Yum! Brands

Yum! Brands is an American multinational fast-food corporation and one of the largest restaurant companies in the world by number of locations. Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, it owns and operates several of the most recognizable fast-food chains on the planet, most notably KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and The Habit Burger Grill. The company was formed on October 6, 1997, as Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc., following a spin-off from PepsiCo's fast food division. PepsiCo had built up these brands through earlier acquisitions: KFC was founded by Colonel Harland Sanders in 1952, Taco Bell by Glen Bell in 1962, and Pizza Hut by the Carney brothers in 1958. The spin-off was announced in January 1997 and initially referred to by the placeholder name Great American Restaurant Company before adopting Tricon in June 1997. In 2002, the company rebranded to Yum! Brands.

Operating primarily through a franchise model, Yum! Brands has achieved enormous global reach, with 61,000 locations across over 135 countries and territories as of 2025. KFC alone has over 14,000 outlets in 105 countries. The company has a particularly strong presence in China, where it separated its China operations in 2016 to form Yum China. Other major brand offices are located in Irvine, California (Taco Bell) and Plano, Texas (Pizza Hut). The geographic strategy leverages KFC for emerging-market exposure while using Taco Bell for U.S.-centric earnings with international growth potential.

For fiscal year 2024, Yum! Brands reported revenue of $7.547 billion, operating income of $2.403 billion, and net income of $1.486 billion. The company has a market capitalization of approximately $41.82 billion. Yum! Brands is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker YUM and is a component of the S&P 500 index. In 2020, the company acquired The Habit Restaurants, and in 2024 launched Byte by Yum!, an internal restaurant technology platform designed to strengthen the value proposition to franchisees. The company's vision is to be the defining global company that feeds the world, and its Good Growth Strategy focuses on building the world's most loved, trusted, and connected restaurant brands. [edit]