KFC opened its next-generation Open House restaurant in McKinney, Texas on September 26, a 3,400-square-foot pilot designed to stress-test menu, service and design concepts before rolling them across the chain's 3,500-plus U.S. units.
The location at 8751 El Dorado Parkway operates 6 a.m. to midnight daily — an 18-hour window that includes a newly introduced breakfast daypart, a meaningful departure for a brand historically absent from the morning occasion. KFC U.S. President Catherine Tan-Gillespie called it a live learning environment. "It gives guests a reason to try us, or try us again, while giving us a real restaurant where we can learn what works for guests, our teams and the business, and scale the strongest ideas across the system," she said.
Menu and Daypart Moves
The Open House menu layers new formats onto KFC's core fried chicken platform. A "Dipped" build-your-own lineup lets guests pair tenders, sandwiches and the Twister with sauces ranging from Kentucky BBQ and Ranch to Jalapeño Ranch and Garlic Parmesan. A "Drizzled" tier applies sauce directly to chicken on the bone, tenders, wings and fries for a more indulgent finish. Beverage gets an explicit upgrade: the unit debuts lemonades, boba refreshers and Krunch shakes under KFC's global beverage strategy — drink-destination positioning that echoes what larger QSR chains have pursued as attach-rate builders.
Breakfast includes Breakfast Sandwiches, Original Recipe tenders, Hashbrown Sticks, Mini Cronuts, freshly brewed coffee and iced lattes. Dessert rounds out with Homemade Chocolate Chunk Cookies. Combined with a midnight close, the format targets daypart coverage that convenience-channel foodservice operators know well — morning commuters, lunch, afternoon snack and late-night demand all in one location.
Service Model and Design
The 52-seat interior draws on mid-century modern design — warm timber, oversized windows, flexible indoor, outdoor and breezeway seating — meant to reference the era when Colonel Sanders built the brand. Service mechanics split the difference between speed and hospitality: dual drive-thru lanes plus a dedicated mobile pick-up lane handle off-premise volume, while table service and self-order kiosks handle dine-in. The hybrid model mirrors a service architecture that c-store foodservice operators have increasingly adopted as grab-and-go and made-to-order programs expand beyond the roller grill.
The unit also includes a Celebration Booth photo experience and a Swag Bar selling KFC-branded apparel — ancillary revenue and social-media-traffic levers more common to experiential retail than traditional QSR.
What Operators Should Watch
For the convenience channel, the Open House pilot is worth tracking on two fronts. First, the breakfast push directly competes with c-store morning foodservice — dispensed beverage, breakfast sandwiches and baked goods are the same daypart battleground where c-store foodservice programs have posted consistent category growth. Second, KFC's explicit investment in beverage as a destination — boba, specialty lemonades, shakes — reflects a broader QSR trend toward beverage-led traffic that convenience operators are countering with upgraded dispensed-beverage programs and proprietary coffee.
KFC is a subsidiary of Yum! Brands (NYSE: YUM), which operates or franchises more than 30,000 KFC units across 150 countries. Whether Open House's elevated service labor and expanded menu complexity can translate to a franchise-friendly model at scale remains the unanswered question as McKinney becomes the brand's proving ground.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
