Tony Liégois, edited by Alexis Patri 10:00 a.m., March 19, 2022
In an issue of the show "Historically yours" devoted to personalities who have become brand logos, Stéphane Bern paints a portrait of Harland Sanders.
An American better known as "Colonel Sanders", who created the chain of Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food restaurants, KFC.
It shows up all over the world.
In ten times larger than anyone his face spreads out.
A grandfather with a pleasant smile, reproduced in a pop art style on a red background.
He has a smile on his face, black rimmed glasses and white, almost silver hair, mustache and goatee.
He is damn elegant with his shirt with a starched collar, his red and white apron and his perfectly tied bow tie which give him an almost timeless presence and bearing.
>> Find all the programs of Matthieu Noël and Stéphane Bern every day from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Europe 1 as well as in replay and podcast here
Behind this grandfather image is Harland Sanders, the founding father of what is now the multinational Kentucky Fried Chicken, better known by the acronym KFC.
Prior to this logo, Sanders had his face altered, on paper, six times.
A marketing facelift over five decades carried out by the biggest communication agencies with a single objective: to attract potential consumers at first glance, to convince them to taste the secret recipe for fried chicken of "Colonel Sanders", as he likes to be called.
Cascading entrepreneurial failures
However, this kid from America could never have imagined becoming the leader in fast food, just behind the yellow and red Clown sign.
Harland David Sanders was born in September 1890 in the United States, in Henryville, in southern Indiana, 150 kilometers from Kentucky.
His father, a farmer then a butcher, died when he was only 5 years old.
While his mother works, Harland is gradually brought to take care of his two brothers and sister.
And this includes the obligation to prepare meals for them.
These are his first contact with food.
But, despite his best efforts to be a considerate big brother, Harland disturbs.
When his mother comes back to life, he annoys his stepfather.
He does not excel at school either and stops going there at barely 12 years old.
As a teenager, the student Sanders is sent to members of his family and rubs shoulders with many trades.
From agricultural worker to tram driver, before deciding to enlist in the army.
Head to Cuba!
While he has not yet reached the legal age of 16.
>> READ ALSO -
The legendary life of Calamity Jane, the terror of the great American West
A few years later, Sanders married his first wife: Josephine King.
Three children will be born from this union.
Is Harland an entrepreneur at heart or does he simply have no choice in supporting his family?
Anyway, he does not hesitate to take risks in his career.
And unfortunately, he often makes mistakes and fails!
Like when he goes into debt to buy the rights to manufacture carbide lamps.
Harland Sanders sets up his factory and imagines selling these famous portable lamps throughout the United States.
But, at the same time, the very rapid electrification of the United States reduced his dreams of fortune to nothing.
A (short) career in justice
But Sanders has a bright idea.
He jumps on the bandwagon of industrialization and becomes a railway worker.
His particularity: although renowned for his flowery language, even his coarse and dirty vocabulary, he is obsessed with cleanliness.
He is even proud, after a day's work, to come home in his overalls and immaculate white gloves.
Crazy Sanders?
Rather determined to turn the tide.
At the same time, he took evening classes in law and ended up working in the court of a justice of the peace.
Legend has it that he managed to obtain generous financial compensation from the mostly black victims of a train accident.
But his legal career came to an abrupt halt after an altercation in the open court in which he allegedly came to blows with a client.
>> READ ALSO -
The four marriages (and a funeral) of Charlie Chaplin's life
Once again, Harland Sanders is on borrowed time: without work, without real training, he must find the energy necessary to relaunch his career.
And if this one-man band found his salvation in the direction of a service station?
In the 1920s, he took over a Standard Oil franchise in neighboring Kentucky.
He climbs the slope gradually when, unfortunately, two disasters cut short his umpteenth ascent to success.
A terrible drought plagues the farmers' crops: no more foodstuffs to sell, no more money collected, and therefore no more money to pay for petrol!
Add to that the terrible Crash of 1929 and, like the stock market, Harland Sanders is not far from collapsing.
Beginnings in fast food
Sanders convinces the parent company to entrust him with a new child: it will be the Corbin gas station, still in Kentucky.
He said of this city that "alcohol traffic, fights and shootings were even more regular there than the crowing of the rooster".
But Sanders feels good there.
It is also in this antechamber of Hell that the Sanders family will finally experience a certain taste and financial paradise.
Because Harland Sanders has just understood that there is a sector which is unlikely to experience the crisis: the restoration.
He sets up a table for six people in the reserve.
"Sanders Service Station and Café" is born.
>> READ ALSO -
Lucky Luke: do you know the story of the real Dalton brothers?
Jackpot: his gas station is full, literally and figuratively.
The food, which he initially makes himself, is very popular.
Beef steak with country ham, potatoes in sauce and biscuits, but rarely chicken.
Too long to cook for his hungry travellers!
But, Harland Sanders will soon find the solution to this problem.
We are at the end of the 1930s and the industrialist he has always dreamed of being discovers a revolutionary machine.
This machine is nothing but a pressure cooker that allows you to prepare vegetables in record time.
Here is the solution to his problem!
Where before Harland Sanders needed 30 minutes, now only 8 minutes are needed to cook his chicken.
But he wants to go even further.
He dreams of inventing a seasoning that would hook anyone who tastes it for the first time.
The birth of Kentucky Fried Chicken
He develops a recipe composed of 11 herbs and spices that he intends to keep secret to make it his signature.
However, its creator will have to wait.
World War II has just broken out.
And nothing will be like before.
Neither the world nor his life.
After 39 years of marriage, Sanders separates from his first wife to wed with one of his employees: Claudia.
At the dawn of his 60th birthday, the former dunce, the former soldier sent to Cuba is named Colonel of Kentucky in recognition of his cuisine!
Colonel Sanders was born.
He has white hair and has wasted enough time!
He then put himself at the service of his company.
He cultivates his appearance, wears frock coats, works on his speech, with one and only objective: to sell his secret recipe!
Painfully, he manages to convince a few future franchisees.
The Kentucky Fried Chicken company is born.
The boss thus recovers four cents on each chicken sold.
But with Harland, it's not all smooth sailing.
>> READ ALSO - Was
Christopher Columbus really the first European to discover America?
A new highway is to divert travelers from its restaurant.
In order not to go bankrupt, he resells it.
With only $105 from Social Security and the income of his rare franchisees, at over 65, Colonel Sanders must once again reinvent himself.
The old man will then travel all over the continent, equipped with casseroles, sauces already ready and of course chickens.
For several months, tirelessly, he goes from restaurant to restaurant and prepares his own recipe to convince the directors to enter the KFC purse.
And finally, it works!
The sauce takes and the franchisees multiply.
But lured by the gains made by the company, entrepreneurs bought it back for 2 million dollars.
Harland Sanders remains the company's representative and travels the world to promote it, sometimes reluctantly.
When he died in 1980, he felt that the quality of the products had dropped considerably.
On the other hand, the secret of his sauce and his greedy face on the brand's logo are still popular.
Bibliography:
Harland Sanders (translation by Laurent Brault),
The Legendary Colonel
, Brossard, 1981
John Ed Pearce,
The Colonel: The captivating biography of the dynamic founder of a fast-food empire
, Doubleday and Co., 1982