Colonel Sanders' House For Sale With A Side Of Controversy
A mansion once owned by the late Colonel Harland Sanders is up for sale and it's not making the folks at KFC happy at all.
The house in question is the Claudia Sanders Dinner House which is a house and a restaurant in Shelbyville, Kentucky. Sanders opened the restaurant in the late 50s for his wife and the restaurant's namesake, Claudia.
The restaurant serves pies and other southern dishes including fried chicken. For decades, according to the New York Post, the restaurant has been run by friends of the Sanders family. Now, they want to hang up their fry baskets and retire.
Here's the rub: some of the potential buyers wanted to take the restaurant national by franchising it. k
Hold the phone, KFC says. This country ain't big enough for two fried chicken slingin' chains under the Sanders banner.
YUM Brands, the parent company of the Nic Cage-approved chicken chain, quickly made a filing with the US Patent & Trademark Office soon after the property hit the market. The intent was to protect trademarks like “Colonel Sanders’ Original Recipe” and "It's Finger Lickin' Good!"
KFC Goes Hard When Protecting Its Brand
You can't blame KFC for protecting its brand at all costs. They know where their biscuits are buttered with artificial butter-flavored spread.
Would we expect anything less from the restaurant chain that has put as much effort into protecting its 11 herbs and spices as the Secret Service does into protecting the president? Maybe even more.
They lock the recipe away in a vault like its the Dead Sea Scrolls or the recipe for Coca-Cola (people are very protective of their recipes).
It's thought that the recipe at the Claudia Sanders Dinner House shares some DNA with the highly-guarded formula.
So, of course, they'll be ready to roll up their sleeves and throwdown in the name of protecting their brand and their chicken.
We're talking about the Colonel, here!
Back in the day, if you messed with a Kentucky colonel you'd be lucky to a face potential lawsuit and not pistols at dawn.
My, how times have changed...
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