Red Rooster Brand Guidelines: Kelmscott 1972, the Hawaiian Pack & Craveable Brands

Two brothers, nine partners and a chicken shop in Perth.

Red Rooster began in 1972 in Kelmscott, a suburb on the south-eastern edge of Perth in Western Australia. English Wikipedia names the founders as the brothers Peter and Theo Kailis, whose family background lay in fishing, pearling and seafood. realcommercial.com.au, in a history of the chain published in July 2025, adds detail: Peter Kailis was the eldest of four sons of George Kailis, who had run a fish shop in Perth since 1926, and in 1972 the two brothers and nine other partners launched the first Red Rooster by buying an existing chicken shop in Kelmscott.

The idea came from a chicken shop on Wanneroo Road in Perth. In a 2018 interview that the brand published on its social media, quoted by realcommercial.com.au, Peter Kailis recalled that his brother had met two men from Adelaide who ran chicken shops there and had opened one in Perth; he tasted the chicken and decided to give it a go. The early years were hard. The same article says the business struggled financially until Peter Kailis bought out his partners and became sole owner of the Kelmscott shop, after which the chain grew to four Perth locations.

The model was American in its discipline but local in its food. Kentucky Fried Chicken had opened its first Australian store in Sydney in 1968, and the Kailis brothers set out to copy the standardised menu, branding and marketing of the American chains while selling roast rather than fried chicken, both English Wikipedia and realcommercial.com.au say. English Wikipedia quotes a description of rotisserie chicken in fast food as “definitely an Australian thing.”

One menu item came straight from the founder. Peter Kailis devised the Hawaiian Pack in the 1970s, English Wikipedia says; realcommercial.com.au describes it as a quarter roast chicken with chips and a pineapple and banana fritter.

Myer, Australian Fast Foods, Craveable.

Red Rooster has changed hands many times. By the early 1980s it had about 45 outlets in Western Australia and Victoria, and it was bought by the Myer retail group: English Wikipedia dates the purchase by the Myer Emporium to July 1981, while realcommercial.com.au gives 1982. Under Myer the chain moved east. In 1986 the group bought the Big Rooster chain in New South Wales and rebranded its stores as Red Rooster, and the remaining Big Rooster stores in Queensland followed in 1992, which realcommercial.com.au says took the network to 230 stores across Australia.

In May 2002 the Perth company Australian Fast Foods, which already owned the rival Chicken Treat chain, took over Red Rooster, realcommercial.com.au reports; the two brands were run independently under the same holding company. In 2007 a management buyout backed by Quadrant Private Equity formed Quick Service Restaurant Holdings, which bought the Sydney chain Oporto the same year, according to English Wikipedia. Archer Capital acquired the group in June 2011, and in May 2017 it was renamed Craveable Brands.

The present owner arrived in 2019. Hospitality Magazine reported on 16 July 2019 that the Hong Kong private equity firm PAG Asia Capital had bought Red Rooster, Oporto and Chicken Treat from Archer Capital, and that Craveable then ran more than 570 restaurants with 12,500 employees across the three brands. In May 2023 Craveable agreed to buy a fourth chicken chain, Chargrill Charlie’s, Inside Retail reported; English Wikipedia lists it among the group’s brands.

The way the stores are run changed too. In 2010 the business moved to a franchise model, converting company-operated stores to franchises, English Wikipedia and realcommercial.com.au say. Red Rooster now describes its network as national, with each restaurant owned and operated by a local franchisee. A move abroad was brief: English Wikipedia says the first New Zealand outlet opened in Takanini in December 2004 and the New Zealand stores closed in 2009.

Design and documentation.

Australian and New Zealand food chains usually present themselves through a small set of repeated parts: a shopfront and sign that can be read from across a car park, a menu built around a few named products, and a story about the suburb where the first shop opened. Roast and charcoal chicken, burgers, pies, muffins, juice, pizza and patisserie each have their own version of that formula, but the structure is shared.

Many of these brands are franchised, and their own pages say so plainly. A typical corporate site explains that each restaurant or café is run by a local franchisee, lists stores by suburb and state, and keeps a separate page for prospective franchise partners. Store formats are named rather than described: drive-thru, shopping centre, strip store, express counter. Store counts appear in trade press with a date attached, and they move as shops open and close.

Ownership is often layered. Several chains sit inside larger groups or private equity portfolios, so one parent may hold more than one brand in the same category; Craveable Brands, for example, owns Red Rooster, Oporto and Chicken Treat. Founders tend to stay in the brand story long after a sale, and company pages keep the founding year, the first shop and the first signature product in view.

Expansion abroad is a recurring chapter, from New Zealand to Asia, the Middle East, Britain and the United States, and the record is uneven, with some markets opened and later left. For designers, these brands are useful studies in how a local takeaway turns its name, colours and a handful of signature items into a system that franchisees can repeat from one suburb to the next.

Fix the food, fix the assets.

The modern look of Red Rooster comes from a deliberate reset. realcommercial.com.au reports that by 2018 the chain had 359 stores in Australia, and that its marketing director that year acknowledged the brand had “lost its way”; customers saw it as a little dated and bland because it was built only on roast chicken. The response, in the marketing director’s words, was to “fix the food, fix the assets and fix the experience”: a refreshed image, modernised advertising and a revamped logo, with fried chicken and burgers added to the menu. English Wikipedia dates the fried chicken to 2021.

The menu has kept a thread to the 1970s. English Wikipedia records that the Hawaiian Pack was dropped at some point before 2012 and brought back that year after a social media vote, alongside the Chicken Cheese and Bacon Burger. By early 2018 it had become the Classic Tropicana, with a second pineapple fritter in place of the banana, and English Wikipedia says that as of 2025 the Trop Box, still with pineapple, had replaced it. The ovens changed earlier: between about the mid-1980s and 1995 the chain replaced its rotisserie ovens with combi ovens while continuing to sell “rotisserie-style chicken,” English Wikipedia says.

The map of its stores has become part of the brand’s story. A “food fault lines” map in the University of Sydney student paper Honi Soit plotted every Red Rooster in Sydney and showed them clustered in the western suburbs; realcommercial.com.au says the map spread on Reddit and Twitter as the “Red Rooster Line,” and the brand’s marketing director said such moments kept it in cultural conversation. Earlier marketing included a 2009 campaign, “They don’t get it in America,” filmed in the United States, and a Supercars sponsorship from 2010, English Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Red Rooster shows how a Perth roast-chicken shop of 1972 kept its name and its pineapple-fritter pack through more than five decades of owners, from Myer to PAG Asia Capital, while redrawing its logo and menu for a burger-led market. Compare its Craveable sibling Oporto and the American chain it set out to rival, KFC. For this guide we use rooster red, ember, roast gold, chalk and char with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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