Dhruv Kaul, center, and Scott Mezvinsky, right, with Nation’s Restaurant News Editorial Director Sam Oches. | Photo by W. Scott Mitchell Photography.
More than any other protein, chicken is soaring in restaurants. Burger brands are adding chicken to their menus. New concepts are emerging and exploding all the time. Internationally, U.S. chicken chains are increasingly eyeing international expansion.
None of this really worries KFC, the world’s biggest chicken chain and one of the biggest restaurant brands, period.
“Chicken is a very hard category,” Dhruv Kaul, managing director for KFC in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said at the Global Restaurant Leadership Conference in Barcelona this week. “We’ve been in many of these markets for decades. We have stores around the world. If anything, it just brings more attention to the category of chicken.”
KFC International is a powerhouse. It is the third-largest restaurant chain in the world based on system sales, behind only McDonald’s and Starbucks, and adds about 2,000 locations per year. It will finish 2025 with more than 30,000 locations outside the U.S.
Nobody else is particularly close. Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, for example, has about 2,000 locations outside the U.S.
Inside the U.S. is a different story, of course. KFC has struggled on and off for decades and will likely finish 2025 as the fifth-largest chicken chain, behind Chick-fil-A, Popeyes, Raising Cane’s and Wingstop.
And a lot of other chicken chains are surging, too, such as Dave’s Hot Chicken, the fast-growing chain just acquired by the private-equity firm Roark Capital for $1 billion.
Yet Scott Mezvinsky, KFC’s CEO, said that the brand can learn from all this new competition.
“The U.S. business has seen firsthand that pressure and tension can impact your business,” he said at the conference. “I think one of the things we want to do is be inspired by that competition. I think the competition helps us get better as a group, as a category, but also us as KFC. And it helped meet where the consumers are going.”
Chicken is one of the fastest-growing categories globally among restaurant cuisines. Chicken sales worldwide grew 9% in 2024, according to Technomic, compared with 1.4% for burgers. Religious groups generally do not have objections to chicken, which makes it a relatively easy cuisine to expand in other markets.
It is the most popular protein in the U.S., and in recent years consumers have made it clear they want a broader selection of chicken products, particularly products that are handheld, shareable and without bones. Many of the growing chains serve items like chicken tenders, wings and sandwiches.
“One of the challenges as a 73-, 74-year-old brand is how to make sure we remain modern and relevant, that we go where the consumer is going,” Mezvinsky said. “I think that’s something that the U.S. competitors are doing [is] identifying where the next generation of chicken consumers are going.”
Internationally, he said, the challenge “is to make sure we don’t get left behind, and we take advantage of that, and we’re actually in the forefront of where the consumer is and meeting them where they are.”
Outside the U.S., KFC is a different animal than in the U.S. In Spain, for instance, the brand has a massive social media following—one in 10 social media interactions in the country include KFC, Kaul said. The brand has more social media followers in Spain than Taco Bell does in the U.S.
Its menu reflects that. Its Spain locations are currently serving chicken sandwiches topped with Monchitos, a popular puffed rice snack with a purple monster mascot. The sandwiches have purple buns.
KFC does have one concept that it hopes can provide key lessons, both in the U.S. and internationally, called Saucy. The chicken tenders concept, featuring 11 types of sauce, has one location, but KFC has plans to expand the brand in the U.S. The architect of that concept, Christophe Poirier, is now KFC’s chief concept officer.
“One of the things that we want to do is not just learn from Saucy in the U.S., which is a one-store concept at this point, but how we can apply that globally,” Mezvinsky said. “There’s a lot of values we’re taking from that store, and the mindset that it took to create a store from scratch, based on where the next generation customers are going. I don’t think you’ll see that concept outside the U.S., but you’ll see things that may be inspired by that.”
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