Thailand doesn't need a chicken shop

I saw the absence of a familiar format and assumed there was a gap. The need wasn’t missing. It was just being served in a shape I wasn’t looking for.

Thailand has fried chicken everywhere. So why doesn’t it have chicken shops?

Coming from London, that struck me recently. You don’t see the format that’s everywhere in the UK — an independent counter with a few tables, fried chicken, wings, chips and burgers, cheap and quick and familiar. Thailand should be perfect for it. Thais love fried chicken.

But that’s probably the wrong way to look at it. Thailand already has the demand, the product and the eating occasion. It just serves all three in a different form. Cheap fried chicken is everywhere — street stalls, markets, food courts, kiosks, roadside vendors — and gai tod doesn’t need a restaurant’s overhead to be accessible.

At the more standardised end, KFC is enormous here: more than 1,200 restaurants across Thailand. And it hasn’t just imported the American format and expected people to adapt to it. Rice is on the menu, so are spicy flavours and Thai-style dishes, and McDonald’s does the same thing, selling fried chicken with rice alongside the burgers and fries. These chains aren’t just competing with other Western fast-food brands. They’re adapting themselves to an eating culture that was already there.

That leaves the British-style chicken shop squeezed from both directions. Small vendors sell very good fried chicken cheaply and conveniently at one end. KFC provides the branded, air-conditioned, deliverable version at enormous scale, while making itself feel increasingly local, at the other. There’s very little room left in the middle.

I’d count the obvious exception before someone else does. I saw a Wingstop open in CentralWorld recently, which on the surface looks like exactly the format I’m describing as missing. But it’s a different thing. Wingstop isn’t selling cheap, everyday chicken — it’s selling a specific American flavour and brand experience that people already recognise from film and social media before they’ve eaten there, dropped into one of Bangkok’s biggest shopping malls. That’s a novelty import chasing a particular craving, not a replicable everyday format, and it may turn out to be one outlet rather than the start of a chain. KFC’s 1,200-plus restaurants are the actual test of whether a format has taken hold here. One Wingstop in a flagship mall isn’t.

The comparison looks different once I flip it round. In London, if I want something cheap, the honest answer is usually one of these chicken shops, and it’s never quite felt like a choice. Good food in London is genuinely good. It’s also not something I can eat every day without the cost adding up, so cheap ends up meaning the chicken shop end of the market by default, with a real gap between the two.

Thailand doesn’t have that gap. Street food is cheap and it’s good, most days better than any chicken shop, and eating that way daily is normal rather than a compromise for when you can’t be bothered to cook. That’s probably the part of Thailand I actually miss most once I’m back in London — not that the food is different, but that eating well and eating cheaply aren’t opposites there the way they are here.

There’s probably an economic story underneath that too, even if I can’t prove it. Running a street stall is about as low a barrier to earning a living as exists — a cart, a wok, a corner — and an enormous number of people in Thailand do exactly that. I don’t know how much of the country’s famously low unemployment actually traces back to it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a fair amount does. It might also be more climate than culture: cooking and selling food outdoors, year-round, without needing four walls or heating, is a much easier default in Bangkok than it would be in Manchester. I’m honestly not sure how much of this would transfer anywhere colder.

What interested me more, thinking about it afterwards, was the mistake in the original question. I looked at Thailand through a British category, saw the absence of a familiar format, and assumed there was a gap. There wasn’t. The need was already being served, just not in the shape I was looking for — and the companies that have actually succeeded here haven’t replicated what works somewhere else. They’ve understood the local behaviour underneath it.

That’s not really a story about fried chicken. We do the same thing with markets, products and content: look for the version of a category we already recognise, and if we can’t see it, assume nobody’s doing the job. Or we take something that worked in one market and treat localisation as swapping a few words, flavours or references, when it’s deeper than that — understanding what people are already doing, what need is already being met, and what would actually fit into behaviour that already exists.

Sometimes the opportunity isn’t in spotting what’s missing. It’s in understanding the shape the category has already taken.

That’s a small example of what I mean by editorial intelligence: questioning the frame before deciding what the market is telling you.