In 2023, Popeyes surpassed Kentucky Fried Chicken in annual U. S. sales, a milestone that would have seemed almost absurd only a generation earlier. Popeyes achieved the feat while operating roughly five hundred fewer locations than its rival, meaning its per-restaurant sales were dramatically stronger.
For decades, KFC had not merely been the largest bone-in fried chicken chain in America; by the 1970s, it had been the largest restaurant chain of any kind in the country. That any competitor could overtake it on home soil was a development few thought possible, comparable in scale to Burger King overtaking McDonald’s, something that has never happened. The rivalry traces its roots to two men with strikingly similar beginnings. Colonel Harland Sanders’s father died when he was six, leaving his mother to raise three children alone.
Difficulties with a stepfather drove him out of school and out of the house at twelve, and he spent years drifting through a series of jobs. By 1929, nearing forty, he was running a gas station in Kentucky and began selling fried chicken to travelers, perfecting the recipe that would later make him famous. By the 1950s, he was traveling the country full-time, using that recipe to persuade others to open their own KFC restaurants. When he sold the company to an investor group in 1964, it was already a national chain with hundreds of locations, and the new owners expanded it even faster.
Al Copeland, the founder of Popeyes, followed a similar path. His father left the family, and his mother struggled to support her young children alone. Copeland dropped out of school at sixteen and worked in several careers before turning to fried chicken. In the early 1970s, he was operating a donut shop franchise in Louisiana when the first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants began opening in his area.
He later recalled the frustration of working hard in a donut shop while KFC operated shorter hours, did four times the business, and closed by eight o’clock at night. He concluded that if he could make a better-tasting fried chicken, he could beat them. In that sense, Popeyes might never have existed without KFC. Copeland’s first attempt at a chicken restaurant was called Chicken on the Run, built around fast service.
It struggled financially, and after about six months he shut it down for a few days and reopened it under the name Popeyes, serving spicier Louisiana Cajun-style chicken. The new approach proved far more popular, and the restaurant became profitable within three weeks. Copeland always believed the spices made the difference. The two chains were built around distinct regional identities rooted in their founders’ home states.
KFC has been inseparable from Kentucky, where Sanders first sold his chicken at that gas station and developed the secret blend of eleven herbs and spices. Popeyes, meanwhile, embraced its Louisiana heritage, heavily promoting its Cajun roots and going so far as to rename itself Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen in 2008, backed by the slogan Louisiana Fast. There is a twist to these geographic identities: both companies eventually abandoned their founding states. Popeyes moved its headquarters to Miami, Florida, while KFC began relocating its U.
S. base to Plano, Texas. The marketing strategies of the two chains diverged as much as their recipes. KFC’s most enduring mascot was Colonel Sanders himself.
When he sold the company, part of the arrangement was that he would continue serving as an ambassador for the brand, and he did so nearly until his death in 1980. Afterward, KFC kept the distinctive image alive in countless campaigns, at times to an almost absurd degree. Popeyes drew on a different kind of mascot. For roughly thirty-five years, beginning in the early 1970s, the chain used Popeye the Sailor in its advertising, but the restaurant was not named after the cartoon character.
It was named after Popeye Doyle, the Gene Hackman character from the film The French Connection, which had been released within a year of the first restaurant opening. The two chains also developed memorable slogans that became part of American culture. KFC’s enduring phrase finger-licking good reportedly originated in the 1950s when a commercial showed someone licking his fingers in the background. When a viewer called to complain, the response was that the man was simply acknowledging that the chicken was finger-licking good.
Popeyes found its own lasting slogan in the 1980 jingle Love that chicken from Popeyes. Later in that decade, the chain launched advertising that called it America’s fried chicken champ, with commercials showing people choosing Popeyes over KFC in blind taste tests. Behind the scenes, both companies were shaped by their associations with other major restaurant brands. KFC was purchased by Pepsi in 1986, joining Taco Bell and Pizza Hut under one roof.
Eleven years later, the restaurant division was spun off into a separate company that became known as Yum Brands. For a while, the company experimented with co-branded restaurants, placing KFC and another of its chains in a single building, and the shared ownership occasionally produced unusual menu items such as the popcorn chicken pizza introduced in 2020. Popeyes went through a more turbulent corporate history. In 1989, it merged with Churches Chicken, its biggest non-KFC competitor at the time, but the merger proved difficult to manage.
The resulting debt was likely the largest factor behind a bankruptcy that soon followed, and Al Copeland lost control of the company in the early 1990s. He retained control of the recipes through a separate company that charged royalties for their use, until Popeyes purchased those recipes outright for forty-three million dollars in 2014. After the bankruptcy, a new owner kept both brands together under a parent company called America’s Favorite Chicken, which went on to acquire other chains, including Cinnabon in 1998, before selling most of those other brands to refocus on Popeyes. In 2017, Popeyes was acquired by Restaurant Brands International, the owner of Tim Hortons and Burger King, and later Firehouse Subs.
The most dramatic shift in the rivalry came not with bone-in chicken, but with chicken sandwiches. Chick-fil-A, a chain built around the sandwich, had surpassed KFC in sales more than a decade earlier and remained above both KFC and Popeyes. Both companies were motivated to compete, but success proved elusive. In 2008, alongside its rebranding, Popeyes launched the Big Easy Chicken Sandwich, but it failed to gain traction.
KFC brought its Zinger, already popular overseas, to the U. S. market in 2017, promoting it by sending one into the stratosphere. The following year, it launched the Crispy Colonel Sandwich.
Neither generated the attention the company hoped for. Then, in August 2019, Popeyes introduced the chicken sandwich, and a brief Twitter exchange with Chick-fil-A ignited what became known as the chicken sandwich wars. The feuding captured enormous public attention, and Popeyes sold sandwiches at a level it had never seen before, even selling out temporarily. The company used that momentum to launch other menu items, such as its sweet and spicy wings, which performed well.
KFC waited more than a year before launching the Best Chicken Sandwich Ever nationally, but it was nowhere near the sensation the Popeyes sandwich had become. The success of these sandwiches elevated Popeyes to a new level and closed the sales gap with KFC that had always existed. By 2024, the dynamic between the two chains had inverted. When KFC introduced new original recipe tenders, it did so with a commercial declaring that the chicken sandwich wars were over and the chicken tender battle had begun.
The ad leaned into a direct challenge, asking why anyone would choose Louisiana herbs and seasonings when they could have the iconic KFC original recipe of eleven herbs and spices, one of the most protected trade secrets in the world. For the first time, KFC appeared to be positioning itself as the underdog against Popeyes. Even with Popeyes ahead in the United States, KFC remained far larger on the world stage. Shortly after Colonel Sanders sold the company in the 1960s, KFC pushed aggressively into international markets, opening its first location outside the United States in England in 1965, followed quickly by Germany, Australia, and Japan.
In 1974, KFC began promoting its chicken in Japan as a holiday meal, and it has since become a tradition for many Japanese families to order it on Christmas, with Christmas Eve remaining the chain’s busiest day of the year there. KFC’s largest presence, however, is in China, where it opened its first store in 1987 and has since expanded to more than ten thousand locations, almost three times its number of U. S. stores.
Altogether, KFC operates over thirty thousand locations worldwide, making it roughly six times larger than Popeyes overall, and while most of the rivalry has played out at home, the U. S. market is no longer KFC’s primary focus.
After more than fifty years of competition, the underdog finally caught the chain that once seemed uncatchable, at least in the country where both were born.