KFC Launches Special Blend of 11 Secret Codes and Puzzles

Colonel Harlan Sanders was obsessed with fried chicken, even before he convinced a cafe owner to sell fried chicken with his special blend of 11 herbs and spices. Enough so, that KFC’s newest commercial is a 75 second homage to the obsession that gave birth to the Kentucky Fried Chicken brand.

With this focus on obsession front and center, it’s no wonder the commercial snuck a QR code on Matty Matheson’s tattoed arm, kicking off a deviously challenging series of 11 secret codes and puzzles to celebrate the herbs and spices that built an empire. The first person to solve each of the puzzles? They’re rewarded with 11 months of free KFC for their efforts.

KFC gets extremely creative with their advertising. Celebrity casting for commercials is fairly standard for major brands, but starting in 2015 KFC went out of its way to surprise fans by cycling through a full roster of celebrity Colonel impersonators. Darrell Hammond was the first to take over the finger-lickin’ mantle, but was quickly supplemented by everyone from beloved comedians like Norm MacDonald and Jason Alexander to more surprising picks like Reba McEntire and RoboCop. But it’s the company’s stunt marketing that truly shines: it’s been almost a decade since the release of the free romance novella Tender Wings of Desire to celebrate Mother’s Day, but I still keep a copy on my Kindle. The company doubled down on their thirst trap branding by releasing a free dating sim that’s still available on Steam.

The commonality between Tender Wings of Desire and I Love You Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Sim? They’re highly enjoyable experiences that recognize what makes the source materials work so well, and pay homage to it. And I am happy to announce that KFC’s puzzle hunt for the overly obsessive continues that tradition with a series of challenging yet creative puzzles. So, we’re going to do this article a little different. If you’d like to give the puzzles a try yourself, go to The11Secrets.com, and see what you can uncover. Keep on reading to be spoiled on a selection of those 11 puzzles and to learn why I’m so effusive in praise for them.

Again: what follows will be absolutely riddled with spoilers.

The first puzzle challenge of the series is finding the website for submissions in the first place, and tweaking the contrast on Matty Matheson’s tattoos was quite the challenge: luckily, I was able to partially circumvent that by paying close attention to a promotional video from Loey Lane, who has covered ARGs extensively in the past and even called me out for my engagement with Nutter Butter’s long-running gonzo marketing campaign.

While the main puzzles are fairly difficult to spot on their own, a series of eleven minimalistic icons nudge puzzlers where to look for the various challenges, while further serving as reinforcement that they’re on the right track once a prospective puzzle is spotted. These clues are not listed in order of the video, but still provide both guide and framework to the experience, with file names providing additional structure to the experience. Notably, these are not just hints – for more than a few of these puzzles, the image is a necessary component to the solve.

Elementary, My Dear Watson: The Case of the Smoking Tree
One of the more straightforward puzzles of the set was nonetheless one of the more satisfying ones: for a few seconds, the camera lingers on the Colonel’s car as it drives past a particularly gnarled tree in the desert.

Take a closer look at the tree, however, and some of those branches start to look a lot like stick figures: a very particular type of stick figures known as “Dancing Men”, which was used as a cipher in a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The result: a solution that leaves you SPEECHLESS.

It’s an elegant puzzle: the icon tells you where to look (a gnarled tree) and what you need to learn about to interpret the message (Sherlock Holmes’ more encryption-based tales). And this level of care is fairly standard for the experience, although many of the finer points are only evident in retrospect.

A History Lesson in Puzzling Form: Reading Maps is Hard
Seconds later, Colonel Sanders pulls out a map, heavily annotated with a red marker. The geographically inclined might notice that the square chunk in the upper right corner is the border between Utah and Wyoming, establishing the map’s area of interest as Salt Lake City. I suppose it would even be possible to pinpoint exactly where the star on the map is located, flexing cartographic skills I’ll never have.

Luckily, the context is built into the puzzle’s iconographic clue: somewhere in Salt Lake City, there’s a starred location along 3900 S. And a bit of good old fashioned research pulls up why Sanders might be starring a location along that road: the first KFC franchise, still bearing signage of its initial Harman Cafe branding to celebrate its legacy.

Since the clue’s icon places the star over the unknown cross-street, the answer becomes an exercise of filling in the blank with STATESTREET. And while this full backstory is hinted at in the Obsession ad spot, the act of solving almost inexorably down the location’s storied history.

An Introduction to Esolangs: A Celebration of Obsession at Its Extreme
Bear with me, as there is no way this explanation won’t sound at least moderately unhinged – but that’s also why this puzzle is my favorite of the ones solved so far, and a major impetus behind this article getting written in the first place.

One of the more dramatic moments of the commercial features Colonel Sanders’ misadventures with pressure cookers, where the lid of a rickety cooker goes up in flames, completely obscuring the camera in darkness. In that moment of deepest black, a single frame highlights a series of almost-black squares that you wouldn’t even notice, if I didn’t dial up the contrast to 11 for the above screencap.

Sandwiched between a series of three tildes (“fenced code blocks” to keep the code contained) are rows upon rows of squares, with counts ranging from 2 to 39. Luckily, one of the clues provides a hint about how to interpret this: “square = chicken, Way Back”.

As ludicrous as this may sound, there is quite a bit of research into the word “chicken”, and I don’t mean that in an etymological sense. It all started with Doug Zongker from the University of Washington, who dedicated an entire published research paper to nothing but the word “chicken”, and went on to present those findings at a subsequent AAAS conference in exactly the manner one would hope. This inspired Nicholas Tollervey to create an entire coding language focused exclusively around the word chicken (although it does also rely on spaces and carriage returns to function).

And KFC in their infinite wisdom decided to hide one of their secret passphrases in Chicken code. Luckily, this isn’t something solvers have to manage by hand: WAY BACK encourages puzzlers to notice that most articles include a citation to a Wayback Machine version of a Chicken code parser. Horrifyingly enough, my first few attempts at running this code failed abysmally, triggering error messages. And I think it’s important that you see a portion of the “code” I was trying to debug.

This puzzle is borderline evil, but also embraces KFC’s message perfectly: in celebrating the Colonel’s obsession, the company is also highlighting a host of other obsessions: academics and coders who created technical odes to the chicken for their own amusement, and puzzlers willing to dedicate countless hours scouring through less than two minutes of video – often proceeding frame by frame – to learn that 396 repetitions of the word “chicken” somehow executes a chain of logical events that spits out the word CRAVE – an obsession in its own right. And yes, all of this “chicken” code was ~~~properly fenced in~~~, as any fowl wrangler worth their salt (itself one of the eleven herbs and spices) would heartily recommend.

At the time of this article, the r/ARG subreddit has publicly solved 8 of 11 puzzles hidden in the KFC advertisement. And while the three solves outlined above are my personal favorites, additional puzzles lead solvers on a journey through what.3.words locations hidden in “secret” closed captioning tracks, morse code cleverly concealed as part of the design of a major kitchen appliance, and blackout poetry mashing up a redacted copy of the Colonel’s secret recipe and a motivational quote from a newspaper article.

KFC’s puzzle adventure is more than a little reminiscent of a few past alternate reality games that also used puzzles to explore their company’s history: Levi’s ran a nationwide scavenger hunt in 2009 that explored the history of Levi Strauss through the lens of Grayson Ozias IV and his lost fortune, while Coca Cola sent puzzlers to Doc Pemberton’s journals for a similar closely guarded corporate secret in The Secret Formula. It turns out, puzzles are a great way to draw attention to the past, by creating an excuse to research all sorts of lesser known facts.

So thanks, KFC, for celebrating your founder’s obsessions, and for giving yet another online community something to obsess about.

To join the public solving effort, check out the r/ARG subreddit, whose collective solving efforts helped make this article possible. Thanks in particular to /u/just_speculating, who saved me from additional hours counting rows of chickens.

Current (Publicly Solved) Puzzle Status:

Binary: SERVEDWITHPRIDE (solution explained)
Bow: MOXIE (from a note on the fridge with X’s)
Chicken: CRAVE (see above)
DancingColonels: SPEECHLESS (see above)
EarthScript: ONTHEROAD (solution explained)
Louvers: GRIT (solution explained)
Map: STATESTREET (see above)
MorseCode: ZEAL (solution explained)
Redacted: ONEHASTOREMEMBERTHATEVERYFAILURECANBEASTEPPINGSTONETOSOMETHINGBETTER (no seriously, that’s the answer – solution explained)
Spark: EXPLOSIVEFLAVOR (solution explained)
Spices: STILLSECRET (solution explained)

Updated 7/23 to add: the solution to “Spark” has been to the final list
Updated 7/24 to add: “Bow” and “Spices” have been solved, completing the set.