This is a transcript of Restaurant Rewind, a weekly podcast about industry history with Editor-at-Large Peter Romeo. To listen to the podcast, click here.
Not so long ago, the battle that eclipsed all others in the chain restaurant business was what everyone knew as the Burger Wars, a tilted competition between McDonald’s and a slew of concepts looking to catch it. The roster of challengers started with Burger King and ran to such concepts at the time as Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, Jack in the Box, Dairy Queen and Sonic.
Burger King was the only brand to come close, drawing at one point to within $100,000 of Big Mac’s average unit sales. But it never opened as many stores, and the challenge faded as McD’s used its fortunes wisely to fuel sales growth.
Now that pack of contenders has thinned considerably. Indeed, the whole battle looks like a squirt-gun fight compared with the bare-knuckled brawl that’s underway in the fast-food chicken business.
Chick-fil-A has assumed the sort of head-and-shoulders lead that McDonald’s had and still enjoys in the burger market, with average unit volumes that, astoundingly, surpass what many bar-equipped full-service brands generate.
The other chicken aspirants include fast-risers like Wingstop, Zaxby’s and, most noticeably, Popeyes, which appears to be eclipsing KFC in systemwide sales.
It’s a shame one of the most colorful figures ever to enchant the restaurant business is not alive to see it. If Al Copeland did nothing more than create Popeyes, he’d be in the industry’s hall of fame. But he did vastly more to garner recognition—and prompt a lot of head-shaking, all in his short 64 years.
What’s forgotten today is that Copeland simultaneously ran Popeyes’ main competitor, the Church’s Chicken chain, now known as Church’s Texas Chicken. Copeland wanted so badly to have both brands in his coop that he grossly overpaid for Church's, burying himself in a $400 million debt that was to be his downfall. He bought the rival chain in 1989, when Popeyes was still merely a popular regional brand, for $330 million, a staggering valuation at the time for a 2,000-unit franchised chain.
On paper, the deal was an investment banker’s nightmare. The two brands were head-to-head competitors. Both were heavily franchised, and their markets overlapped to a stunning degree.
But ego played into Copeland’s move as much as economics. And, as we’ll see, Copeland’s ego could be larger than his home state of Louisiana.
Copeland bought Church’s from billionaire investor George Bamberger with the same ardor a rich classic-car collector shows in chasing the one omission in his collection. Once he bought it, the question was, what to do with it? The acquisition was clearly redundant to Popeyes.
Church’s was more value-driven, and couldn’t match the array of unique sides that Popeyes boasted, like dirty rice and red beans and rice. But both bragged about the flavor wallop they delivered.
Popeyes delivered a Cajun kick through the peppery breading Copeland had developed and guarded more carefully than Coke protects its secret recipe. Church’s point of distinction, in addition to a lower price, was a prep process that instilled the juiciness of its chicken all the way through the meat, so every bite delivered the flavor.
Operators from both brands were ready to pluck Copeland alive, saying they were now competing with themselves. Meanwhile, Copeland struggled to pay off his debt. He would eventually file Chapter 11, and Church’s and Popeyes became the property of a company called AFC Enterprises, or America’s Favorite Chicken.
To appease the irate franchisees, AFC structured itself in a way that bordered on the bizarre, as I can attest. The brands were housed in the same Atlanta headquarters, but on different floors. Employees of one brand were banned from visiting the office space for the other, and the rule was diligently enforced. During a visit, I saw the elevator doors open and a Church’s executive being instructed to wait for the next car because this one was going to Popeyes’ floor.
Each brand also had its own R&D lab and, if I recall correctly, its own training and support operations.
By then, Copeland had been in effect banished from both brands. But he continued to make considerable money from Popeyes because he owned the rights to its signature spice blend.
While he may have stepped out of the fast-food chicken business, he was still making headlines. For one thing, he had started a casual-dining chain called Copeland’s. Like Popeyes, it was drawing attention by daring to forego the blander fare that established competitors were serving up to Middle America. Among its driving forces was Tim Gannon, who’d go on to help found Outback Steakhouse.
He also dabbled in other concepts, including one called Straya that sported one of the strangest designs and menus I’ve ever encountered. The ambience was a cross between Las Vegas cheesiness and the mysterious mien of a New Orleans fortune teller. The servers dressed from head to toe in white.
Copeland described the menu as California Creole, a subcategory that strangely never caught on.
The design was so outrageous that it was sharply criticized by one of Copeland’s famous neighbors, Anne Rice, author of the mega-popular “Interview with the Vampire” books.
When Straya opened, Rice took out a full-page ad in the local newspaper, blasting Copeland for giving stately St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans’ Garden District an eyesore that was worse than the seediest flophouse. She described the place as an “abomination.” Never mind that Rice’s house looked like a second home of the Addams family.
Copeland responded in kind, saying the restaurant was the nicest place on the street. It was as if he was calling Rice a crazy.
The skirmish would escalate into a longstanding and highly visible war of words between the two famous residents of greater New Orleans.
One of the key flashpoints, a point of friction that made national news, was Copeland’s delight in decorating the exterior of his home at Christmas. He used enough lights to make the house virtually visible in space. Neighbors like Rice complained that they needed sunglasses to walk the neighborhood, and they groused about the crowds that were drawn to take a look at the over-the-top array.
Copeland ate it all up, and refused to back down. Indeed, he was never one to shy away from putting up his dukes, quite literally.
In 2001, he was dining in the Morton’s steakhouse in New Orleans when he encountered a local businessman named Robert Guidry, who’d succeeded eight years earlier in getting the city’s first casino license. Copeland had bid for the permit but had lost out. Afterward, Guidry had testified that he’d prevailed because he’d bribed then-Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, who would subsequently go to jail.
On that day in Morton’s, eight years after the scandal, Guidry and Copeland had words, and the argument escalated into fisticuffs, with Guidry’s sons and Copeland’s pregnant wife joining in. Both Copeland and his missus ended up in the hospital.
Copeland was, to put it kindly, a showman, and not just at Christmas time. He was a fixture at the National Restaurant Association’s annual convention in Chicago, usually wearing an all-white outfit that extended even to his shoes. The Popeyes booth featured his racing boat, and throngs lined up for a sample of its chicken.
His personal life was also far from a picket-fence existence. He had nine children—by four different women, all of whom he married.
He’d purchased his first restaurant at age 18, a doughnut shop, after dropping out of high school two years earlier.
Copeland was also in sync with the mysticism of New Orleans. Shortly before his death from an unusual form of cancer, he swore he had a vision while in a dream-like state of a woman coming to him with some sort of message or warning.
At Copeland’s funeral, Copeland’s son Al Junior swore that the woman made an appearance. He also told me that he could feel his father’s presence.
That’s not so far-fetched. If there was a way to stir up something out of the ordinary, Al Copeland would be all for it.
I’m Peter Romeo. Thanks for listening to this episode of Restaurant Rewind. We’ll be back next week with more time travel into the restaurant industry’s past.