Why have Americans fallen out of love with KFC?

That was one question put to Scott Mezvinsky, CEO of KFC Global, on the first day of The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Conference. His top line was succinct: “Not keeping up with the consumer.”

The chain failed to match consumers’ shift toward boneless chicken, for example, and watched its market share decline.

Now it hopes a test concept called Saucy will help keep it ahead of the curve.

The sub-brand, which opened its first location in December 2024, is “our way of saying, look, how do we go all the way forward?” Mezvinsky said. “What is the most relevant product? How do we really push and challenge ourselves? If we were to start KFCs from potentially scratch, what would it look like today?”

The result so far emphasizes tenders (“tendies,” per a Saucy naming convention that also includes “sammies”), a range of sauces beyond traditional barbecue and a Gen Z-friendly pink color scheme.

“You won’t necessarily see that concept all over the world, but what you’ll see is some of the learnings that we’re taking from that concept,” Mezvinsky said of Saucy’s influence on KFC. “....You will see some pink tones in our brand.”

And there will be new sauces, of course, at a date to be announced. “The marketing team would kill me if I outrun them on when they’re going to make the news,” Mezvinsky said.

P.S.: No, the KFC in “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” wasn’t product placement, Mezvinsky said.

The biggest names in fashion and entertainment hit the green-and-white carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Monday night to celebrate the museum’s annual Met Gala in New York City, Chavie Lieber writes.

The marquee sponsors of this year’s gala and museum exhibit were Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos. In a press conference at the museum earlier in the day, Sánchez Bezos said she was “grateful to be in this room.”

“The designers we celebrate tonight are true artists,” Sánchez Bezos said. “The future of that art deserves investment.”

Protesters had called for a boycott of the event, opposing Amazon’s work with ICE, the company’s treatment of workers and Bezos’s relationship to President Trump. Hundreds of people attended one pre-gala protest called The Ball Without Billionaires, while a “Resistance Red Carpet” gathered protesters outside the main event.

Despite the backlash against Bezos, the Met “had no trouble filling seats,” Anna Wintour, chief content officer of Condé Nast and annual chair of the Met Gala, said at Monday morning’s press conference.

More: Chanel dominated, mass fashion made a showing and three other takeaways from the 2026 Met Gala. [Glossy]

Bad things sometimes happen to big brands, but your responses following Spirit Airlines’ sudden shutdown showed that awareness and even loyalty don’t evaporate overnight.

After I asked which faded names have stuck with you, I got notes rattling off the likes of Tab, Kodak, Circuit City, Sears (and its house brand Toughskins Jeans), Blockbuster and Worlds of Wonder. (Hat tip to John Dambros for reminding me about that last one, the toy company behind Teddy Ruxpin and Lazer Tag.) 

“Hypercolor deserves a comeback,” Rebecca Johnston-Gilbert added. “Every generation needs a shirt brave enough to capture mall-rat optimism, adolescent panic, and whatever secrets your armpits were trying to keep private.”

Infamous doesn’t mean forgotten, Gregory Siegelman said, noting the marks left by Enron, WorldCom and Theranos. Still fresh: “the way ‘experts’ pumped them up by going for the ‘sizzle’ rather than look to see if there was any ‘steak.’ ” (The Enron name had enough juice left in 2024 to power a sardonic merch store.)

RadioShack should return “not as a nostalgia play, but because it served a role we don’t really have anymore,” wrote Omid Amidi. “It wasn’t just a place to buy tech, it was a place to understand and fix it. In a world where everything feels more complex and opaque, that kind of usefulness could matter again. The neighborhood hardware store is a pillar of any community. Why not technology?”

And then there’s Pan Am. “You can’t actually rebuild that kind of generational equity,” David Bettenhausen wrote:

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Harley-Davidson’s new boss wants the company to sell more motorcycles that people can actually afford. [WSJ]

Fox Sports’ World Cup campaign imagines a world in which the U.S. wins the whole thing. [Ad Age] 

How ACE Hardware built an AI assistant for its store employees. [Modern Retail] 

Gap co-founder Doris Fisher, who shaped the way a generation of Americans dressed and laid the foundation for the company to become an apparel behemoth, died on Saturday at age 94. [WSJ]

A radio station in the Cincinnati area played the “WKRP in Cincinnati” theme song for six hours after acquiring the call letters for itself. [THR]