Warning: Stacy Brown’s mouth-watering story may inspire a trip to a nearby supermarket to snap up the ingredients for the recipe that hatched this improbable business success story.
Or, for the entrepreneurially-inclined, it could prompt a bid to secure a franchise in a decade-old venture that last year generated $52 million in revenue.
The entrée that set Brown on a culinary path she’s built from a kitchen in Auburn, Alabama into an empire of 71 restaurants stretched across nine states is … chicken salad.
Yes, chicken salad.
It began with the divorce that challenged Brown to earn a living while maintaining her role as a stay-at-home mom for three children under the age of six.
The kitchen provided the answer.
“I was a Southern cook and I happened to be obsessed with chicken salad,” Brown says. “When I say that people always think I cooked it a lot. But I never made it. I only ate it.”
As a chicken salad connoisseur, Brown understood the limitations of menu options.
“It’s take it or leave it in every restaurant,” she says. “Everyone offers their own version.”
Rejecting the notion that “one size fits all,” Brown set out to create the perfect chicken salad. Plural.
Friends and neighbors thus became taste-testers of recipes that ranged from basic – chicken, celery and mayo – to the adventuresome – variations on the theme featuring jalapenos, buffalo sauce and other alternatives.
“I listened to what they said and I tweaked and tweaked and tweaked,” Brown recalls. “I knew I had the recipe when they closed their eyes and made really weird noises.”
Perfection led to the personal delivery of chicken salad from Brown’s kitchen directly to Auburn area customers.
And acclimation spread by word of mouth and a 2007-vintage advertising platform.
“The only way I could get my name out there was a car magnet,” Brown says. “Chicken salad had to be in the name for someone to absorb what I do for 30 seconds at a red light. And I’m the chick that is going to bring it to you.”
A health inspector was among those taking notice. He drew Brown’s attention to county statutes prohibiting the sale of food products to the public from an unregulated kitchen.
By that juncture, Brown had enlisted the help of Kevin Brown, a friend and computer salesmen with a business background.
“I had to make a decision about whether to go legit and open a restaurant or quit and go 9 to 5,” Brown says.
Together with Kevin – who became her husband as well as a business partner – Brown opted for legit.
The Browns sold out of 40 pounds of chicken salad on the day in early 2008 day when the first shop store. Customers the following day consumed 80 pounds.
To meet the demand, the couple soon added a second Auburn location. And another. Before long, inquiries about franchising opportunities began flooding in.
The ascent of “Chicken Salad Chick” has not been without setbacks, professional and deeply personal. An ill-advised 2011 partnership with an outside investor forced the couple to buy back a 51 percent stake in the business.
Then, in 2013, Kevin was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer.
Pushed in a different direction but no less motivated, the Browns launched the “Chicken Salad Chick Foundation” to support cancer research. Planning began for a fund-raiser featuring country star Kenny Chesney at the 87,000-seat Jordan-Hare Stadium, football home of the Auburn University Tigers.
Kevin Brown died in November, 2015, five months before the concert generated $50,000 for the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.
Stacy Brown, in his memory, is forging ahead.
“I am still here and it is my honor to fulfill his legacy by continuing the foundation and … we’re opening restaurants left and right. We’re doing it effectively and we’re doing it responsibly. We’re not leaping out to California, we’re not leaping out to New York. We’re growing organically and we’re letting each community pull us to the next one so there’s a desire and they are screaming for us before we can get there. The future is as bright as it has ever been for ‘Chicken Salad Chick.'”
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