Earlier in the year, KFC announced, after a successful 38-store pilot, plans to spread “Kwench by KFC” across the U.K. and Ireland by summer. It signaled the first effort to extend the specialty beverage offshoot fully to a global market.
Unsurprisingly, though, it was part of larger ambitions. Yum! Brands shared Wednesday in its Q4 earnings Kwench was headed this year to roughly 3,000 stores. It’s a branded, layered-in concept that includes (today, at least) 11 freshly made drinks across four categories—Boba Refreshers, Krunch Shakes, Sparkling Lemonades, and Iced Coffees.
While Yum! didn’t break down locations or targets, the U.K. and Ireland rollout offers a glimpse. There, franchisees and corporate expect to invest £38 million (about $45 million translated to U.S. dollars) to add Kwench. Stores build dedicated counters and branding, while others bring on furniture and other fixtures. There are locations, like Liverpool and Rome, where Kwench shows up as a separate counter that feels almost like a nested concept within KFC.
As for guest feedback, KFC said Kwench sales more than doubled from the start of its pilot to its decision to balloon it. And north of 90 percent of users said they “loved” the new drinks. Additionally, about half noted they’d visit KFC specifically for Kwench, which include options like a Iced Tiramisu Latte and Sparkling Raspberry Lemonade.
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KFC is hardly alone in pushing forward a beverage brand to drive traffic, strengthen dayparts, and court Gen Z consumers. Taco Bell’s Live Mas Café opened 31 stores last year and McDonald’s is currently entrenched in a 500-store test to serve CosMc’s beverages inside restaurants. Chick-fil-A rebuilt one of its sites in Georgia as a “Daybright” venue dedicated to drinks.
Another year of growth to build from
In larger themes, KFC, which represents 51 percent of Yum!’s divisional operating profit, posted a 2025 that felt familiar to recent years—robust expansion globally and efforts to settle the U.S. business. The chain generated 6 percent system sales growth overall. Same-store sales in Q4 grew 3 percent against a year-ago flat result. That comprised of 3 percent comps outside the U.S. and 1 percent within it.
For the full calendar, international was up 3 percent and the U.S. down 1 percent.
KFC opened 1,132 gross new restaurants in Q4 and 2,986 across 105 countries for the year. Headed into the period, KFC had built nearly 10,000 restaurants over the first half of the decade. Today, it opens a location roughly every 3.5 hours.
To put that pace in perspective, KFC developed a little less than a third of its entire base over the past five years.
Net wise, year to date as Q4 rolled over, KFC had 3,523 U.S. restaurants (90 company and 3,433 franchised) and 30,374 international, for a total of 33,897. The U.S. started the period with 3,669 (80 company and 3,589 franchised). It built 15 and closed 161 as the U.S. brand declined by a net of 146 restaurants. The international side lifted by 2,062 with KFC building 2,971 restaurants and closing 909.
KFC’s systemwide net growth was 1,916 units (2,986 builds and 1,070 closures).
Yum! CEO Chris Turner said KFC’s largest equity estate market, the U.K., achieved 10 percent same-store sales growth in Q4 and high single-digit expansion for the year.
And it could get better as the U.K. is about to deploy Yum!’s SmartOps bundle that includes the company’s Byte point of sale, menu, and kitchen management, and was in more than 7,000 restaurants by year’s end. Digital ordering is coming to KFC Australia in 2026, too.
Yum! has a “digital ordering bundle” as well that includes web and app ordering, menu and third-party marketplace integrations, and was in nearly 18,000 restaurants. That’s helped stores deliver up to a 75 percent reduction in aggregator ordering failure rate.
Yum! said, within its proprietary SmartOps bundle, it’s had restaurants report an up to 10 percent increase in consumer satisfaction and up to an 85 percent reduction in stock-outs.
Whitespace globally
Back on KFC’s wide-ranging growth, the Middle East enjoyed high-single-digit comps in Q4 building off a 13 percent prior-year performance. And for 2026, Turner said, CEO Scott Mezvinsky, who was promoted atop KFC in January from his title as president of Taco Bell North America and International, will lean on past experience—what Turner called “the magic formula playbook at Taco Bell”—to reengineer KFC’s menu and calendar, and “continuously evolve and modernize the brand and accelerate net new unit development.”
One point will be to leverage findings from “Collider.” Yum! acquired the company in 2015 to fuel a R.E.D. (relevance, ease, distinctiveness) marketing approach through its brands. Collider, a name inspired by “Where Good Ideas Come From,” by Steven Johnson, is a think tank comprised of social scientists, marketing strategists, cultural trend forecasters, and data gurus. Essentially, Yum! searches for a competitive advantage by supplying insights to guide decision making. That coupled with local leaders at the franchise level allows a global enterprise like KFC to operate through a data-centric lens rather than a web of disconnected ideas.
One example being KFC’s Squid Games Spain collaboration that came from Collider insights. The brand was able then to expand to Europe to capitalize on relevancy. Stranger things in the U.K. was another activation.
More recently, Collider published a Food Trends Report that highlighted three shifts in guest behavior—the “me, me, me economy” (where consumers are increasingly over-indexing on customization and craveworthy food), “choice therapy” (diners are reclaiming a sense of agency through small, intentional choices, such as sauces and add-ons), and “vibe mapping” (guests emphasizing affordability that feels good and connects emotionally).
Turner said KFC in 2026 will increase the pace of its marketing windows while upgrading LTOs through partnerships. “We’ll also invest in high-confidence platforms that drive frequency and check growth,” he said, “including beverages, sauces, and tenders.”
Like Kwench, KFC has another extension of its brand expanding along these on-trend lines. “Saucy by KFC” announced three new locations in December about a year after its debut. There’s a near-term goal for the chicken tender- and beverage-centric standalone to get to 10 restaurants in Florida before branching out. Notably, a third of its customers have been under 30 years old. And sales are more than double KFC’s U.S. system average, placing Saucy among the top 15 locations in the footprint. Beyond Florida, at least 20 more are planned.
For now, though, Turner said, learnings from Saucy helped KFC develop more than 20 sauces, “creating a scalable platform that allows us to move innovation from limited-time offers to [an] always-on proposition.”
Turner added KFC will refine its tender offerings in 2026 by adjusting portion sizes and tailoring crispiness to consumer preferences. And similar to Taco Bell’s testing platform, KFC in September launched a global innovation hub where it has a centralized database of historical products and can test ideas and Collider concepts. A goal, he said, will be to “meaningfully” shorten KFC’s development cycle. Loyalty is coming to more markets as well.
“The team will pair its higher innovation cadence with profitable low-price point products,” Turner explained, “compelling individual value offers, and expanded daily menus designed to drive traffic while protecting margins long term.”
Regarding growth, if not for Turkey closures in Q1, CFO Ranjith Roy said, KFC would have set a net new unit record in 2025. Many of the brand’s franchisees create development plans more than a year in advance, he added. So, the performance last year came on top of a challenged same-store sales landscape in 2024—a “testament to the global appeal of the KFC brand, its attractive restaurant paybacks, and our advantaged franchise system,” he said.
There’s been some movement along such fronts. On January 1, Devyani and Sapphire—two of KFC’s publicly traded partners—announced intention to merge and create one of India’s largest F&B companies. Similarly, the Carlyle Group, which acquired KFC Japan in 2024, has doubled down to buy KFC Korea. The pace of net new unit development in Asia increased by nearly 70 percent last year.
There’s additional whitespace, Roy said. Thailand has about 24 KFCs per million consuming class population. India has just five. Brazil, closer to two.
Korea, a market KFC has worked closely to transform in recent years, had five and six net new units in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Last year, it jumped to 39.
Italy was posting low double-digits (12 in 2023). Yum! brought in a new partner and its done 35 and 35 over the last two calendars.
Japan, not too long ago in the mid-30s, had 69 in 2025.
“It starts with reaching the consumer and driving AUV growth. The second piece of that is leveraging our scale to help our franchisees continue to improve margins. So we have focused goals on how over the next few years do we systematically improve paybacks. As we do that, we will unlock white space in those markets,” Turner said.
