The Biggest Changes You'll See At KFC In 2025

Perhaps no major fast food chain has evolved as much as KFC. It doesn't even have the same name it once did — in the 1960s, Kentucky Fried Chicken became one of the first national quick-serve brands, presenting the novelty of arduously prepared, traditional family dinners at an affordable price within minutes. With KFC built around chicken seasoned with a blend of 11 herbs and spices that was once cooked in the somewhat shady Col. Harlan Sanders' gas station, Kentucky Fried Chicken helped establish the idea of fast food in America.

In recent years, and under the ownership and direction of PepsiCo and Yum Brands, the renamed KFC has aggressively made changes to position itself in an increasingly competitive and crowded field. While it serves some of the lowest quality chicken in fast food (by some opinions anyway), it looks as if 2025 will be one of its most active years on record. Here are all the ways KFC will be transforming itself and its menu in the months ahead.

What is now a 24,000 outlet-strong network of KFC locations started out as service stations that sold pressure-cooked fried chicken dinners to motorists stopping in Corbin and Nicholasville, Kentucky. By the 1950s, Kentucky Fried Chicken was a franchised operation, and even after Pepsi bought the chain in 1986 and launched a separate portfolio called Tricon Global Restaurants in 1997, KFC was based in its origin state, most recently maintaining its corporate headquarters in Louisville. As of 2025, there will be no more Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kentucky. Holding company Yum! Brands announced that it would move KFC's operations base to Plano, a suburb of Dallas, Texas. Those offices will serve as the new command center for both KFC and Pizza Hut, while Taco Bell and Habit Burger and Grill corporate employees will remain at its complex in Irvine, California.

As part of the move, 100 KFC-centric Yum! Brands employees will see their jobs relocated to Texas. The company will also call back to the office 90 employees who have been working indefinitely — their jobs will be re-centered in Plano over the course of 2025 and 2026.

Up until 2025 and often through franchise agreements, KFC operated restaurants in the majority of the world's nations. A total of 145 countries were home to at least one of the fried chicken restaurants, but that number just dropped to 144. In January 2025, KFC's parent company Yum! Brands disclosed that it had severed ties with IS Gida, an independent franchisee that owned and ran every KFC and Pizza Hut in the nation of Turkey. The operator didn't meet Yum! Brands benchmarks for quality, leading to a termination of the agreement. 

"Having '3C' franchisees that are capable, capitalized and committed is essential to our business, and we strive every day to provide them the necessary support and tools for success, while asking our partners to deliver high-quality experiences for our customers," Chris Turner, Yum! Brands CFO Chris Turner said in a press release. "Yum! Brands engaged with IS Gida over several months to provide assistance and resolve key issues, but IS Gida was ultimately unable to maintain compliance with our standards and adhere to fundamental provisions of our franchise agreements." 

Along with facing some legal matters associated with the contractual activity, IS Gida will shut down all 283 KFC restaurants in Turkey.

Along with moving its headquarters and closing hundreds of restaurants in one significant international market, KFC is mixing up its corporate strategy even more by installing a new boss. On February 13, 2025, KFC announced that it started to transition Catherine Tan-Gillespie, at the time the chicken chain's chief marketing officer and chief development officer, into an elevated role as President of KFC's United States operations. Tan-Gillespie will officially step into the new position on April 1, and will serve under KFC's CEO Scott Mezvinsky.

Tan-Gillespie entered the KFC C-suite in 2015 as chief marketing officer for the South Pacific before being promoted to the same job for the entire company. After a spell as president and general manager of KFC Canada, where she instituted technological improvements and advocated for more provocative advertising and consumer-facing bargain pricing, Tan-Gillespie will succeed the retiring Tarun Lal, a 30-year KFC veteran.

In the final months of 2024, KFC began looking into the future of 2025 and beyond. Citing a company-wide goal to make ordering at its locations easier, speedier, and more accurate, the chain started converting 16 KFC restaurants in Orlando, Florida, into a new restaurant concept called KFC Original. 

Aiming for an overall better KFC experience (though not exactly new in concept), dine-in customers at KFC Original in 2025 will be treated to curated playlists of ambient music along with new interior design features including original artwork. Self-ordering kiosks and easier-to-read drive-through menus are set to heighten order ease and accuracy, while the chicken may even taste a bit different. KFC Original locations are set up to cook that well-known Kentucky Fried Chicken in smaller and more frequent batches to ensure fresher, better-tasting product.

In January 2025, KFC reflected on the nascent KFC Original operation and concluded that it was successful enough to keep trying it out. In February 2025, six older KFC restaurants in the Dallas area will be thoroughly revamped to fit the KFC Original model.

Having already sold its customers on bone-in fried chicken and all manner of boneless chicken strips as a vehicle for its Original Recipe chicken, KFC finally unveiled Kentucky Fried Chicken Nuggets in 2023. Bite-sized chunks of the chicken that made the company world famous were so popular that in 2024, KFC began selling Saucy Nuggets, which took the product and covered them in the customer's preference of Korean Barbecue, Sweet and Sour, Nashville Hot, Georgia Gold, or Honey Sriracha sauces. KFC enjoyed one of its most impactful new product selling periods in its history, and in 2025 it will put a lot of faith in its sauces with a project called Saucy. 

The KFC spin-off restaurant dubbed Saucy opened in Orlando in late December 2024. Operating with minimal KFC branding, Saucy doesn't sell the full menu of its parent chain. The main entree is boneless chicken tenders, and the hook is that customers can get them doused from their choice of 11 specially-created sauces, including Thai Sweet N' Spicy, Sweet Teriyaki, Spicy Mango Chutney, Peri Peri Ranch, and Chimichurri Ranch. Diners can also combine sauces; about 4,000 flavor options are possible in this manner.

"We envision limited-edition sauces, trend-inspired sauces, and sauces created in response to changing taste buds," KFC chief new concept officer Christophe Poirier told Brand Innovators. Also selling Hawaiian-style rolls, fries, and coleslaw, more Saucy branches will open in the months ahead, KFC promises.

In 2006, KFC unveiled a proprietary creation that boasted familiar flavors associated with the chain but in a brand new package: the Famous Bowl. It proved to be a successful and enduring item for the chain, as well as one that could be presented in a seemingly endless series of variants. The original Famous Bowl consisted of mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, chicken nuggets, and shredded cheese. Other versions, including one with fries and bacon, sold well enough over the years that in 2025 KFC introduced a whole new line of Famous Bowls. Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl — crispy, french fried potatoes along with coleslaw, pickles, shredded cheese, and its Original Recipe-treated chicken nuggets slathered in KFC's sweet-and-spicy Nashville Hot Sauce. Nashville Hot Mac and Cheese Bowl subs out the fries and pickles in favor of macaroni and cheese, and it's available with or without the hot stuff. A standard Nashville Hot Famous Bowl is based on the flagship entree, with the addition of the Nashville sauce to make the dish a bit fiery.

KFC will also attempt to lure people into using its online ordering system with an app-exclusive variation. The Korean BBQ Loaded Fries Bowl utilizes Korean-style sauced fried chicken nuggets sitting atop coleslaw, fries, and pickles, and topped with cheese.

Hot honey is something you can make yourself at home, and it's been a growing food trend over the past few years. But 2025 is the year that KFC, which has long offered standard, non-spicy honey or honey-based sweet condiments for use on its biscuits and chicken products, gets on board. Locations of the chain in the United States began selling chicken doused in the signature offering of leading producer Mike's Hot Honey in February 2025. (We tried it and can attest it is finger lickin' good)

Mike's Hot Honey is procurable at KFC's via one of three combination meals. Sold at a value price point of $7, the Three-Piece Original Recipe Tenders boxed meal comes with three boneless fried chicken pieces treated with Mike's Hot Honey (along with a side and a biscuit), while the Two-Piece Fried Chicken combo, in Original Recipe or Extra Crispy versions, get the powerfully sweet but notably spicy treatment. The Fan Favorites Box celebrates the hot honey to an even larger degree, including four pieces of bone-in chicken and 12 white meat fried chicken nuggets all doused in Mike's Hot Honey. Sold with fries, biscuits, and four sauces, of which Mike's Hot Honey is available, the whole thing costs $25.

Back in 2023, KFC publicly made some big promises with regards to the ecological and environmental aspects of doing business as a multinational fast food giant. It set multiple benchmarks for itself, and the due date on those looms large. Holding itself accountable for limited waste, the chain declared that by 2025, it would have fully rolled out food packaging that was recyclable, reusable, or composable. KFC has reduced consumer packaging use and gotten rid of disposable materials wherever it could. Its Canadian outlets, and soon to be shuttered Indian restaurants, reached packaging reduction milestones before 2025 arrived.

KFC also acted upon its goals outlined in a 2023 sustainability report. The company hired an executive to oversee global sustainability issues, allowed for more use of locally grown ingredients in its stores in Kenya and France, and adopted renewable energy sources for its restaurants in the Netherlands and Ecuador.