Minnie Pearl’s
Grand Ole Opry legend Minnie Pearl affixed her name to this fried chicken chain, which was launched by Nashville attorney John Jay Hooker in 1966.
The company went public in 1968, and over the course of the next few years more than 500 locations opened and thousands more were franchised out, although a lot of those franchises never saw the light of day.
While rival KFC grew organically and focused on quality and consistency, so many outposts of Minnie Pearl’s opened that no two chicken recipes were the same, and people simply stopped going.
Investors sued the company after they were forced to redo their 1968 taxes to show a loss of more than $1 million, and the company shut down shortly thereafter.
