The Chinese food delivery business is worth 85.7 billion dollars a year. And when it rains, KFC China’s orders can spike 10% resulting in backlogs and delivery delays. With every KFC outlet straining during periods of bad weather, KFC wanted to reduce the pressure on its staff while maintaining its sales growth.

But how to solve the chaotic in-store experience brought on by rain? How to transform KFC’s business operations and eCommerce engine to be ready for an additional 60,000 delivery orders per hour on rainy days?

Introducing KFC’s The God of Rain delivery menu, available in the KFC APP only when it rains. KFC optimized their combo menu on the APP to show their rainy day offerings while integrating marketing technology that reacts to real-time weather and location data, and links itself to a world-famous celebrity.

In market obsessed with mobile, saturated by new apps coming out every day, the ability to breakthrough to the hardest to reach audience will be a key. KFC China embraced the latest technology to keep up with the evolving digital expectations of its customers and solve their pain point as well as a supply issue due to backlogs and delivery delays on rainy days.

The weather responsive campaign is empowered by frictionless payment and an innovative combination of real-time weather API, coupled with targeted meal offers and a very clever sponsorship link, through which KFC turns a negative into a positive for its customers, cutting down on wait times and guaranteeing cheaper prices.

It is more than just a one-off but an effective long-term strategy for dealing with backlogs, engaging consumers and cementing KFC in China’s food delivery business, which is worth an estimated ¥579bn ($89.4bn) per year.

KFC replaced its à la carte menus with simplified discount meal combos named ‘The God of Rain’ which it promoted via KFC’s mobile ordering app and rolled out across 6,000 stores in China.

Whenever it rained, real-time weather and location data automatically triggered the KFC app to unlock the The God of Rain menu as KFC kitchen employees in that locality stood by to pack and deliver thousands of meals on-time, reducing delays and alleviating pressure on the restaurant chain’s delivery and instore staff. Because we bundled KFC favorites, customers could choose quickly and check out in under 5 seconds.

To promote the campaign, KFC partnered with Chinese rock star Jam Hsiao who is jokingly nicknamed ‘The God of Rain’ because it rained at 83% of his concert when he toured around the world! When it rained, marketing technology automatically pushed content from Jam Hsiao about the rainy day menu.

With The God of Rain menu, KFC transformed their multi-billion dollar menu to be responsive to something as unpredictable as the weather, and transformed how restaurants operate for maximum eCommerce transactions. Without any process change or hiring extra labor, KFC streamlined kitchen operations at scale.

It also eliminates wait times for its customers and ingrains the habit of ‘having KFC when it rains’ by associating itself with the weather.

And for the first time ever, KFC could prepare meals 25% faster and deliver them in 30 minutes or less! In the first few weeks after the KFC Rainy Day Menu was launched:

200,000 ORDERS ON A PEAK DAY

4% INCREASE IN RAINY DAY ORDERS

8% INCREASE IN AVERAGE SPEND PER ORDER

*Data source: Yum China.