Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/604902
LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 12.15 41 The Chicken Picker Just of I-264 near Gardiner Lane, up Colonel Sanders Lane, down the hill from the company tennis courts, in a big gray totalitarian-dystopia-conjuring mod- chic anvil of a building, through the glossy lobby and past the all-smiles receptionist, beyond the key-card-with- high-enough-security-clearance-required doors, up an elevator, past the key-card- with-even-higher-security-clearance- required doors, down slick gray hallways embedded not with windows but plasma-screen TVs tuned to cartoon Colonel Sanderses, somewhere above or perhaps below — who knows in this maze? — the fully-stocked mock- up of a KFC restaurant where trainees learn the spices and the drive-through window opens onto a hallway facing the company gym, around the corner, through a set of metallic doors: Tis is where that luminous red and white menu at every KFC goes from dream to dish. Tis is the KFC test kitchen. Senior manager of food innovation Jenny Nixon knows this route well after 12 years with the company. Te 37-year-old, wearing black dress pants with smart silver heels and a red KFC blouse, leans forward onto a table at the front of the kitchen, smiling a this- can't-be-real-it's-so-radiant smile. A wiry spice rack towers behind her, and down past the long table: sinks and stoves and hanging knives, tongs, spoons. Don't let the word "test" throw you — the KFC test kitchen is a kitchen. Nixon, who works with two culinary- minded compatriots to carry ideas from paper to PR, came to KFC after earning a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Louisville and working as a food technologist at a food-dye company. She's since earned her MBA and moved into a managerial position. She says her job is mostly failure; KFC proposes upwards of a hundred new ideas per year, but only "a handful" make it through the months- long conceptualizing-to-cooking-to- tasting-to-retrying-to-test marketing- to-restaurant releasing-to-advertising process. "Some ideas last for fve minutes," she says. But Nixon prefers to focus on ideas that actually become food. Most recently: Nashville hot-style chicken, currently available only in a test market — Pittsburgh. Nixon sets a black plastic tub flled with three red-sauce- dripping strips, a biscuit, and a bowl of slaw in front of me, another in front of photographer Chris Witzke. She eats at KFC fve or six times a week herself. As we dig in to the yes-it's-fast-food-but- it's-hot-and-smoky-too goodness, Nixon says: "Tere are times on Saturday when the only thing I want to eat is what I had at work on Tursday, and I know I'll just have to wait for Monday." When I get busy sopping up sauce with my biscuit, Nixon, the mother of a seven-year-old boy, mentions a job perk: "My son loves it when I bring my work home." By Dylon Jones Photo by Chris Witzke Jenny Nixon, KFC, senior manager of food innovation "My son loves it when I bring my work home."