Chick-fil-A: Deep Fried Civil War
In the popular imagination, the American fast-food chain founder is an amalgam of entrepreneurial archetypes. He is at once a garage tinkerer and a tastemaker, a showman and a flesh-presser. He starts out in a paper hat behind a lunch counter and rises to become the smiling grandfatherly face on a thousand billboards and a million management handbooks.
No member of the fast-food pantheon actually matches up with this mythic figure, of course. Ray Kroc was a salesman by trade, not a cook, and a charismatic autocrat whose mania for detail verged on the pathological. Harland Sanders spent his later years embittered by what Kentucky Fried Chicken had become—a franchisee ended up suing him for libel when the Colonel called the chain’s gravy “pure wallpaper paste.”
The founding father who comes closest to the ideal is S. Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A. He opened his first restaurant in 1946 in the Atlanta suburb of Hapeville, catering to workers from a Ford (F) plant and Delta Air Lines (DAL) offices nearby. The place was tiny, with a counter and four tables. He called it the Dwarf Grill. For entertainment, he would dress his school-age sons Dan and Bubba (Donald) in dwarf costumes and have them sing for the customers.
Cathy would probably have spent his life as a moderately successful local restaurateur save for two innovations, one culinary and one cultural. In the early 1960s the owners of a local poultry purveyor came to him with a bunch of boneless breast pieces they couldn’t do anything with and he began experimenting with ways of making a fried chicken sandwich. Cathy had grown up on his mother’s chicken, fried in a skillet with the lid on to keep it moist. The difficulty for a restaurant like his, with customers grabbing a quick bite between shifts, was that fried chicken took too long to make. The young restaurateur set out to replicate his mother’s version and found a recently invented commercial pressure cooker called the Henny Penny that allowed him to fry a boneless, skinless chicken breast in a mere four minutes. After tinkering with his seasoning mix, Cathy put the result on a buttered bun, added two pickle slices and, at the suggestion of his lawyer, came up with a trademarkable name: the Chick-fil-A, the final “A” a measure, he said, of the sandwich’s quality
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-02/chick-fil-a-deep-fried-civil-war
Total sales last year reached $4.1 billion.
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