I rarely ever eat at KFC, even though fried chicken is one of my favorite foods. I just don't happen to like theirs very well, and my wife doesn't like fried chicken at all. So I eat at KFC once every few years or so.
I ordered some chicken that came with 2 not very good sides and a biscuit. I went over to the condiment area to get some honey for my biscuit. Instead of honey, there were packets labeled "Honey Sauce".
"Honey Sauce"? Really? They can charge me over $5 for two pieces of chicken with glue-like mac 'n cheese, watery cole slaw and a pasty biscuit, but they can't give me 9 grams of actual honey to go with it? 'Cause that's how much "honey sauce" there is in one of those packets. "Honey Sauce" that, according to the packet, is 7% real honey? That's 2/3 of a gram of honey, mixed with mostly corn syrup.
9 grams. Over at Dutch Gold Honey's website (they of the Honey Bears), I can buy a 60 pound pail of honey for $181, including shipping. That works out to about $.06 for the 9 grams. Six cents! At retail! How much does it cost to put 9 grams of honey in one of those fancy plastic packets? I don't know.
But how much less could 9 grams of "honey sauce" cost than the real thing? Are they saving maybe four cents or so per packet by giving us fake honey? Were KFC's going out of business because people were taking too many real honey packets? Jeeziz! They could at least hoard them behind the counter like they do at McDonald's. Of course, if you ask for ketchup at McDonald's, the kid behind the counter usually gives you like a dozen packets of it.
Maybe that was the problem. Generous employees + greedy customers="Honey Sauce".
Of course, this is the same chain that switched to artificial "mashed potatoes and gravy" to save space and labor. They did this after the Colonel sold the chain to Seagram's, but before he died. He was known to be something of a hothead, so his frustration over the mashed potatoes probably killed him. He only lived to 90. I wonder how much fried chicken the good Colonel ate?
I'm sure he never ate any "Honey Sauce". Did you know that 1 packet of "Honey Sauce" has as many calories as one of the biscuits? Really. They both weigh in at 70 calories.
Real honey has about 30 calories per 9 grams.
"Honey Sauce" indeed. Popeye's still gives you real honey packets. They also have real mashed potatoes and their fried chicken rocks! I think I'll go back to driving the extra mile.
'Cause I can't think of a less tasty manifestation of corporate greed than "Honey Sauce", fake mashed potatoes and mediocre chicken for five or six bucks.
By the way, in case anybody's wondering, the "Honey Sauce" is just as bad as the "mashed potatoes".
