What it’s like working as a cook for the world’s biggest fried chicken chain.
Everybody loves fried chicken. OK, not everybody, but a significant chunk of the New Zealand population does. To many of us, fried chicken is a comfort food. To others, it’s part of their ethnicity’s food culture, and to some, it is simply a tasty treat. When lots of us think about fried chicken, our minds naturally drift towards KFC; after all, the brand has become synonymous with fried chicken in the English-speaking world. It’s the world’s biggest fried chicken fast food chain, with almost 27,000 locations doing $31.3b in sales in 2021 alone.
Here in New Zealand, we have 114 KFCs spanning Kaitaia to Invercargill and everywhere in between. The sight of Colonel Sanders’ mug and the KFC bucket are easily recognisable to plenty of us, but how many people know what goes on behind that bucket? I work as a cook at KFC, so I can answer that question.
As well as working at KFC I am still in high school – with all the sports training, homework and assignments that come with it. Typically I work late nights since I’m at school during the day. When I wake up on a workday I always have a sense of despair about how long and tiring my day will be – I’m going to be out from 8:30am – 11:30pm.
Getting home so late from work means I can’t do my homework until almost midnight, forcing me to stay up well past a reasonable school-night bedtime (not that I go to bed early usually anyway, but at least it’s my choice when I’m not working). Not only does this make me extremely tired at school the next day, but I am often stressed out trying to balance paid and school work.
As a cook, stress seeps into my day when the KFC store I work at is understaffed. Frequently my workplace does not have enough people to allocate to each station – ordering, packing, sending out food and cooking. Cooking itself is split into two sections, breading (aka coating the chicken) and frying/cooking. Sometimes we’re forced to work more than one station at a time when we’re short staffed.
Working more than one role at once is really rough. Doing both cooking stations when we’re understaffed means it’s really difficult to get people’s orders out, particularly keeping the “chicken warmer” (sounds gross, and it is) stocked. Particularly when we’re understaffed and/or busy, I must cook the chicken well in advance to beat the rush. The chicken sometimes sits in the warmer for up to one-and-a-half hours depending on what piece it is.
When I’m at work, nothing great ever happens that gets me excited, although there are plenty of lows. As already mentioned, working alone in the kitchen when it’s busy is really difficult, and sometimes we even run out of chicken! But the worst thing about working at KFC is the cleanup.
Cleaning the kitchen includes scrubbing, washing and rinsing down work surfaces, filtering flour and draining the vats of oil used to deep fry the chicken. The latter is very difficult and has given me several bad oil burns. To do it best requires a helping hand, so it is especially tough when we are understaffed.
Surely at least as a teenager I would be happy to get free fried chicken? Surprisingly, the answer to that question is no. Before I started working at KFC I was excited to get an endless supply of deep fried depravity. But now I have come to think that our food is just gross. Being made with that much oil seems off-putting. Particularly since I am the one cooking the chicken, so I see the oil dripping off.
Working at KFC has put me off our food, but I still break that rule sometimes. I’d never buy KFC anymore – I do eat it at work when I’m really hungry, but that’s it. Also, I think it’s bad that it’s company policy to throw out uneaten food at the end of the day. But fortunately my co-workers, who are yet to be put off by the grease, take the spare food home instead of feeding it to the rats.
The Spinoff asked me “What’s good about working at KFC?” That’s a dumb question – there is nothing good from my experience. To get a bit philosophical on you, I think working in fast food should be a last choice for everyone. But I acknowledge that to get by financially, some people must work at places like KFC. I’ve found that a lot of fast food staff are young people, like myself, who struggle to get better jobs. I want to quit KFC, but I have to pay the bills somehow, so for the time being I’ll stay put. Many more long 8:30am to 11:30pm days of school, followed by cooking chicken, await me.
– As told to Tommy de Silva