Biography|Sabir Sami — The Gardiner Lane Campus That Named Him KFC's Global Chief

People treat the KFC job as something that happens in a restaurant.

The promotion that put Sabir Sami over the whole division was issued from this Louisville campus.

On 22 September 2021, Yum! Brands announced from Louisville that Sami, then 54 and a twelve-year company veteran, would become KFC Division chief executive on 1 January 2022.

He would succeed Tony Lowings, who was stepping down ahead of retirement.

He would report to Yum! Brands chief executive David Gibbs.

The dateline on the company release was this address: 1441 Gardiner Lane.

The campus is a pair of office buildings on about twelve acres in Watterson Park, just off Interstate 264.

The older block is a three-storey colonial revival pile from 1970 that locals call the White House because it copies the Washington facade.

A larger five-storey office from 1986 sits beside it.

KFC's corporate headquarters had lived on this ground for decades.

Sami was not a newcomer to the system.

He had joined Yum! in 2009 and run KFC Canada and Turkey as general manager.

He then ran the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey markets as managing director.

By 2021 he was already KFC Division chief operating officer and managing director for KFC Asia, a region the company said then covered seventeen markets outside China.

The September release was the formal hand-off of the global brand to that record.

He held the division job from January 2022 until the end of February 2025.

Yum! named Scott Mezvinsky as his successor effective 1 March 2025.

The campus itself is leaving the company.

In 2025 Yum! agreed to donate the Gardiner Lane ground to Jefferson County Public Schools for a new central office.

The company signed a lease in downtown Louisville's PNC Tower at 101 South Fifth Street and said it planned to move staff there in late 2026.

A visitor coming for Sami's appointment year should expect a school district campus, not a restaurant headquarters.

The decision that made him KFC's global chief was still taken on this lane.

Photo: Portrait of Colonel Harland Sanders commissioned by Winston L. Shelton, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The founder of the division Sami was named to run.