"colonel sanders" news and stories

Kentucky Fried Chicken is offering $500 worth of grilled chicken in exchange for information leading to the safe return of a missing Colonel Sanders bust.

The 24-inch bronze bust vanished from a Berea, Ky., KFC just before closing time on Jan. 31.

"There were three men in the restaurant, and the employee went to the kitchen," spokesman Rick Maynard recounted. "When she returned, the three men and the Colonel had flown the coop."

The bust has graced the restaurant's dining room since the 1970s, making the outlet one of the few to house expensive KFC-related art. According to Maynard, the bust – depicting a jolly Sanders in his "trademark glasses and string tie" – is worth $1,500.

"Folks who frequent the restaurant kind of miss it," Maynard says. "I think it's been replaced with a potted plant."

Speedy Alka-Seltzer is one of our more durable male advertising mascots, though you wouldn't know it to listen to him. The high-pitched voice heard in over 200 TV advertisements between 1954 and 1964 (courtesy radio actor Dick Beals) could have belonged to a Madison Avenue castrato, sent to school an overindulgent nation on the error of its ways.

For Alka-Seltzer is not food, of course, but its antidote. In this Sixties spot, Speedy promotes the product as good for political headaches and Mardis Gras hangovers. The original model (brainchild of ad man Chuck Tenant and graphic artist Bob Watkins) was retired for decades, but made a triumphant comeback last year. In a series of Web videos, Speedy accompanied the Conchords-like singing duo Rhett & Link as they crossed the country in a tricked out AMC Gremlin dubbed the Speedmobile, playing chicken (and burger and falafel) with heartburn and stomachaches.

Speedy wasn't alone in the world of mascots. Though it's become harder to find Thomas Lipton on a box of Lipton tea these days, his spirit lives, Tom Joad-like, in every bag. Sometimes called the father of modern advertising, the Scots-Irish entrepreneur was celebrated for stunts such as parading hogs through Glasgow wearing signs that read, "I'm going to Lipton's! Best shop in town for Irish bacon!" (I guess you had to be there.) Lipton went from one teashop to over 300 in twenty years and was famed in the U.K. for his healthy, abstemious lifestyle. For that and underselling the competition.

Lipton went on to buy (and revive) blighted British tea plantations in Ceylon and pioneered the "flow-thru" tea bag that helped Americans overcome their fear of the stuff. His use of the word "brisk" (tea-taster code for leaves that weren't stale) was revived most recently in the canned ice tea commercials featuring Claymation puppets modeled after Bruces Willis and Lee, among other cultural icons, who exclaimed of the beverage, "That's brisk, baby!"

A KFC Colonel Sanders lookalike has caused a minor international incident.

Last week, KFC sent an actor dressed as chain founder Colonel Harland Sanders to the United Nations in New York to publicize its Oct. 26 UNFry Day for Kentucky Grilled Chicken. But it seems the actor and his entourage were a little too good as they were able to bypass United Nations security to pose for photos with Libya's Dr. Ali A. Treki, the current president of the UN Assembly.

"It should not have happened -- that I will stress, and very strongly," Michele Montas, spokeswoman for U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, told Canada's National Post. She added there was "some lapse in security," with a guard ushering the Sanders lookalike "into the U.N."

A KFC official told Slashfood on Thursday that they never planned to send the Colonel into the U.N.

"The KFC Colonel was in New York City for a Kentucky Grilled Chicken sampling event outside the United Nations," Laurie Schalow, a KFC spokeswoman told Slashfood. "While serving free chicken on First Avenue, he was invited inside by a U.N. staff member, along with a photographer who was documenting the event."

The chicken chain did send "a tongue-in-cheek letter to the U.N. requesting that they allow their employees to "unthink" their usual lunch routine and sample Kentucky Grilled Chicken outside the U.N.," she said.

"KFC has the utmost respect for the United Nations and this lighthearted event in New York City was in no way meant to undermine the important work that the U.N. does around the world," Schalow said.

What do you think? Should the Colonel have gone to the U.N.? Let us know in the comments below.

[Via the National Post]

In ancient times, food was marketed primarily by "hunger." But in the modern era, it's not enough that we eat our food, we must also emotionally bond with it. This partly explains the enduring appeal of food mascots, those bright, colorful, affable characters who beckon us to consume.

In many cases, we choose a product simply because we have a bizarre attachment to the cartoon that represents it. There is no shame in trusting, say, a paranoid Leprechaun with a powerful marshmallow lust more than one's own family. These 10 icons are the awesomest in the pantheon of cheap food branding.

KFC Chicken Photo: Sikachu!/flickr

A former Wall Street executive has plucked himself a new career trying to unlock Col. Harland Sander's fried-chicken secret.

Ron Douglas, a former finance director at J.P. Morgan, has been experimenting in the kitchen over the last few years in an attempt to crack KFC's world-famous Original Recipe, the New York Post reports. With his sixth attempt, Douglas thinks he's finally done it.

"Nobody knows what those 11 herbs and spices are, Douglas told the paper. "But if you taste my chicken, you would find the flavor very similar to KFC."