Joey Wat is the CEO of Yum China, the Chinese wing of the American corporation that owns beloved fast-food brands like KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. She’s a bit of a creep. Like a total perv, she’ll go to when her company’s restaurants and spend hours watching customers eat. But it’s for a good reason — it’s how she comes up with ideas on how to better serve them.
Wat was in New York last week speaking at the 2024 Fortune Global Forum talking about how she runs the Chinese side of some of the biggest fast food brands in the world. The CEO first boasted that KFC China is single-handedly responsible for killing 1 billion chickens a year, a number so outrageous that her own son calls her “chicken killer.”
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She didn’t specify if this was an affectionate nickname or one born of disdain and disgust, and I kind of like that she didn’t. It provides her home life with an air of mystery. That number is especially wild considering that in a country of 1.4 billion people that consumes 8 billion chickens a year, KFC China alone is responsible for nearly 13% of the country’s dead chickens.
Anyway, I got sidetracked by the chicken genocide part of her discussion. Back to her creepy observation of customers as they eat. The CEO says she will personally visit KFCs and just sit there for “two, three hours” watching customers eat, all the while note-taking and ideating. Wat explained the process, as creepy as it may seem, helps her generate ideas on how to better serve her customers. She’s even been able to come up with menu items based on her observations of customers’ eating habits.
Wat noticed that Gen Z customers would dip their fried chicken into the mashed potatoes and then dip that into the gravy and then take a big honking bite. This led her to develop what she called the “mash potato burger.”
I tried to find evidence of this “mash potato burger” but couldn’t find anything. So for now I can only assume that it’s a fried boneless chicken sandwich with mashed potatoes slopped in there somehow.
She goes on to say that the best-selling pizza in Pizza Hut China right now is a durian pizza with cheese. Durian is the notoriously pungent South Asian fruit that is spiky on the outside and filled with a runny, extremely stinky goop inside. She says Pizza Hut China sold 30 million durian pizzas last year. As someone who has eaten durian before, I can officially say that China has lost its goddamn mind and Wat must be stopped.
