The Bucket Has Two Bottoms

The gherkin and the bucket

Somewhere in Britain this summer, a teenager in a branded cap sliced through a mountain of pickles, and the Colonel had the best week of his life. KFC UK & Ireland sold 4.2 million gherkin slices in a single quarter, its Pickle Mania menu delivered the highest sales week the brand has ever recorded in these islands, and like-for-like sales rose by 10%. Read that back slowly, because it sits awkwardly beside a headline you’ve probably seen more than once in the last couple of years… the one telling you KFC is in decline, that the legacy fast-food giants are finished, and that we’re all drifting off to eat lovingly smashed burgers at the independent place round the corner.

Both stories are true, which is the inconvenient part. Which one you believe depends almost entirely on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be standing on, and the gap between them tells you more about where our food is heading than either does on its own. I came to this subject expecting to write a cheerful little obituary for the bucket, the sort of piece where the corporate behemoth finally gets its comeuppance and the plucky local café inherits the earth. The numbers had other ideas, and as anyone who has spent time in uniform will tell you, evidence has no interest in the story you’d prefer.

What follows is a tale of two continents watching the same film at different times. America is somewhere near the closing credits, while Europe is still in the foyer buying popcorn. And the independents, the people I write about most fondly in these pages, turn out not to be the heroes of either version.

America: when cheap stopped being cheap

Fast food in America was built on a simple contract. You gave up any expectation of romance, and in return you got something hot, predictable and cheap, handed through a window without you having to leave the car. Somewhere around 2020, that contract was quietly torn up. By McDonald’s own reckoning, its average menu prices climbed 40% between 2019 and 2024, against a rise in general consumer prices of around 21%, and industry analysts reckon menus have crept up by another few per cent this year on top of that.

The public noticed, as the public generally does when it’s being had. A 2024 LendingTree survey found that 78% of Americans had started to think of fast food as a luxury, which is a remarkable sentence to write about a product whose whole reason for existing was not being one. Once a drive-thru meal for a family costs roughly what a sit-down dinner used to, people start asking the obvious question: if I’m paying this much anyway, why am I eating it out of a cardboard box in a car park?

KFC felt that question harder than most. Its US same-store sales fell for three quarters running in 2024, sliding 5% in the third quarter even after the company rolled out $5 value meals to tempt people back. In Technomic’s ranking of America’s 500 biggest chains, 2025 was a fine year for chicken, with the category growing 5.3% against 3% for the industry as a whole, yet KFC and Popeyes were among just seven chicken brands that actually lost sales. This year hasn’t brought much relief either: KFC’s domestic system sales were down 2% in the first quarter, and footfall data from Placer.ai suggests total visits fell by 3.5% in the second.

Here’s the part that matters, though. Americans didn’t stop eating fried chicken; they just stopped eating the old fried chicken. Dave’s Hot Chicken, which started life as a pop-up in a Los Angeles car park, grew its sales by around half in 2025, ended the year among the fastest-growing chains in the country and was snapped up in a $1 billion deal by Roark Capital. Wingstop added 382 net new restaurants in twelve months. The giant wasn’t brought down by the corner café with the chalkboard menu at all… it was brought down by younger, louder, more photogenic versions of itself, selling the same bird under better lighting with a heat scale that turns lunch into a dare.

Europe: the party’s still going

Cross the Atlantic, and the mood changes entirely. In Britain, KFC isn’t wobbling; it’s on manoeuvres. Like-for-like sales across the UK and Ireland were up 9% for the year by the end of June, following solid growth right through 2025, and the company has a £1.5 billion plan to open 500 restaurants and create more than 7,000 jobs over the next decade. Its franchisees, who run the overwhelming majority of the estate, are busy buying each other’s restaurants, and the Adil Group alone will be running 135 KFCs once its latest deal goes through.

The most telling detail isn’t the chicken at all; it’s the drinks. KFC and its franchise partners have put £38 million into Kwench counters across the UK and Ireland, a speciality drinks range pitched squarely at Gen Z, and the company says Kwench sales have more than doubled since January. Add the gherkins, the Stranger Things tie-in menu, the tenders arriving with a choice of nine dipping sauces, and you start to see the trick. KFC in Britain has learned exactly what the American upstarts taught everyone else: that younger customers want novelty, theatre and something worth photographing, and it has bolted those lessons onto a machine that already has more than a thousand sites and a drive-thru on every ring road.

It isn’t only Britain, either. KFC has more than 2,200 restaurants across 40 European countries, and it’s adding more with real intent. In June, it announced around €100 million of investment in Spain and Portugal through to 2029, including 100 new Spanish restaurants, having just opened its 300th here. In Germany, a country I knew as a boy growing up in a service family, the brand has roughly a fifth of McDonald’s footprint, and one franchise operator has committed to opening between 45 and 90 new restaurants in four years to start closing that gap. Back in the UK, chicken is now the fastest-growing corner of fast food, with outlet numbers up 6.3% in the first half of 2026 while the market as a whole grew by barely 1% and pizza actually went backwards.

So the European version of the story, for now at least, is the mirror image of the American one. The legacy brand isn’t being eaten alive over here. It’s the one doing the eating.

The Americans are coming

And yet. If you’ve watched enough films, you’ll know that the moment the hero puts his feet up is usually the moment something comes through the window. The brands that hollowed out KFC’s American business have noticed that Europe still has an appetite, and they’re packing their bags. Dave’s Hot Chicken opened on Shaftesbury Avenue in late 2024 and has since signed with the Azzurri Group to build 180 restaurants across ten European countries, on top of an existing plan for 60 in the UK and Ireland. Popeyes and Wingstop are already here and growing at a pace that ought to make somebody in Louisville a little uneasy, with Lumina Intelligence forecasting British turnover growth this year of around 51% for Popeyes and 45% for Wingstop.

It’s worth pausing on what that means. Europe’s chicken boom is real enough, but KFC is no longer the only bird in the coop, and the rivals arriving are precisely the ones that beat it on home soil. Pickle Mania might be proof that KFC Europe has learned to fight like the newcomers. It might equally be proof that it’s running faster just to stay in the same place, buying attention one limited-time menu at a time while the brands Gen Z actually talks about move into the unit next door.

The honest answer is that nobody knows yet, least of all the people writing the press releases. But America has already shown us what happens when the novelty runs dry and the prices keep climbing, and nobody in Britain needs reminding that our own prices haven’t exactly been standing still.

So where are the independents?

This is the bit the comfortable version of the story gets wrong, and it’s the bit I care about most. The tidy narrative says delivery apps levelled the playing field, that the local smashed-burger joint now sits on the same phone screen as the Colonel, and that discerning diners are choosing character over corporate. Some of them are, bless them. But being on the same screen isn’t the same as being on the same footing. The giants negotiate their commission rates, spread their energy bills across hundreds of sites and swallow a bad month without blinking, while the family-run place with eleven tables pays full whack on everything and has nobody to swallow anything for it.

The figures on both sides of the Atlantic make for grim reading. UKHospitality’s modelling expected 2,076 venues to close in Britain this year, with independent single-site operators over-represented among them, closing quietly while the chain closures grab the headlines. Britain lost 305 licensed premises in the first three months of 2026 alone, which works out at roughly three and a half a day. In America, the pattern is much the same, with rents, wages and borrowing costs doing the damage and independents taking the worst of it, even when their dining rooms are full.

Even the old mid-market chains are falling through the floor. Whitbread shut every one of its 106 Beefeater restaurants in September, along with its Brewers Fayre pubs, to put restaurants inside its Premier Inns instead, at a cost of around 3,800 jobs. The squeeze isn’t simply big against small. It’s the middle being crushed between cheap-ish chicken at one end and expensive, once-in-a-while treats at the other, and the independent restaurant tends to live in exactly that middle.

So no, the independents aren’t winning the chicken wars. Most of them were never fighting in them. They’re the villages on the edge of the battlefield, and the shelling doesn’t much care who started it. That’s partly why I keep offering free write-ups to small food businesses in these pages, with no catch and no upsell. It won’t change the arithmetic, but it beats writing another obituary.

The view from the hillside

I’m writing this from a cave in rural Spain, which is about as far from a drive-thru as a man can reasonably get without a passport stamp. The nearest bucket of anything is a decent drive away, and down in the village the menú del día still does the job fast food was invented to do: a proper lunch, a couple of courses, bread and a glass of something, at a price that would make a London chicken shop blush. Spain now has 300 KFCs and another hundred on the way. I find myself wondering how that contest ends… whether the tortilla quietly holds its ground, or whether in ten years the kids round here will measure lunch in gherkins and dipping sauces.

I’d love to tie all this up with a neat bow, but it wouldn’t be honest. America has shown us the later chapters: prices that outran loyalty, a giant that stopped feeling cheap, and a new generation of brands that took its customers without ever quite earning their affection. Europe is still in the early chapters, still at the party, still selling pickles by the million. Whether we’re five years behind America, or five years ahead of a mistake we could still avoid, is the question that matters, and I don’t think anyone knows the answer yet, least of all the Colonel.

What I do know is that the little places I write about won’t survive on our good intentions. They survive on our lunches. Make of that what you will.

Until Next Time