Someone Just Bought Colonel Sanders' Planner for $30K

UPDATE Jul 29, 2026 10:45 AM CDT

We'll have to wait a few more days to see how much the former Kentucky home of KFC founder Colonel Sanders and adjoining restaurant fetch on the auction block, but some of his personal items have already been scooped up. The AP reports that Harland Sanders' clip-on black ribbon bow tie was bought for $8,000 at the Menish Group sale on Tuesday evening. Quartz notes that some other sold items included a bust made by Sanders' daughter, an engraved pressure cooker, a cutlery set, and some of Sanders' timepieces. The item that drew the biggest sale of the night: Sanders' 1964 planner, which included a handwritten list of 11 herbs and spices that some had suspected was part of the secret recipe for the chain's fried chicken. KFC has since said the list wasn't the elusive formula, but instead was part of a stuffing recipe. The planner sold on Tuesday for $30,000.

Jul 28, 2026 8:15 AM CDT

The ties that Colonel Sanders had to Kentucky are loosening, and not just because KFC's headquarters now sit in Texas. The Shelbyville estate where Harland Sanders once drilled franchisees on how to make pressure-cooked chicken is headed to auction, along with a trove of personal effects that includes his Bible, knife kit, trademark black string tie, and dusty pressure cookers, reports the New York Times. The item expected to draw the highest bid: his 1964 leather day planner, which contains a handwritten list of 11 herbs and spices that may—or may not—mirror the famous recipe.

"The Louisville real estate agent who is orchestrating the sale ... said he couldn't guarantee that it's the vaunted secret formula, and wouldn't let a photographer shoot it before the auction," the Times notes. The Claudia Sanders Dinner House next door, opened by Sanders and his second wife to showcase how his chicken and gravy should really taste, is also up for sale by Cherry Settle, an ex-employee who scooped up the estate in 1974 and ran the eatery with her now-deceased husband for more than 50 years.

Locals hope that the new owners will keep the restaurant running. "Colonel Sanders was the original celebrity chef," Bill Menish, whose firm, the Menish Group, is holding the auction, tells the AP. "The feedback has been worldwide, so we needed to have an auction that would cater to that worldwide audience." Menish also has praise for Sanders, whom he calls a "marketing genius." "He didn't dress like that before he was starting to build Kentucky Fried Chicken," Menish says. "He adopted the colonel: the clothes, the bow tie, the glasses, the goatee."