidelity. Married to his first wife Josephine, her bearing his three children, Sanders later moved onto other pastures when it came to having affairs with other women. Claudia Ledington, a former waitress was one of them. Thanks to the help given by Claudia, both would transition KFC from a restaurant to a brand. Apparently it wasn’t just Ledington who caught the eye of the Colonel. His biographer John Ed Pearce revealed information about a woman at the Chamber of Commerce, who used to avoid Sanders as he couldn’t seem to keep his hands off her. So there you are. Because of Sander’s licentious nature, apparently he couldn’t stick around one woman. Yes the quality of his chicken had to remain stable for an efficient growth of the KFC brand, but it seems his relationships got the short end of the stick, because of his indulgences.
8. Taste vs health
Yes the taste succumbs us all and forces us to make multiple trips to the nearest KFC. Yes the company markets the brand as finger lickin good, complete with a smiling face of Sanders, holding a KFC bucket. But no there is not even a fine print detailing the health concerns of the fried chicken. Its not like the public and the health department are unaware of the risk that comes with having their food. Throughout the years many eyebrows have been raised regarding the harm it does to the body, and its just not being prone to obesity. According to many medical professionals, avoiding KFC is the best decision to make. Now that proposition does seem understandable, but doctors have emphasized that meat and oil are the least things to worry about. Ingredients like maltodextrin can cause diabetes and increased blood sugar levels if you decide to make it part of your lifestyle. Refined salt and monosodium glutamate are also part of the many substances that go into the food.
Knowing the health risks involved with having KFC products, healthier options are the best route to avoid complications. Well in case you want the blood pumpin as it should, devoid of such substances and fat, time has come to abandon that bucket and think of what benefits you can reap if you bury it six feet under, not digging it out again. In the wise words of Arnie himself, “if you want to turn a vision into reality, you have to give 100 percent and never stop believing in your dream.” Now lets hope you all take it that to heart and dethrone the Colonel, we mean, the bucket.
7. Sander’s secret recipe for success
We have already talked about the supposed secret recipe that goes into the KFC items. But did you know Sanders and the company always had a friction between them when it came to the business practices and the implementation of certain recipes. While many people still believe that the famous 11 herbs and spice recipe is still used to this day, according to the Colonel himself, the chain stopped using the secret formula a long time ago. Even though its safely locked up behind a billion embedded codes at the headquarters now, some of us still want to hold onto the thought of tasting a chicken with the recipe to this day and it would be hard to fact check, given the company’s protective nature regarding the handwritten note by Sanders.
Whatever the case maybe, Sander’s friction with the company was not that under wraps as he despised the KFC menu during the latter part of his life. According to him, the quality wasn’t upto par with the standards he had in mind, but after his demise things changed and the chain decided to improve the food quality for the better.
6. Chicken breeding
KFC has been accused of breeding its own chickens of a certain genetic form. The animals are believed to be kept in inhumane conditions and are not exactly healthy. They have malnutrition. If you thought mutated chickens sounds like a farfetched idea and your imagination was going haywire, KFC has been accused on that front too, although it is a speculation. Their chickens are hybrid in nature according to belief and mostly consist of meat in them than other biological organs. At this point some even don’t consider them to be normal and are unnatural by nature. Also the chickens are crammed into small spaces and are grown large to the point that they can barely carry their own weight. The abomination doesn’t end there as they are conscious while they are slaughtered. It is not just KFC but McDonalds as well who have come in the light when it comes to animal cruelty. In a leaked video, supplier workers were seen punching, kicking and stamping the birds. Animal cruelty is a big no no and those companies who endorse their products, while the animals are being mistreated in unfathomable fashion, they should be shut down for the best.
5. Recycle, rinse, repeat
KFC has had to bear the brunt of many things and on top of the list has been the unhealthy price one has to pay for momentary happiness the crunchiness brings along. Children have been prone to obesity and many mothers and health groups have coined the franchise as a ‘Kid Fattening Centre.’ It looks like having KFC and getting fat is the least of the worries as in 2013, a video popped up, showing an employee reusing old food and eventually repackaging to sell it off. Mac and cheese, green bean and fried chicken were apparently the food items that were being recycled again. This turned heads and in order to extinguish the fire, one of the KFC spokesperson came out, claiming it as an isolated incident and that the actions in the video were not what the company represents when it comes to their food handling procedures. Whatever the case, knowing the morbid history of the food involved in the chain, one has to remain cautious as to where the food comes from and how long it has seen the light of day. Knowing how the food is handled sometimes, the thought of it being ‘finger lickin good’ does not exactly come to mind.
4. The shootout showdown
The last thing you would expect from Colonel Sanders is a fiery temper, especially the way he has been advertised with the KFC brand. Having been part of popular culture, the ever smiling bucket grabbing Colonel actually did have one according to this interesting story. Back in the 1920s, Sanders managed a Shell gas station and in order to attract customers from the highway, he painted a large sign. This did not go down well with a man named Matt Stewart, who owned a competing Standard Oil Station. Both hot headed, and both having a thirst to be on top of their game, obviously had a lot of friction going on there. Stewart on multiple occasions tested Sander’s patience by messing with this signs, despite multiple warnings. During one of Stewart’s escapades, Sanders and the district managers he was meeting at the time, spotted Stewart destroying his sign again. As the men approached Stewart, the guy took out his gun and started shooting frantically. In the heat of the moment, one of the managers, Robert Gibson got killed and Sanders grabbed his gun, returning fire.
The aftermath of the showdown led to Gibson serving 18 years of jail for murder. We know that there is a thing called cut throat competition and any business would stoop to a certain level to remain on top, but a shootout just to make a point seems like the last thing one could ever imagine for the sake of competitiveness. Now if only Stewart tried out Sander’s recipe and gave in to the idea of working something out, favoring both parties. Whatever the case, one wouldn’t want the Colonel to go green, no matter how he has been advertised throughout the years, during and after his demise.
3. Whats in a name change? Everything!
Before it was called KFC, the franchise used to call itself by the name ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken,’ after which it decided to shelve that name and go by the acronym we all now know. After the change in 1991, a lot of speculation started floating among the people as to why the move was made. Because of such widespread curiosity, KFC officially came out and elaborated on it on their website. According to the ‘official’ info, the chain wanted to showcase their diverse menu and it wasn’t just solely about fried chicken. According to the website, the PR move would help encapsulate what they were trying to sell to the consumer. During the time when Craig Kyle was the President of KFC, he let it slip that the move was made because the word ‘fried’ was synonymous to all things unhealthy. Knowing what kind of products KFC has been endorsing all these years, this version of the story seems more plausible in our opinion. Obesity is something which a large number of people have been facing because of food choices that don’t exactly cater towards a healthy living and KFC is a brand that is farther away from all things that are good for a healthy lifestyle. A change in name does not steer away from the fact that the food being sold and marketed by the company has been and always will cause harm of taken regularly. What we now need is for the franchise to shake things up a bit on that menu for healthy options. After all, if we don’t change, we don’t grow.
2. A case of ‘unjustified’ identities
Marketing is part and parcel of every company out there so as to reach out to the masses and attract more customers, keeping them aware of their presence. KFC’s intention was just the same when they recently started a new series of commercials, starring Darrell Hammond, playing the famous Colonel Sanders. He is not the only one to have played the white suit cladded fast food chicken inventor as there have been other clones as well in the past, imitating him. It seems like the new commercials haven’t been in the good books of people and Mashable noted a bunch of reactions to gage the general perception towards it. Former KY Governor John Y. Brown Jr. found the advertisements as ‘tarnishing’ the Colonel’s reputation and that they were making fun of him. Others followed suit as well and also thought of them as not giving justice to what Sanders actually was. But KFC on the other hand doesn’t actually care about the hatred spewed towards their marketing gig as for them any publicity is good publicity.
This doesn’t seem like a surprise because of the friction Sanders had with the vision of the company during its beginnings, during his time. Both of them didn’t see eye to eye on food choices and recipes. The iconography of the man behind what KFC is today is so popular that certain layers of ‘creative’ narrative has been cooked up by the chain to sell their product. It doesn’t seem like a morbid secret, but the business practices of the company and the direction it goes to be out there, sure screams sinister. Whatever floats their boat?
1. The KFC drug racket
KFC might be all things crispy and delicious, but the one thing anyone can’t associate it with is a portal to smuggle drugs. That sounds more like a script Hollywood can peak over for their next project. But unlike all fictional stories, this one actually is true. Yes we do live in a world where all impossibilities are on the brink of becoming a reality or have already become one. But that’s doesn’t mean there are alligators living underneath the sewers of Manhattan or Ninja Turtles for that matter. An abandoned KFC in San Luis, Arizona consisted of a 590 foot tunnel. It ended at a residence in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico. Ivan Lopez, the owner of the place was nabbed by the authorities as he was found guilty of holding 168 kilograms of hard narcotics, also including cocaine and heroin, to name a few. The revelation didn’t just end there as the tunnel was used to smuggle the drugs between US and Mexico. Looks like you never know what you might come across in abandoned places nowadays. So what’s next? A hidden UFO underneath trap doors and secret tunnels? All conspiracy buffs, take note.