12 Signs KFC Is Struggling

As of late, the competition in the realm of fried chicken quick service restaurants has been pretty fierce. From Raising Cane's to Chick-fil-A and comparatively smaller companies like Slim Chickens and Dave's Hot Chicken, fried chicken chains are expanding in 2025. Surprisingly enough, one of the oldest and most well-known fried chicken restaurants is not one of them: KFC.

It may be true that Southern fried chicken was invented by Scottish immigrants. However, in the United States, KFC is considered the granddaddy of fried chicken joints, having .

Despite serving fried chicken to customers for almost 100 years, KFC seems to be struggling recently with restaurant closures, declining food quality, shrinking portions, and other fairly significant problems. When comparing whether KFC or Popeyes has a better chicken dinner value, we found that while KFC is a better value cost wise, the quality of Popeyes chicken is better — in spite of the fact that KFC has . Read on to find out some of the signs that KFC is struggling.

In that it would be moving the fried chicken chain's headquarters from Louisville, Kentucky to Plano, Texas — where KFC Global is already located. With the repositioning of the headquarters the company will also be .

Yum! Brands CEO David Gibbs . CPA Paul Miller from the firm Miller & Company told Fortune that another reason was that the Lone Star state has lower taxes and is more pro-business. Kentucky has a 5% corporate tax rate on business' profits but Texas only taxes the company's gross sales by 0.331% compared to 0.75%. Miller explained with the relocation, KFC's franchisees will pay royalties to the new headquarters and the company will be doing its payroll and accounting in Texas as well which means that the company will pay a majority of its taxes in the state. The fried chicken chain isn't the first company to make this move, . However, KFC moving its headquarters from the state it originated from and is also named after — especially for tax reasons — makes you wonder how the company is truly doing.

The fried chicken restaurant's sales have not been doing well recently. In April 2025, Restaurant Dive covered Circana's Definitive U.S. Restaurant Ranking 2025 report which showed that while fried chicken chains like Raising Cane's, Wingstop, Chick-fil-A, Zaxby's, Bojangles, and Popeyes saw spending increase in 2024, KFC saw spending fall.

In fact, the . In addition, Yum! Brands' third quarter results came out in . KFC's . 

CEO David . In . The chain's . That time Gibbs stated that the .

For fried chicken chains like Raising Cane's, Popeyes, Dave's Hot Chicken, and more, business is booming and new locations are popping up all over the place. While KFC did open a new spinoff restaurant called Saucy in Orlando, Florida in December 2024, over the last year it has also seen a fair amount of locations shutter their doors.

The locations that have closed are in the United States as well as overseas. Starting domestically in . According to Restaurant Dive, EYM Chicken was only listed in KFC's franchise disclosure documents as owning 47 stores meaning that this closure affected more than half of its locations. Then . On the global side, t. The former franchisee, which was . There were also after a franchisee — Mefaco — announced that it would be halting business at all of its locations but didn't provide any explanation as to why.

There have been claims on discussion forums that the quality of the fried chicken chain's food has been declining over the years. In fact, KFC was ranked as one of the fast food chains that serve the lowest quality chicken. One customer took to to look for answers as to whether the chain had really gone downhill or it was just them. Most of the responses in the thread were fairly similar stating that it was really a roll of the dice and sometimes depended on which location you were visiting and how busy they were — apparently, the trick is the busier the restaurant the fresher the chicken. There and . 

Redditors in a titled "Why is KFC so bad these days?" shared similar sentiments complaining about the food consistently being cold, greasy, tough, and tasteless. In another discussion on regarding the chain's food quality, there were multiple customers who stated that the taste and quality of the chicken had definitely seen a change. There was even one user who called KFC a sinking ship. Another claimed that the reason the taste has changed is because, to cut costs, the company has been including a smaller amount of the famous 11 herbs and spices in the breading for the chicken. This hasn't been verified, but the customer sentiment seems to be that KFC isn't what it used to be. 

Not only is the food quality declining, but just to add salt to the proverbial wound, KFC's prices have seen a noticeable increase. While it's not uncommon for prices at fast food chains to rise, it does appear to be deterring some customers from eating at the fried chicken chain.

In March 2025, a diner from Kentucky took to Reddit after discovering that a single chicken  with the simple proclamation "we are doomed." There were some customers in the thread who attributed the high price to inflation while others stated that it was corporate greed. A different in the thread broke down the cost explaining that on Grubhub for delivery in NYC it was $4.19, pickup was $3.49, and delivery to their mom's address in Maryland was $2.69, adding that the markup is crazy. Another discussion broke down and complained about the high price tag menu items as well. One example was that a f — which is eye popping to say the least. A .

A number of companies have been instituting shrinkflation — reducing the size or quantity of an item without decreasing the price — in order to preserve their margins with the rise of labor and transportation costs, The Food Institute reported. Based on recent complaints from diners, it appears that KFC may be one of the companies participating in the practice.

A diner on stated that they noticed the chain is cutting chicken that used to be offered as one piece, like thighs, in half to count as two pieces of chicken. One redditor even claimed, "I've had KFC a few weeks ago and none of the pieces were from the thigh or breast. I had a bunch of spine and back pieces that were really just battered bones and some weird joints...it was inedible." In a different a customer posted a drumstick they paid $4.19 for that had virtually no meat on it; commenters' were appalled and disgusted but not surprised. There were claims in that KFC buys the smaller chickens on purpose because the company buys chicken by the pound but sells it by the piece. An article from Retail Wire explained that customers in Australia and Singapore have also had issues with the size of the chain's chicken and sides. KFC has been getting trickier with the wording of its menu items, Daily Dot pointed out that some of the family meals advertise that they come with large sides while others list that they come with individual sides. So, diners need to pay extra close attention or risk being severely disappointed by what they receive.

KFC has made a lot of leadership changes over the past few years with a fair amount of them occurring in 2025 alone. Occasional leadership changes are not uncommon, however, these shuffling of executives could be the company evoking change to see if it shifts the company's declining success.

It started off the year by . Mezvinsky actually . In — who previously served as Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Development Officer for KFC U.S. — to the president of KFC U.S. effective as of April 1. Before that, in . Earlier in 2024,  In  — obviously now replaced by Tan-Gillespie.

It seems that along with the declining food quality and portion sizes, the fried chicken chain's customer service has also gone downhill. Incentivo highlights good customer service as essential in the restaurant industry because it encourages customers to come back and sets the restaurant or restaurant chain apart from its competitors.

A diner shared their experience at KFC in a and explained that not only did the restaurant they went to look abandoned but the employees were not present when speaking with them and often left long awkward pauses before responding. A in the discussion said they've experienced bad service even when visiting a rebuilt KFC and ended up waiting 50 minutes for their meal when they were told 15 minutes. There is even a called "KFC COMPLAINTS" that has over 50,000 members. In it there are countless complaints about people getting food poisoning, being given attitude by staff, not receiving orders and then being told by managers that they can't help them, being given small portion sizes, and even having managers flat out refuse to give them their order. None of this bodes well in an industry where customer service is almost as important as the food itself. 

Boycotts and protests are never a positive thing for a business to experience, especially a restaurant since it needs customers to buy its food in order to survive. There have been a few boycotts against KFC in recent years.

Most recently, in . — a site that lists companies to boycott in support of Palestine — also has KFC on its list of companies to boycott urging people not to eat or work at the restaurant because its parent company, Yum! Brands, is an investor in Israeli startups. 

When IS Gida declared bankruptcy in February 2025 after Yum! Brands terminated its franchise agreement and it had to close 283 KFC restaurants, . In in its first quarter which is 60 times more losses than it experienced the year before; the company at the time attributed some of the extreme loss that it experienced to pro-Palestinian boycott. There is even a website called that is run by PETA and urges people not to eat at the fried chicken fast food chain due to its animal welfare practices.

Besides KFC having franchisees close locations around the world, the company has also had a franchisee let go of employees. In November 2024, KBP Foods — the fried chicken chain's largest domestic franchisee — laid off 29 employees.

KBP Foods but is also — more than 830 of those locations are KFC restaurants. The employees that were let go worked on the company's corporate side and were located at its headquarters in Leawood, Kansas. A spokesperson with KBP told that the layoffs were part of a restructuring that the company is doing and amounts to less than 9% of its corporate team. The Kansas City Business Journal reported that the franchisee stated the decision to restructure was fueled by

The amount of fried chicken chains in the United States as well as around the world has increased exponentially since KFC first started. This means that the competition within the fried chicken realm has become especially fierce and, unfortunately, KFC has had a hard time keeping up.

Yum! Brands . Nation's Restaurant News also reported on data released by Placer.ai that showed that the fried chicken chain experienced a 12% decline in visits in March 2024. Meanwhile, Popeyes' visits were up almost 13% in February 2024 and Wingstop's visits increased by over 23%. Nation's Restaurant News also that revealed that competitors saw sales increase by between 5% to 20% but KFC's U.S. sales increased by just less than 2%. Restaurant Business published a story in May 2024, that showed that Popeyes was outperforming KFC with system sales up 71% over the previous five years while KFC only saw an increase of 17%. In addition, Restaurant Dive covered Circana's Definitive U.S. Restaurant Ranking 2025 report which showed that KFC dropped to fifth in QSR chicken chains consumer spending, falling behind Chick-fil-A, Popeyes, Raising Cane's, and Wingstop.

KFC has had some of the oddest menu items over the years but it has also some pretty weird advertisements. On top of marketing misses the chain has also had some unfortunate mishaps that have damaged its reputation.

In March 2025 that depicted people who worshipped gravy baptizing a boy who was then transformed into a piece of fried chicken followed by the words "believe in chicken." Most users in a were thoroughly confused by the commercial, one even compared it to a scene from a horror film. Another redditor simply stated, "Yeah this commercial was annoying, there was no payoff. It was not funny. It just felt like a massive waste of time." 

There was . Then when Someone should have double-checked the translation because that's just off-putting. Finally, in — certainly not a holiday that should be celebrated.