Editor’s note: Restaurant Business Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Maze is in Singapore this week for FSTEC Asia and is providing some regular observations from the country.
We travel a lot for work and are typically ready for much of what we see when we visit a new city or country. But we have to admit we were not ready for Kenny Rogers Roasters on Monday morning.
We were in a mall, looking for coffee, when we happened upon a not-yet-open location of a chain we honestly thought was gone. Alas, it is not. Kenny Rogers Roasters may be defunct in the U.S. But it is alive and well in Asia.
We should not have been surprised. One of the first lessons we learned since we started covering restaurants nearly two decades ago was just how hard it is to kill restaurant brands. Once a brand establishes itself, it has some value, even if the business model is flawed or the parent company struggles. It takes a lot to kill a restaurant chain. Just ask Boston Market.
Someone usually steps forward to buy the company and keep it going. Even when it does die, someone might buy the brand name and resurrect it again, which is happening right now with Sweet Tomatoes and Steak & Ale.
In a franchise brand, franchisees can step up and buy the brand because they have bills to pay. In the early 1990s, for instance, Hardee’s bought Roy Rogers and then set about converting them to Hardee’s. Roy Rogers operators eventually bought the brand and it continues to operate today. Even Burgerim has a few open stores run by franchisees who just make it work on their own.
The same works for international, apparently.
Kenny Rogers Roasters was created in the early 1990s, the latest in a weird string of country music personalities creating typically chicken- focused restaurant chains (anybody remember Minnie Pearl’s Chicken?). John Y. Brown, a former governor of Kentucky who helped build KFC, partnered with Rogers to create a chain of rotisserie chicken restaurants.
The first location opened in Florida in 1991 and the chain grew to more than 400 locations in the 1990s. But the brand also faced controversies and challenges from the get-go. It was sued by a Miami-based brand, Cluckers Wood Roasted Chicken. And then Boston Market grew rapidly.
The chain filed for bankruptcy by 1998. Rogers himself sought to cut ties with the brand that year. The chain was then sold to Nathan’s Famous in 1998 in a deal estimated to be worth $4 million. Nathan’s had a habit at the time of buying dying brands and later bought the rights to Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips.
(Maybe the world just wasn’t ready for rotisserie chicken, as Boston Market filed for bankruptcy that year, too.)
Kenny Rogers Roasters didn’t quite thrive under Nathan’s ownership and a decade later the brand was sold to a Malaysian company that owned the international master franchise rights, Berjaya Corp.
Berjaya operates a few western brands, among other things, including Starbucks, Krispy Kreme and Paris Baguette.
The last U.S. Kenny Rogers Roasters, in a food court in a mall in Ontario, California, shut its doors in 2011.
Meanwhile, Berjaya has been growing the brand globally. The chain has more than 200 locations throughout Asia, including several in Singapore.
While the late Rogers himself asked out of the brand, he apparently had a deal with Berjaya to keep using his name.
There have been reports in the past that Berjaya wants to sell the brand. And there have also been reports that the concept could one day make a return to U.S. soil. None of that has happened yet. But Kenny Rogers Roasters is still going.
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