boycottthecolonel.com --- BOYCOTT KFC! --- boycottthecolonel.com
KFC/YUM BRANDS FACT SHEET
 KFC trades off the popularity and credibility
of the most popular black woman in the
world – Oprah Winfrey – to sell its chicken
to African Americans, during the worst
economic downturn in generations. After
the fiasco exploded, Entertainment Weekly
ridiculed Oprah’s role in the promotion with
this racist Photoshop image of Oprah
wearing a bucket of KFC on her head. KFC
never apologized to Oprah.
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 YUM Brands, KFC’s parent company, made over $1.5 billion in profit last year on $11.3 billion in sales.1
 KFC issued over 10.2 million coupons for its free “Kentucky Grilled Chicken” giveaway, but honored fewer than
half of them. 5.7 million coupons were not honored.2
 KFC’s promotion was disproportionately aimed at African-Americans, as its restaurants are concentrated in poor
and African-American neighborhoods.3 We believe that the people turned away at KFC were also
disproportionately African-American.
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 KFC issues ads featuring African Americans dancing around and clucking like chickens for their “finger-lickin’
chicken.”4 The ad agency that brought you the Oprah Chicken Giveaway Fiasco and the racist ad above
(DraftFCB Chicago) also used the song “Sweet Home Alabama” – a song defending the Confederacy and
Alabama’s racist history – to promote KFC, as reported by Business Week.5
 KFC looks at this fiasco as a great thing; its President Roger Eaton said that “The critical thing for us was to get
people to eat the chicken, whatever it took,” and brags that sales are up since the fiasco, calling it
"transformational" and bragging that "clearly, we're bringing in a lot of new customers." 6 Eaton is a native of
South Africa, and left just as apartheid was ending.
 KFC’s “Kentucky Grilled Chicken” isn’t even all chicken. It contains rendered beef fat and beef powder.
1
Financial information for Yum Brands available at Forbes.com.
KFC itself provided these numbers in a recent lawsuit Doering v. KFC Corp., Case No. 1:09-cv-4166 (N.D. Ill.)
3
See http://minority-health.pitt.edu/archive/00000469/01/Fast_Food,_Race-Ethnicity,and_Income.pdf.
4
See http://windimoto.com/scorpeze-blog/?p=132. The full commercial is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdJqtG0Mrs0.
5
www.businessweek.com/the_thread/brandnewday/archives/2005/02/kfcs_sweet_home.html
6
KFC president Roger Eaton, interview with Bruce Schreiner, Associated Press, May 26, 2009.
2