Pelicana Brand Guidelines: Daejeon Station, a Pelican Name & Korea’s Yangnyeom Chicken

A borrowed name, then a pelican.

Pelicana began in Daejeon, in central South Korea, and its own dates and the press disagree by a year or two. The company says it started in 1979 as a small chicken shop in front of Daejeon Station and began franchising in 1981. In a June 2004 interview with the monthly Wolgan JoongAng, the founder, Yang Hee-kwon, said he opened his first franchise fast-food shop in front of the station in 1981, under a sign copied from an American chain, Donald Chicken. The American company objected, he said, so he paid an agency in Seoul’s Chungmuro printing district to create a new brand, and it came back with the pelican.

Korean Wikipedia dates the trading company, Pelicana Sangsa, to 27 April 1982 in Daejeon’s Gajang-dong, and says the Pelicana trademark was registered in November 1984. The company marked its 40th anniversary on 27 April 2022, which matches that date.

The early business was built by hand. Yang told Wolgan JoongAng that the chicken was made and sold for twelve hours a day from a one-room shop beside a department store in Daegu, chosen as the centre of the eastern market, while the head office stayed in Daejeon. The first regional franchise went to a man from Wonju who had driven to Daejeon the day after the first advertisement appeared, wanting the rights to Gangwon province. Demand grew by word of mouth, and would-be franchisees queued at the Daejeon office.

By June 2004, the same magazine wrote, Pelicana had 13 regional branches, two overseas subsidiaries and about 2,300 shops, which the magazine called the largest in the field.

Red sauce on fried chicken.

The product that made the name is yangnyeom chicken: fried chicken coated in a sweet, red, spicy sauce. Yang described the early version to Wolgan JoongAng as Korean flavours on American-style fried chicken, a sauce of gochujang chilli paste, onion and garlic bought in local markets and ground in a blender, closer at first to a glazed snack than to the later dish. Even in 1982, he said, the signs did not say “chicken” in the modern sense but yangnyeom tongdak, “seasoned whole chicken,” the usual word then for a whole chicken, most often roasted on a spit. The company now says its sauce combines about twenty fresh ingredients.

The menu has widened since. The Ottawa Citizen’s restaurant critic, reviewing a Pelicana counter in July 2024, listed eleven kinds of fried chicken, among them original, soy, garlic and padak, chicken topped with green onion, each served with fried rice cakes and pickled radish.

The identity is unusually well documented on the company’s own website. It says the brand was built on the pelican, a bird that stores food in its beak to share with its young, an image of parents bringing home a whole chicken in a brown paper bag on payday. It says the name joins “pelican” to “americana,” a fashionable loanword in 1980s Seoul. Its 1986 television advertisement, set to a reworded children’s cartoon song with the line “Pelicana chicken has come,” is a jingle the company says is still remembered.

The current mark dates from 1 August 2011, when the company replaced its corporate identity and made a new round emblem; in January 2012 it replaced the signs of every franchised shop free of charge, its timeline says. The website publishes the logo in Korean, English and emblem versions, and gives its colours as a deep red as the main colour, with an orange and a near-black as supporting colours, each with a Pantone reference.

Chicken, pots and paper boxes.

Korean fried-chicken and hot-pot chains tend to present themselves through what happens to the food, not through a mascot. A chicken chain’s company pages will often explain a sauce before they explain a logo: a soy-and-garlic glaze, a chilli version, a honey version, each with its own year of launch and its own name on the menu. Kyochon, for example, describes sauce brushed on piece by piece and has carried the brush into its wordmark; bb.q points to a training centre it calls Chicken University. Hot-pot chains put the pot itself at the centre of the table, so the broth, the burner and the plates of raw ingredients around it become part of how the brand is seen.

Shop interiors and menus are where these identities become consistent. As franchise networks grew into the hundreds and then the thousands, the companies describe bringing in uniform interiors, standard menu boards and set colour schemes; Kyochon, for one, dates uniform shop interiors and orange-based menu boards to 1999, the year it passed 100 shops. Delivery boxes, sauce packs and takeout bags carry the same marks, and some chains have built whole shop formats around delivery and takeout.

Names are usually plain. Menus are organised by sauce or cooking method, and side brands are given short, descriptive names of their own; several groups now run cafés, bars or noodle formats under separate names alongside the main chain. Some write their names in Korean characters, some in Latin letters, and some with punctuation or a founding year built into the mark.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: who founded the company and when, which group owns it, where it is listed, and how many shops and countries it reports. Those figures come from the companies, and dated press reports are the way to check them. This guide reads each brand through those pages and through independent reporting, and treats colour and type as an interpretation, not a copy.

Gyeryong head office, shops abroad.

Pelicana is a private company, Pelicana Co. Wolgan JoongAng described Yang as its chairman in 2004, and the company’s timeline still calls him chairman in 2016; its website now carries a new-year message from the chief executive, Song Young-mi. Korean Wikipedia records a factory in Daejeon in 1985, a Seoul office in 1989 and 1990, a sauce plant moved to Duma-myeon, in what is now Gyeryong, South Chungcheong, in 2002, and the franchise headquarters moved there in 2007. Gyeryong is the company’s head office today.

Overseas, the brand set up early companies and opened shops much later. Korean Wikipedia records Pelicana U.S.A. Inc. founded in Los Angeles in 1992 and a trading company in Shanghai in 1994. The company’s timeline lists entry to Southeast Asia and Oceania in May 2012, then Mongolia in March 2013, the United States and China in November 2013, Canada and Taiwan in 2017, Australia in 2019, the United Kingdom in April 2021 and Thailand in January 2025. English Wikipedia gives slightly different dates, with American shops from 2014, in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, and a first Canadian shop in Toronto in 2022.

The Ottawa Citizen gave an outside view in July 2024. Its critic described Pelicana as a decades-old brand with more than 3,000 locations worldwide, with shops in China, Australia, Mongolia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States, and an Ottawa counter that had opened that March inside a Korean grocery store. The company itself said in 2021 that it traded in seven countries.

For a design guide, Pelicana shows how a naming accident, a bird and a red sauce can carry a brand for more than four decades. Compare bb.q and Kyochon, two other Korean chicken chains that also took their shops abroad. For this guide we use a gochujang red, a pepper orange and an ink black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pelicana’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.