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Mmm! Smell that? KFC sells out of fried chicken-scented sunscreen in 2 hours

KFC may be heading into the sunscreen business. After announcing this morning that it was giving 3,000 bottles of fried chicken-scented sunscreen in a special end-of-summer promotion, the chain ran out in two hours.

August 22, 2016 by S.A. Whitehead — Food Editor, Net World Media Group

The days of basking in the sun, slathered in baby oil in pursuit of something akin to fried chicken skin are long over, but if you got up early this Monday and responded right away to an offer from KFC, you could have started harkening back to those "bad ole’ days" of sizzling under the sun. Instead of baby oil, however, KFC gave its fans Extra Crispy fried chicken-scented sunscreen from KFC. 

That's right, for reasons we're not exactly sure of, the Colonel got into the sun lotion business here in the waning days of summer with a special end-of-summer, fried-chicken-scented sunscreen promotion that ran out in record time.

At 9 a.m. KFC released the news that sun gods and goddesses who were U.S. resident could go online here, complete a request form, then head to the nearest KFC to pick up one of 3,000 bottles of SPF 30 Extra Crispy sunscreen at no charge. There was a limit of one per household, but they were all gone by 11:15 a.m. according to a notation "All gone!" on the website.

Now as far as business purposes for this promotion by the chain, it's likely that some of the "lotion LTO"  had to do with KFC's June introduction of thatinfinitely bronzed actor, George Hamilton, as the "Extra Crispy Colonel." For instance, this is how the chain's chief marketing officer explained things.

"Our chicken is hand breaded and freshly prepared in our kitchens all day every day, which is why you can smell our Kentucky Fried Chicken outside of our restaurants," said Kevin Hochman, in a news release. "Our Extra Crispy Sunscreen is a fun way to leverage that delicious aroma and let our fans live the Extra Crispy lifestyle for themselves."

Extra Crispy Colonel was introduced early this summer after the chain realized that more than 50 percent of Americans didn't know KFC had two fried chicken recipes, the original recipe from the real Colonel Harland Sanders and the extra-crispy variety brought onto the market years later. But it's quite unlikely that the marketing folks at KFC expected their second promotion to go as well and as quickly as it did, since in the initial news release about the offer, even Hochman admitted that this was a product promotion that nobody was demanding, as far as he knew.

"While I'd love to tell you our customers have been asking for this, they haven't," Hochman said in the news release. "In fact, I'm pretty confident nobody ever asked for this."

About S.A. Whitehead

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Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb editor Shelly Whitehead is a former newspaper and TV reporter with an affinity for telling stories about the people and innovative thinking behind great brands.