The Birdcode Story Part One: Meet the Founders Brandi & Phil Killoran

This three-part series focuses on Birdcode, a fried chicken joint based in Connecticut, created by Connecticut locals. Part One focuses on the backstory of its founders, Brandi & Phil Killoran.

Birdcode founders, and the husband-and-wife team of Phil & Brandi Killoran, outside of their first location in West Hartford.

About six years ago, fried chicken chains started popping up all over Connecticut. But amongst the Chick-fil-As, Popeyes, KFCs, and Dave’s Hot, our state has a few that have local roots. One of those, with seven locations, and growing, as of press time, is Birdcode.

Founded in 2020 in West Hartford by the husband-and-wife duo of Phil and Brandi Killoran, Birdcode wasn’t then, still isn’t now, and it’ll very likely never follow in the footsteps of soulless fast casual franchises.

“Birdcode,” a term you won’t find in your trusty Merriam-Webster, was coined by The Killorans to match the many things they and their business stand for.

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Teamwork makes the dream work. Employees gather outside of Birdcode’s Plainville location, their seventh. And you’ll come to understand in Part Two that Birdcode isn’t just the name of their restaurant franchise, but that it’s a whole philosophy about teaching, caring for, and cultivating great employee-employer relationships and then some.

But before we can get to the bottom of what Birdcode is all about (hint: it’s more than just fried chicken), Brandi and Phil’s story that led to them starting their own franchise had to begin somewhere.

“Our story starts with Phil,” Brandi says. “The food and the recipes start with me, but deciding to start a business started with him at McDonald’s when he was 15.”

Ask Brandi, she’ll say it started with Phil. Ask Phil, and he’ll say it all started with her.

Truth is, it takes two, first as individuals in different parts of the country, then the happenstance of meeting one another.

Brandi grew up in Tallahassee, Florida in a household that she says had limited resources. Her mother, Roberta, aka, Roby, though, was a terrific home cook, who made nearly everything from scratch.

“She could make anything from nothing it felt like a lot of the time,” Brandi recalls. “We had chickens, so we would do our own eggs and do our own stuff. She was always really encouraging about using raw ingredients as often as possible. Sometimes, that's the only thing that you had to access. She was always super encouraging about putting things together. And even if you think you've got nothing in the fridge, I bet you do. You can find something and put something together out of nothing. Food was something that, it's a staple in life. It's something that you got to deal with. Being able to cook on your own was really helpful to me, especially when I left home at a young age, because I moved away from Tallahassee for the first time when I was around 16-17 years old, then I kind of worked all over and I started out in hospitality.”

Of course there was a family pet in Brandi’s family. Meet Mildred, their egg laying rescue chicken.

When she left Florida, via a job ad she found in the Tallahassee Democrat, Brandi ended up in Platoro, Colorado in the San Juan Mountains to work at a hunting and fishing lodge where she, as a cook, accompanied hunters and their friends or families as they hunted elk.

“It was a fascinating experience,” she says. “Hunters would come up from areas like Texas and Oregon, but a bunch of families would pool together to get the hunting licenses and that was the meat that they would eat all year. It really showed me the importance of hunting. It was not a sport. It was a resource. Some towns would get together because an elk, if you could kill an elk, it's 1,500 pounds. That's a lot of meat and that can go a long way. Some families would eat off of that the entire year. It showed me the real importance of food, and integrity in food, and how all of that tracks all the way through from the very beginning, how you source that protein and where you get it from all matters, and that it's done with integrity matters.”

For a solid five years, Brandi traveled all over the states, even as far away as Alaska, doing all kinds of industry odd jobs, waiting tables, cleaning hotel rooms, you name it, she probably did it. She’d wind up in Connecticut as a marketing director/property manager for The Shoppes at Farmington Valley in Canton, a position that would change her life both personally and professionally. Said shopping center had a Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop and that’s where Phil worked.

Prior to working for Ben & Jerry’s, Phil was already well into franchises. While most teenagers were out doing teenager things, he was rapidly climbing the corporate ladder at McDonald’s, getting his start when he was only 14.

“I was born in Connecticut, but when I was 12, we moved to the west coast,” Phil shares. “A friend of mine and his brother worked at McDonald’s.”

Phil pauses and rewinds a bit.

“My father was a very driven man that had requirements for jobs for all of his kids, so the minute you were working age, his money was his money. It wasn't our money. You had to get a job. Even when I was really young, I knew entrepreneurial was the way to go. I just didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I didn't want to work for anybody else, so I'm 14, I get this job at McDonald's. I'm working at a McDonald's inside a Walmart, which pretty much cease to exist these days.”

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Thinking his boss only had this one McDonald’s, Phil quickly found out it wasn’t one, but 33. His boss? Ray Kroc, who was McDonald’s president, then chairman of the board, then senior chairman for nearly 30 years.

“I start talking to him about the business and how it works and everything and I knew right then, this is what I'm doing, not necessarily McDonald's, but I want to be in the hospitality industry, I want to provide service,” he says. “I love the connection and the experience that you create. Food goes back to the beginning of time. Look at all religion breaking bread, right? And that's such a big thing. It's connection in your communities. I would watch people come up to the register as a 14-year-old and they’d be grumpy. ‘They’ are a lot of them working at Walmart. You feed them, they're happy right. You develop great relationships with them and have fun.”

Now in his senior year of high school, Phil was enjoying the San Francisco Bay Area, referencing loving the different cultures and people he met, fluently learning Spanish along the way. Then, one day, his parents told him that it was time to move back to Connecticut.

“I'm angry, real angry,” he says. “I'm like, I'm not leaving this. I built a career here. I'm making numbers that that kids in college aren't making getting out of out of college at 17-18 years old. My parents said, ‘Please come spend nine months in Connecticut, then you can go back.’ And that's what I did. I walked right back into a district manager role. Did that for about two years and then Starbucks called me and I went to go work for Starbucks for a couple years. Did the same thing. My McDonald's operator called me and asked me if I'd be interested in coming back, so I did, and worked for them for a little bit.”

Phil would get a phone call from “a New York finance guy” who had the Connecticut rights to Ben & Jerry’s, including a few scoop shops. Said finance guy retired to rural Connecticut, but his family pushed him to move back to the big city, so he requested that Phil run it for him for a 20 percent partnership. They’d sell the shops that weren’t doing as well.

“When we got down to the original store, which was the best by far store, he turned to me and was like, ‘You want to buy it and I'll move on?’” Phil explains. “I'm operating this store and the landlord walks in and the landlord would eventually be my wife. She comes in talking to me about, ‘Hey, we're doing this movie thing, would you participate?’ I was growing the scoop shop and we needed to get more in the community because that type of business, you have to be community driven. I said absolutely, I'll come out there and I'll do it. Her and I became friends a little bit at that point, then the movies start and when the movie plays its downtime, right? Brandi used to pop open the back of her Santa Fe and we would sit there and talk for hours. I knew very quickly that this was the person I wanted to be with the rest of my life.”

“The shopping center gave me a budget to start this outdoor movie series,” Brandi says. “I hired a guy with a big tent and a big blowup screen and they would set it up in the back parking lot of the shopping center and Phil would come out with the ice cream cart and serve ice cream to the guests. We would get like 5,000 people to come out, which was great. It was a free event for families and nobody had to pay for anything. It was just a really good thing to do. I was proud of the shopping center for doing that. We would spend all night talking. All of our conversations were always about business. Phil's been about business since he was probably five. He just knew that this was his passion and what he was going to end up doing. When we talked, it was one of the biggest things that attracted me to Phil is his passion about business, people, and operating. Then we started dating, then we got married, and we decided we were going to buy the business. For about eight, almost 10 years, we built six Ben & Jerry's locations, built a big catering business, and had ice cream trucks.”

When you’re all about your brand, it’s absolutely imperative to take a photo with a giant statue of a chicken.

In 2018, Phil and Brandi decided to sell Ben & Jerry’s to do something of their very own, something that was a culmination of all of their combined years of experience, something that was true to Brandi’s upbringing, and a place that would treat employees fairly in all aspects, while teaching them, too, and something that gives back to the community.  

“We took some time and really decided that we could do this on our own, that we could start our own concept, that we could do this with my mom's recipes, and if we keep it really simple, and we use the same level of ingredients, and just do what we do really well,” Brandi says. “Let’s find the best ingredients, find the best people, and provide the best service.”

Phil, knowing that as entrepreneurs, the biggest step is often taking that risk, said, let’s go all in, and he took advice from something his mother once told him: “You're gonna need somebody who is the yin to your yang. You're going to need somebody who's good at everything that you're not good at and can help keep it organized and keep everything rolling. So, at some point, you're going to have to find a partner, a business partner, to do that with.”

That concept is a combination of Brandi and Phil’s industry knowledge and experience, mixed with Brandi’s mom’s recipe for scratch made fried chicken , a once a week feast at her dining room table growing up, and, in addition, southern staples like mac & cheese, and homemade banana pudding. Collectively, all of it is the foundation for a place you’ve probably had a fried chicken sandwich at in Connecticut and that place bears the name, Birdcode.

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Stayed tuned for Part Two where we’ll dial in on Birdcode’s food and ingredients, their overall business philosophies, and employer-employee dynamics.