It has been nearly three years since William Alford threw in the towel on his 40-year run at the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant at Hilltop and Cleveland Avenues in St. Joseph Township, but now it looks as if KFC may be returning to that site.
I’ve reached out to several contracting crews on site over the past week who have been working on refurbishing the building, and tried multiple routes to connect with the Alford family to see what the plans entail.
A UPS driver says contractors on site told him that after listing the building for sale since January of 2016, Alford had elected to refurbish and resurrect the KFC business there. 
Last fall, Jake Pittman essentially “decommissioned” the building by removing the readily identifiable red-and-white color scheme, repainting the building a soft gray to remove the last vestiges of the KFC brand from the site on behalf of Alford’s team which at that time still owned KFC restaurants in multiple markets including in Niles and Benton Harbor. The Niles property has since changed hands, and there are conflicting reports over whether it is Alford or a much larger franchisee who has taken the property over in St. Joe with plans to return KFC to the market.
Alford had maintained a KFC restaurant at that corner dating all the way back to 1976, but the end arrived in late January of 2016 when crews began disassembling equipment and removing things from the site.
At that time, Richard Alford, the local KFC Franchise representative told me, “It’s been wonderful serving Kentucky Fried Chicken in the St. Joseph area for many years.” He added, “Our KFC on Hilltop Road was constructed in 1976, and we’ve remodeled that facility several times over the past few decades. Instead of undergoing another remodel on the current building, we felt it best to focus our future investment efforts on building a new state-of-the-art, KFC restaurant in St. Joseph in the future.”
At that time, Alford did not immediately identify where the new site might go or what timeline they would operate under going forward. Now, it appears that either they or a new franchise owner are making good on the deal to return to St. Joe for the first time in three years.
Last October, Pittman Painting Company of Battle Creek applied the fresh new exterior to the empty building for the Alfords. Jake Pittman, the painting contractor who owns the Cereal City business said at the time he’d already done nearly a dozen stores for Alford who found him through a mutual friend a couple of years ago. At that time Alford hired Pittman’s crew to renovate his KFC in Hastings, Michigan. He was so impressed with Pittman’s work that he hired him on to do all of his interior and exterior painting.
Pittman says this week that he has not been contracted for rebranding the building as yet, also implying that the property may have been sold to one of the largest KFC franchisees in the nation, a company that owns nearly 800 of them. One such company might be KBP Foods of Overland Park, Kansas which owns more than 700 restaurants in over 20 states largely throughout the Midwest, and along the eastern seaboard as well as south into Texas. I reached out to them but have not heard back one way or the other.
Lots of people are asking, but the full picture has yet to develop. the Alford family has not responded to attempts to learn more at this time. Nevertheless, it appears that KFC may be abut to re-enter the St. Joe market in the near future. Stay tuned.
