The Day KFC Ran Out of Chicken

In February 2018, 900 KFC outlets across the UK did the unthinkable. They closed. Not because of a lack of customers, but because they ran out of the one thing they sell: Chicken.

The "Great Chicken Crisis" wasn't a failure of farming; it was a failure of logistics architecture. KFC had just switched its distribution contract from Bidvest Logistics to DHL. What followed was a masterclass in the dangers of centralized risk and unverified transition protocols.

At the heart of the collapse was a single warehouse in Rugby. DHL attempted to manage the entire UK distribution network from one massive, automated hub. When the software "glitched" and trucks were delayed, there was no redundant infrastructure. No Plan B.

"Efficiency is often the enemy of resilience. In the pursuit of a lean supply chain, KFC removed the safety buffers that allowed for local deviations. When the center failed, the periphery died instantly."

The KFC incident highlights the Transition Risk. Organizations often assume that a new vendor's "system" is ready on Day 1. In reality, complex integrations require phased rollouts and "Shadow Operations" where the old system remains active until the new one is stress-tested under live load.

The "Rugby hub" became a bottleneck because the Inbound QC and Slot Management protocols were not calibrated for the volume of a national rollout. It was an inventory management error at an industrial scale.

Supply chain resilience requires Distributed Redundancy. It requires every warehouse node to have independent, verifiable audit protocols for receiving, picking, and dispatch. If you depend on a single warehouse management system without a manual fallback or a secondary node, you aren't optimizing—you are gambling.

Resilience is an asset. Gaps in logistics documentation aren't just inconveniences; they are existential threats to high-volume brands.