82. Kentucky Fried Chicken

The Chinese have always been proud of their gourmet cooking and food. Even after the modern entry in 1840, a lot of Chinese intellectuals, some of whom even traveled to West to study and visit, still believed that China might have fallen behind the West in all aspects of development except for cooking and food.

They saw that comparing to the traditional Western way of eating like grilling big chunks of meat, mixing uncooked vegetables into salad, or simply adding food pieces into a hamburg, etc, the Chinese way of finely prepared food and well stir-fried or broiled dishes with delicious flavors made of complex ingredients through a process of "multiplexing" food elements were way advanced.

Even the Chinese medicine and herbs have quite a role in food. Together they entertain people's appetite and condition people's health to its maximal status.

In China the flavors and styles of gourmet cooking and food can be categorized by different geographical regions. For instance, the Sichuan dishes are famous for being hot and spicy; Cantonese dim sums are mostly made of finely prepared and cooked sea food; then the Peking Duck is of northern Chinese style with special marinating and oven baking process.

By mid 1980s, however all of a sudden, the Chinese gourmet cooking and food field experienced a strong impact and competition from an American fast food chain called the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC).

Before this, China also has had quite a few restaurants with foreign like Russian or French food and flavors. But they were not powerful enough to change the Chinese food in charge situation and people sometimes went to such foreign style restaurant only for a change of flavors.

But this landing of KFC in China obviously was marching beyond the "change of flavor" line and targeting to grab big groups of Chinese customers from their traditional habits of dining and markets.

The impact and competition by KFC are from five aspects. First this "Fast Food" concept - the "ready-cooked food to go" nice idea, now made possible by modern machinery and technology, meaning many items can be prepared and served very quickly in a massive and standard process, and its profit made possible by low unit pricing but high quantity of customers served.

It would be unfair to say this "fast food" idea was totally new to China. The Chinese noodle serving, later even in the style of "convinient noodle" for example, had been sort of fast food, with noodle, soup, vegetables and sometimes meat served together.

But no one has tried hard enough to make "fast food" a unique product.

The Chinese convinient noodle, for example, can not become universal because its serving amount is so limited that to western customers it's more just like a cup of soup, hardly meeting the nuitrious needs of a meal.

But the typical KFC serving package was surely standard and sufficient to make a meal: fried chicken, salad, sweet bread and a beverage. Meanwhile, all the food and bevarges were either produced and packaged in advance or cooked instanly via modern machinary like ovens based on a standard receipe.

The "fast food" restaurant doesn't need a chef. Instead a standard receipe has been designed and tested to cater for the majority's taste with regional and cultlural preference and sensitivities also under consideration.

The service style and restaurant enviroment were quite different too. The banner like overhead manu, transparent food handling process, modern seating and other supplementary facilities like state-of-art restrooms, customer's self- serving during the meal, American culture oriented internal decoration, and lighting effects with soft background music, etc. were all very attractive and accomodative to customers in China.

On the contrary, in the traditional Chinses way, more attention were paid to the food cooking itself or environment factors were only added for special occasion for the wealthy and powerful. In general occasions, little consideration were given to innovations about envirnment factors and serving styles.

Finally, the management and marketing style of such fast food restaurants was great eye-opener to the Chinses back in the 1980s. In the traditional Chinese way, the chain store idea was always hard to achieve. Maybe a short chain like 2 or 3 stores within a limited region was possible to manage, but a national even global chain store plan was just unimaginable.

Why? Because to manage a chain store, a traditonal family restaurant business needs being elevated to a modern corporation with franchizing arrangments. The Chinese hadn't given much thoughts on nor tried that.

In addition, quality control was an issue to the Chinese way of running a restaurant. A chain store means no matter where a store is, as long as it's using the same brand name, say KFC, then it should serve the same flavor and quality of food served anywhere else by KFC. Meaning a KFC in Beijing China should serve exactly the same or very similar menu and food quality to what served by a KFC located in Washington, DC, USA.

Only a standard recipe and restaurant management process make such requirements possible. The recipe sets the criteria and the management process enables each franchized chain store to implement strickly such recipe and other standard rules of doing the business.

By the way, the corporation will handle the marketing campaign to achinece cost-effective results and wider coverage for each individual store. For example, a KFC TV commercial will be run by KFC's corporate marketing group instead of any individual KFC store.

In this way, the TV commercial will cover a big audience using a standard message of promotion or sales pitch; also each individual store only needs to pay the corporate marketing team a small porion of the total TV commercial expense.

Anyway, the Chinese have always assumed, to beat the Chinese food, others have to make diligence on the cooking skills and ingredient sources. But "fast-food" restaurants like KFC back to the 1980s totally took the Chinese by surprise through innovative management styles and serevice process, as well as the modern fast-food concept.

Lesson learnt is that there's no end for innovation even though one may preassume something like the Chinese gourmet food is already very advanced. "Being advanced" actually sometimes may become a barrier for future progress.

When taking new angles, new thinking and technology on the business, and understanding better about the market needs, something innovative and even better can always be created and introduced to the world.

Today the Chinese restaurant industry are quickly catching up through maintaining their traditonally delicious and healthy advantages, while integrating modern management and serving styles into their business.