Cover story

Something approaching a national fixation with KFC was exposed and further embedded by lockdown, and the Covid-19 vaccination rollout. National Correspondent Steve Kilgallon investigates.

When New Zealand first went into a Covid-19 lockdown in March 00, Alex had only one thought: KFC. “When everyone else was panic buying toilet paper, I drove to KFC and parked outside at 10am, just before it opened,” he says. The first customer inside, he bought a bucket of chicken, chips and mashed potato, drove home, ate it, then thought again. How long might this lockdown last

So he returned that evening and bought two more buckets and side dishes, froze the lot, and each Friday, dug out a ration for himself and his wife. Defrosted in the microwave and warmed in the oven, it still tasted almost as good.

On the first day of Level 3, he returned to KFC. “It was,” he says, “amazing. I can vividly remember it.” His appetite was so insatiable, the chips were gone by the time he’d driven home.

At Alex’s white-collar city workplace, a WhatsApp group called the “CluckBus” rounds up theKFC lovers for lunch time outing she favours a Friday lunchtime feed with his workmates and then a Friday “date night” at home.

“I’m a big fan of KFC, and I’m never ashamed to admit it,” says Alex, who owns shares in parent company Restaurant Brands on the theory that fried chicken is a recession-proof stock. “It’s a comfort food, it’s really tasty, and most of all, it’s consistent ... you can always expect the same sort of enjoyment and taste from it.

“The spices, the greasiness, the fragrance when you walk into a store. It feels like a time you can just let go of all your healthy eating. It feels naughty.”

ach time a lockdown eases, those who haven’t shown Alex’s freezer foresight have found themselves victims of their pent-up demand.

There’s been car crashes, traffic jams, one Auckland councillor’s plea to capture the vaccine hesitant by putting mobile jabbing posts in KFC car parks. And, of course, a couple of Auckland bordercrossing crooks were caught with a car-bootful of chicken. National leader udith Collins’ description of the difference between our two most stringent levels of lockdown was that “level 3 is level 4 with KFC”.

Lockdown has helped illustrate something significant about the New Zealand character: we’re obsessed with our franchised American fried chicken. As the late comedian Billy T ames once said, to illustrate an argument that all Kiwis, Māori, Pākehā or otherwise, had a shared cultural background: “I’ve been brought up with radio and television and Kentucky Fried Chicken, like everyone else”.

Love at first site

It was love at first sight. There was no drive-through, no dine-in, no delivery, no car parking, one till, and just six items on the menu.

But they still queued 100 metres down the block, even in the rain, for weeks after the first Kentucky Fried Chicken opened by Auckland’s Royal Oak roundabout on August 0, 1971.

A four-page advertising supplement in the u St declared: “Precision is the keynote of Kentucky Fried Chicken: everything goes like clockwork”.

Actually, they were scrambling: based on sales in Australia, where a handful of stores were already operating, six months’ supply of packaging had been made. After four weeks, they had to order more.

“It went gangbusters,” remembers Garry MelvilleSmith, the first general manager of KFC New Zealand. “In retrospect, the reason for that was it was the right product at the right place at the right time: there was nothing like it here, and I think because of that, it caught people’s imaginations.

“People were looking for something new, the economy was buoyant at the time and the average person had a bit of money to spend.”

Melville-Smith worked for General Foods, then the parent company of Tip Top ice cream, which came up with the idea of bringing in KFC to drive custom for another of its brands, Tegel Chicken.

He remembers a confidence that they would be successful. A joint venture was formed with the

S parent company, import licences secured to bring pressure fryers from the S (each had to be individually certified by the Labour Department under the same regulations as commercial boilers) and plans made for an eventual chain of 40 outlets.

There was little competition – the only other takeaway chain was a domestic product called ncle’s Burgers. Their only poultry rival came much later in the local Homestead Chicken (which went into receiver ship in 199) and the smaller Big Rooster.

While the Australians had to contend with Red Rooster and the Americans with Chick-fil-A, New Zealand was ready to be exploited. “When you look back, it was a wide open space,” says Melville-Smith.

KFC was the first big American takeaway chain to arrive in New Zealand: Melville-Smith brought the next to market when he started Pizza Hut in 1974 (McDonald’s was third to arrive, in 1976). “People loved it, because it was something from overseas, something a bit different.” The menu was simple: fried chicken, potatoes and gravy, some sweet yellow buns to dip in the gravy, coleslaw, bean salad, and, in a revolutionary move, french fries: Melville-Smith is fairly certain they were the first KFC to sell chips.

Those 40 stores have grown through ownership changes to 103 nationwide. KFC is now owned by the publicly-listed Restaurant Brands, which also holds the New Zealand Carl’s r and Pizza Hut franchises, plus fast-food master franchises in Hawaii and Australia. Restaurant Brands declined to give Stuff an interview for this story but, through a public relations agency, eventually supplied some anonymous answers to specific questions.

Incidentally, Alex was right about Restaurant Brands being recession-proof. While he’s not allowed to recommend I buy them, Forsyth Barr stockbroker David Price says while spending drops on other discretionary products – such as beauty treatments – during tough times, fast food doesn’t suffer. “Instead of spending on going out, people ‘shop down’ to Restaurant Brands: it becomes what they do as a treat instead of going out,” Price says. “Fast food continually outperforms, even during the bad times.”

Why does it taste so good?

We cannot be blamed for liking KFC, says food scientist Professor Russell Keast: we’re fighting against thousands of years of evolutionary history.

Keast, from Melbourne’s Deakin niversity’s faculty of health, talks about how life first evolved out of the sea, “bathed in this salty solution,” and once on land, had to seek out salt to survive.

Sodium is essential for life, but we don’t have major stores of it and lose it in sweat, urine and faeces, so have to regularly replenish. Thus, we developed a “hedonic response” – or a feeling of pleasure – to the taste of salty foods.

And fried chicken, says Keast, ticks a lot of those survival boxes for our hunter-gatherer bodies, packaging up fat, salt and sugar, all once-prized nutrients, into one parcel. Of course, now, he says, they are all cheap and readily available, and that hedonic response has become an evolutionary relic but we’re not letting go of it. “It is with us, our children, and in 10,000 years time,” Keast says.

There’s a lot going on when you first take a bite of fried chicken, Keast explains. The smell has already forewarned us as has the tac tile feeling of the chicken in our fingers. What he calls the “first pressing” of it between our teeth gives us an indication of how good it will be (our brains associate crispness with quality) there’ s a further release of smell through retro n as alolf action then we get the taste sensations, sweet, sour, salt, bitter, umami, fat, carbohydrate.

Boyd Swinburn, professor of population nutrition and global health at Auckland niversity, calls it the “bliss point”: the perfect amount of something addictive like salt or sugar at a level that triggers the taste buds. “Vegetables don’t have much of a chance,” he says scornfully.

Keast describes a cycle in which salt, fat and sugar are alternatively demonised in the media, and food producers, attempting to limit negative publicity, try to reduce their use.

The problem is, he says, that people like the taste and would notice their absence if the levels dropped more than about 10 per cent. There’s no healthy salt substitute, and artificial sweeteners have been shown to trigger an appetite response, leading to greater consumption. “It’s a nasty paradigm the food industry is in: trying to satisfy consumers and the public health nutritionists,” he says.

But while salt hooks us in, it’s not good for you. New Zealanders eat almost 0 per cent too much salt a day (you’re recommended to consume about a teaspoonful). While essential for life, too much salt can cause increased blood pressure and has been linked to higher risks of heart problems and stomach cancer.

I’ve been brought up with radio and television and Kentucky Fried Chicken, like everyone else. – Billy T James