Yum! Brands’ Road to 100,000 Restaurants Starts With People
As the Taco Bell owner grows faster than it ever has, efforts to recruit, retain, and develop talent are heating up as well.
Originally published by QSR on qsrmagazine.com
By Danny Klein
It’s not hyperbole to say no restaurant group on record has grown as fast as Yum! Brands is currently. The Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Habit Burger owner opened roughly 8,700 locations in the past two years. That calculates to a store every two hours, across the globe, for 24 straight months, or 730 days. In fiscal 2022—its 25th as a public company—Yum! opened 4,560 gross new units, which topped a previous high mark it set a year earlier at 4,180.
As of the end of 2022, the company committed about $50 million to help fund more than 30 social impact programs in 11 countries.
Every employee is required to certify Yum!’s “Global Code of Conduct” as part of annual compliance training, which also covers anti-discrimination and harassment. Yum! tapped an independent, third-party-operated ethics hotline and online portal, known as The Speak Up Helpline, for employees to reach 24/7. It’s translated across nine different languages.
In recent years, however, this wider movement to foster culture and talent at Yum! has been characterized by newly refined values, and an “EIB [equity, inclusion and belonging] mindset,” the company said.
Yum! struck several cross-sector partnerships, like Hispanic Promise, which is a national pledge to hire, promote, retain, and celebrate Hispanics in the workplaces; and the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusions. As a member of OneTen Coalition, Yum! teams with other U.S. businesses to create career mobility and advancement opportunities for a million Black/African-America individuals over 10 years. In 2022, Yum! was among the organization’s highest-performing partners in terms of the number of new hires and promotions at its equity-owned restaurants and corporate offices, the company said.
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