In 2013, at the height of the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Gaza, hundreds of tunnels gave the Gaza Strip a break, connecting it underground to Sinai. Everything was smuggled in there: from food and tobacco to weapons, building materials, livestock and cars (yes, cars). A young Gazan man then came up with the idea of putting Yamama (“dove” in Arabic), a kind of predecessor to Glovo, in a physical version to bring Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) from the nearest accessible location. .. in Egypt.
When I had about 30 orders together, a courier would get the chicken fresh out of the fryer, take a cab 50 kilometers, go underground across the border, catch another cab and deliver it. An acquaintance told me that four hours later the fries were overcooked and the chicken was cold, but the feeling of freedom was priceless. A cube with 12 pieces was worth about 120 shekels, or 30 euros at current exchange rates. Now that tunnels are scarce, at the end of the day some orders are brought in by the 18,000 Gazans with work permits in Israel.
The anecdote explains the popularity of KFC in Palestine and fried chicken in general in the Arab world, where knock-off shops like the also green-and-white Cafeteria in Ramallah Stars & Bucks (sic) are rife. KFC was the first American restaurant in Syria with the opening of Bashar El Assad in 2006. It closed two years later.
The West Bank isn’t exactly synonymous with safe investments either. In addition to military checkpoints and a complex road system, Israeli soldiers sometimes raid cities with a KFC presence. However, the multinational has had nearly twenty offices there since 2011, despite attempts to boycott it due to the United States’ political, economic and military support for Israel. More recently, Popeyes has joined, with franchises in places that make more headlines in the international column than in the business supplement, like Nablus or Jenin.
In the same 2013 that KFC had already established a foothold in Ramallah and shipped its chicken from Egypt to Gaza at the price of gold, its branches in Israel had just closed in the red. Only one survived, right in an Arab town, Umm El Fahem. The multinational failed in two previous attacks on this market in the 1980s and 1990s, as did Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks.
Breaded with soy
In 2020, he embarked on a fourth attempt that solves — partially — the fried chicken mystery. And the housekeeper seems to follow the rules of Jewish cuisine, kashrut, which forbids mixing meat and dairy products. KFC had previously replaced milk powder in the dough with soy powder and also bought chickens, which were slaughtered according to Jewish rituals in order to receive the rabbinate’s certificate. At that point, “sales started to fall and the business was no longer economically viable,” franchise owner Udi Shamai told the Globes, a business newspaper in Israel. “The product was less good.” According to the market research company Euromonitor, sales rose from 4.6 million to one million.
That’s why he’s decided this time to stick with the original recipe, even if it means giving up the 40% of the population who eat kosher out. It doesn’t seem to be going badly. The company already has 15 stores and plans to open 100 before 2025 in a small market (nearly 10 million people) and complex (bureaucracy, oligopolies, cultural specificities…). The locations are not random. The conquest began near the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the country’s largest Arab city. That said, Palestinians are just as crazy about fried chicken (only those with Israeli citizenship) as Christian pilgrims and tourists.
The rest of the branches are mostly located in other Arab cities or in those populated by secular Jews, many of whom find kosher food boring. The general manager of KFC in Israel, Omer Zeidner, has made it clear that it was not an “ideological” decision, but rather that the Open Skies agreement between the EU and Israel (with the entry of low-cost airlines) more and more, more Israelis got used to the original recipe on their travels.
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