KFC’s plan to regain ground in the fried chicken wars: Ditch the bones

Fried chicken is making more money than ever in American restaurants — except at KFC, the very place that popularized selling the dish by the bucket across the country.

Chick-fil-A fans flock to its sandwiches and milkshakes, Popeyes launches go viral on social media, Raising Cane’s attracts customers with its yellow Labrador mascot and 2.3 million followers on TikTok, and McDonald’s now sells almost as much chicken as beef.

But KFC? “Invisible” and “irrelevant”, according to one of its leaders. It was the only major chicken chain whose sales fell last year.

“We used to be an American icon,” Catherine Tan-Gillespie, president of KFC USA, said in an interview. “At some point, we stopped acting like it.”

The problem with KFC, which is owned by Yum! Brands Inc., is in the bones. The 73-year-old brand focuses on bone-in chicken — like its iconic striped bucket of fried drumsticks — and that has alienated younger customers who prefer boneless white meat.

Since 2020, sales of bone-in chicken have fallen by 4%, while boneless chicken sales have risen by 11%, according to data from Circana.

So far, investors in Yum! Brands were protected by the success of the company’s other restaurant, Taco Bell, which accounts for 82% of US profits. The company’s shares rose 6% in 2025 and hit a record at the beginning of the year.

KFC is now looking to learn from the success of Taco Bell, known for limited releases and constant new releases, to boost its business. It is also reducing prices and has brought back the famous character Colonel Sanders — based on the founder of KFC — for ads alongside celebrity chef and actor Matty Matheson. The hope is to regain a spot among the top three chicken chains in the US after Technomic data showed KFC trailed Raising Cane’s last year.

“When we became fourth, I think that was a huge call to action,” Tan-Gillespie said. “The status quo will not be good for this brand.”

Going back in time, however, is part of the plan. KFC has already bet on reviving trends from the 2000s, bringing back honey BBQ sauce and rustic potatoes, both classics from the 1990s menu. The potato preview included a campaign that sent whole potatoes, stamped with the relaunch date, to gastronomic influencers. A single photo posted on X with the caption “HERE, DAMN.” — a response to fans calling for the return of potatoes — had almost 80 million views.

The company also reduced the price of its chicken sandwich from $5.49 to $3.99, despite the increase in wholesale chicken prices.

“Especially for millennials and older generations, there is a strong nostalgic connection,” said Tan-Gillespie, who was previously director of marketing and development for KFC in the US. “We need to remind people what made us so great in the beginning.”

Less likely to be won over by nostalgia is Generation Z, which frequents fast-food restaurants the most, but represented just 6% of KFC’s customer base as of July this year, according to Numerator. When they eat at chicken chains, they prefer tenders and nuggets — boneless options that make up just a quarter of KFC’s menu.

KFC is updating its core menu to better reflect consumer tastes, Tan-Gillespie said — “How do we make buckets of tenders? What does a bucket look like for one person, for two?” — but did not reveal details or release dates. KFC briefly launched its “first new bucket in nearly a decade” during March Madness: a $7 meal with tenders, mashed potato dumplings and gravy.

This isn’t the first time KFC has tried to change its identity to boneless. In 2013, the company ran a series of ads in which customers ate a bucket of chicken and were shocked — with increasing intensity — to realize they had eaten the bones. The revelation: they were actually eating boneless pieces of chicken.

Although the campaign went well during the three months, it did not continue. It was “maybe a little ahead of its time” in terms of what consumers wanted at the time, Tan-Gillespie said.

The success of this strategy will be an important test for Chris Turner, Yum!’s new CEO. Brands, and its revamped leadership team at KFC. Will they abandon their bones to follow trends, running the risk of alienating current customers, with no guarantee that they will be able to stand out in an increasingly competitive market?

“The brand represents something specific, most famous for chicken on the bone, chicken in a bucket,” said Mark Kalinowski, president and CEO of Kalinowski Equity Research. “Launching additional products that do not fit this definition does not necessarily change consumers’ perception of what the KFC brand represents.”

The irrelevance Tan-Gillespie mentions is evident under the lights of Times Square, where prominent Raising Cane’s, Popeyes and Jollibee are popular with tourists and office workers at lunchtime.

The closest KFC to Times Square was a few blocks away, in the theater district. But that location closed during the pandemic, and now the closest KFC is a worn-out restaurant about a 20-minute walk south, between an Irish pub and a hookah bar. Another Raising Cane’s is just a few minutes’ walk away, inside Penn Station’s recently renovated coffee shop.

Since 2023, Yum! closed about 300 KFC units. During the same period, it opened 412 new Taco Bell locations, according to company documents.

The Mexican-inspired franchise, whose best-sellers include tacos and burritos, launched crispy chicken last year and made it a permanent item following the success of the limited edition. Taco Bell’s chicken sales grew 50% in two years and are expected to double to $5 billion by 2030.

KFC in the US, meanwhile, hasn’t received a major investment in a decade, when Yum! allocated US$185 million for advertising and new equipment.

If you’re an executive at Yum!, “KFC USA probably isn’t where you focus most of your attention,” said Eric Gonzalez, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets. “Doing this for long periods of time has its consequences.”

The lack of investment is noticeable to Precious McMillon, 34, who lives in Louisville, Kentucky, less than a three-hour drive from KFC’s first location. When he wants fried chicken, he prefers to go to the nearby Popeyes, where he usually orders chicken with the bone. A lot of this has to do with the in-store experience — KFC is “outdated, just not modernized,” McMillon said.

“With Popeyes being right down the street, it’s a new store, and I feel like that makes a difference too,” she said.

Tan-Gillespie did not provide specific details about Yum!’s investment plans. at KFC USA, but said there are “really positive things happening in that regard.”

A spin-off concept called Saucy by KFC, focused on chicken tenders with a long list of dipping sauces, opened an Orlando location last year, with several more planned for this year. On Yum!’s last earnings call, outgoing CEO David Gibbs said that a third of the new store’s customers were under 30. The company will release third-quarter results on November 4.

Failing to make the change would mean losing consumers’ seemingly insatiable appetite for chicken. Over the past 10 years, U.S. chicken consumption has grown nearly 19%, versus a 5.6% increase for beef, according to Brian Earnest, lead animal protein economist at CoBank. By 2030, Americans are expected to consume about 105 pounds of chicken per person per year, U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows.

A key moment in the shift in preferences was in 2019, when Popeyes — known for its bone-in dishes — launched its chicken sandwich, sparking a race for the best and most viral sandwich. KFC came in third place at best, while Chick-fil-A and Popeyes traded barbs on social media and sold out of products.

The craze has drawn burger chains like McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King into the fray, and more than 60% of fast-food restaurants now offer chicken sandwiches, according to Datassential.

KFC’s offering was as good as the others, analyst Kalinowski said, but the company wasn’t ready to fully commit to boneless meat. “A lot of franchisees love to sell a lot of bone-in fried chicken,” he said.

© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.