Yum! Brands, the owner of fast-food chains Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, wants to get bigger —a lot bigger.
CEO Greg Creed tells Fortune that Yum will “easily double” the number of its restaurants in the upcoming years. It currently has 44,000 KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut restaurants in 130 countries. “We want to bring the great taste of our food to the world,” he says.
Just one year ago, Creed spun off Yum’s restaurants in China into a separate, publicly-traded franchise named Yum China. Now his recipe for growth is to dramatically expand the company’s three iconic brands in more countries. Yum opens a new KFC every eight hours somewhere around the world, he boasts, and his new goal is to open a new restaurant “at least every five hours.”
His hope is that many of the new restaurants will be Pizza Huts, which have been struggling against rival Domino’s Pizza. Creed has already committed $130 million to fix the pizza chain. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he says. One fix is making takeout orders easier and delivery faster just like the one or two clicks it takes to order something on Amazon. “What customers are really crying out for these days is what we call ‘easy’, ” says Creed. “If you’re going to order on Amazon, which is what a lot of people do, you don’t want your pizza experience not to be as good as your Amazon experience.”
Watch the video above for more of our conversation with Creed.