ANY QUOTES MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
The government has been urged to take urgent action to help the so-called lost generation as figures reveal as many as one in four young people are classified as NEET, Not in Education, Employment or Training but now Colonel Sanders is trying to help out with KFC providing thousands of apprenticeships and planning on creating thousands more jobs. Martin Shuker is their Chief Executive and is with me now, a very good morning to you. Tell me about these jobs, much needed of course, and particularly apprenticeships. People are going to say what kind of training are you going to give these young people.

MARTIN SHUKER:
Well we are a big business, we are 24,000 people working at KFC but one of the great things we are lucky enough to be able to do is as you say to provide new jobs and apprenticeships. So in growth terms we are actually growing about 1600 new jobs a year and we are delighted that apprenticeships are really having such an effect. We’re finding that our teams that are going through the apprenticeships are really in personal growth, they are really growing in confidence. It is the equivalent to an A Level in Maths and English and it is giving them a lot of confidence.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
But it’s not just flipping burgers or chicken breasts, you are teaching proper transferable lifetime skills here.

MARTIN SHUKER:
I think a way to think about the type of people we have working at KFC is to think about their jobs, so an average restaurant manager at KFC is responsible for about a million pound business, responsible for about 30 people in their restaurant and over 60% of restaurant managers started life as a team member and so the possibility to actually build a career from what is an entry level job as a team member is great.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
So if you go in and start mopping down tables how quickly can you be managing that restaurant?

MARTIN SHUKER:
We can get someone who comes in as a team member to quality as a team leader within about six to seven weeks and they have then the responsibility for the running of a shift in that restaurant from which they can then grow to become a restaurant manager. We have 800 restaurant managers and these are big careers.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
It’s interesting what’s been happening to the company during the course of the economic difficulties, recession and then bumping along in whatever phase we’re in now, you’ve been expanding quite aggressively.

MARTIN SHUKER:
Well the nice thing about KFC actually is we have had the chance to be in continuous growth actually for a very long time. We have just recorded our 22nd quarter of same store sales growth so this is not a recent phenomenon, it is about long term consistent growth. The nice thing is with all the bad news on the high street, here is a business and a brand that is in good consistent growth.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
But you must be seeing families who perhaps went to sit down restaurants for a night out, they are trading down are they as well?

MARTIN SHUKER:
Well I think with these difficult economic times people are definitely evaluating lots of different options so yes, we’ve had some people who have come back to KFC and our job clearly is to delight and surprise them with how good KFC is so with things like … we are very proud of our food, we deliver chicken fresh to our restaurants, all our chicken on the bone is hand prepared, fresh hand prepared chicken.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Just on that, is it battery chicken? How concerned are you about how they are bred, how they’re kept, how they are slaughtered?

MARTIN SHUKER:
All of our chicken is prepared to the highest welfare standards right throughout the UK so as a leading brand you’d expect us to be very clear on animal welfare, so that’s important. What’s great about KFC is really the taste, our core product is great but what we’ve been able to do is actually innovate our menu and we are now selling a braiser chicken which is actually the first chicken product we are cooking from an oven so it is griddled in an oven.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
So an admission that it was too high fat in the past?

MARTIN SHUKER:
No, it’s not that. What we need to do is give our consumer choice, so on our core product, this year for example we changed from cooking our chicken in palm oil to rapeseed oil and that is a 25% reduction in saturated fats. We have been reducing salt on our menu for about six years so the core range that we do at KFC is …

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
So what does that do, I mean your biggest seller is the chicken fillet isn’t it, what does that do in terms of calories, in terms of a reduction?

MARTIN SHUKER:
If I said to you that a chicken fillet burger for example is 430 calories, a braiser product is …

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
430 now it is cooked in rapeseed oil, what was it before?

MARTIN SHUKER:
Top of my head I can’t remember but …

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Okay, but do you think you have had some contribution in the past to Britain’s obesity problem?

MARTIN SHUKER:
I think what we at KFC have been doing is actually being progressive and being ahead for a long period of time. As I said, we stopped salting our fries at KFC six years ago, before everything to with responsibility deal and we are posting our nutritional values on our menu boards next month, we made the change to rapeseed oil so we have had lots of good progressive things happening.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
But if people start saying look, I don’t like the taste any more then presumably you’ll stick the salt back in again, that’s what leads you as a company not the fact that people may be putting on weight.

MARTIN SHUKER:
We have to be very mindful about taste and salt so what we’ve been doing is progressively reducing the amount of salt every year for six years so as people’s tastes change our product is changing to suit those tastes. There was one brand recently which had a very big reduction in salt and they lost their core customers because you lost that taste but we have an important role to continuously improve our menu, make our offering as broad and as appealing as we can and help inform consumers about choice.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
But a lot of health experts say look, the government has to get really tough on this issue, there is an obesity crisis in this country, the strains it is causing upon the NHS alone are too big to manage and that company’s like your own need to have really punitive action in terms of a fat tax to change people’s habits.

MARTIN SHUKER:
Well I think if … it is important to understand that the average customer at KFC is visiting about once every four weeks so you can afford to have a KFC as part of a healthy balanced diet. So I think the frequency is important but what we are doing is making our menu visible and very clear to consumers so that they can actually see nutritional values posted on the menu board and can make an informed choice. You can look at the vast majority of products on our menu and if you have an occasional treat it will probably still be less than half your guideline daily allowance for the day so you can eat KFC as part of a balanced diet.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Anna, you go twice a week, a good advert for it, Mr Shuker thank you very much for your time.

MARTIN SHUKER:
Thank you very much.