Boston Market Joins Latest Round of KFC and El Pollo Loco Chicken Fight

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KFC did its third grilled chicken giveaway on Monday. It was more successful than the first round — stores didn’t run out of supplies like they did in May, when a partnership with Oprah Winfrey wound up generating so much publicity that KFC couldn’t keep up and had to issue rain checks.

But once again, El Pollo Loco was ready to use the KFC promotion for its own gain. The smaller chicken chain launched a competing free-chicken offer on the same day, plus a chance to win free chicken for a year on Facebook. El Pollo Loco, which has always focused on grilled chicken, waited years for KFC to roll out its own competing product, and when it finally did, El Pollo Loco was quick to jump into the ring and get as much publicity as possible through creative attacks on its bigger, more well-known rival.

Boston Market also decided to tag along, though it sold chicken for a dollar rather than giving it away for free — and its promotion will last the entire week. “We thought people might still be hungry if all they got was one piece of chicken,” CEO Lane Cardwell said.

Tags: KFC Corp., El Pollo Loco, Business Structures, Food & Beverage, Finance, Manufacturing, Katherine Glover

Katherine Glover is a Minneapolis-based print, radio and online journalist. She's written for Salon.com, Sierra Magazine and many others, and she does a weekly blog on immigration issues for MinnPost.

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