Kiwi design just what the colonel ordered for KFC

Anne Fuller, from Yum! Restaurants International, and Rod de Vries, KFC general manager, at the new-look Mangere store. Picture / Paul Estcourt

The radical redesign of a KFC store here has so impressed the brand's international owner that it will be adopted worldwide.

The senior management of Yum! Restaurants International decided this week that the New Zealand design for a store in Hamilton would be used as a prototype for all KFC drive-through stores.

Yum! Restaurants is the largest division of the world's biggest restaurant company, Yum! Brands, which owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The decision has been made even though the trial of the new look at Frankton, and at a KFC outlet in Mangere East, has not yet finished.

"It is one of the freshest designs for a quick-service restaurant that I have seen," said Yum! Restaurants design director Anne Fuller, who arrived in New Zealand yesterday.

"We have already determined that this design is so successful it will be one of our leading recommendations."

The design was drawn up by Mortlock, McElroy & Associates' Bill Mortlock for New Zealand's KFC franchise-holder, Restaurant Brands.

KFC builds more than 1000 new restaurants a year, but because franchise-holders' individual contracts determine how often they are required to update the look of existing outlets, it was too early to say how soon the Kiwi design could go global.