The Decibel - Popeyes Chicken, covert surveillance and alleged rotting meat

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Popeyes Chicken is one of the most well-known fast food franchises in North America. But its reputation could be tested by a lawsuit alleging that some of the chain’s franchise owners purchased meat from an unauthorized seller. The accusations from a former chicken supplier – which Popeyes’ parent company refutes – include “unsafe” and “rotten” meat, according to the statement of claim.Susan Krashinsky Robertson, The Globe’s retail business reporter, breaks down the allegations, recounts the corporate surveillance and explains what it could mean for the chicken you’re eating.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Susan Krasinski Robertson covers the retail sector in Canada for the globe. And recently, she has been reporting on a contentious lawsuit. This is a story that involves private investigators, executives following cars through traffic, allegations of unsafe food at fast food restaurants, and really just accusations flying back and forth between. a major fast food company and a former supplier about who is to blame for food quality issues. That major fast food company is Popeyes, which is owned by the same parent company that owns Burger King and Tim Hordons.

And the former supplier is a Canadian chicken processor. This is one of the most bizarre cases of quality control I've ever seen in Canada's fast food industry and it has left a trail of unanswered and financial damage. Susan joins me today to explain how these allegations over chicken have become part of a lawsuit and one of the most bizarre stories she's ever reported on. I'm Laura Stone, guest hosting The Decibel from the Globe and Mail.

Hi, Susan. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, my journalism school friend from 15 years ago. Look at us now. All right, so Susan, you've been reporting about this lawsuit that involves some franchise locations of the popular fast food chain, Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen, and a Canadian company called ADP Direct Poultry. Where does this story begin? So this story starts all the way back in 2022. So ADP is a chicken processor and was at the time a supplier to Popeye's restaurants in the greater Toronto area. And basically what that means is they would receive chickens after they were slaughtered. They would sometimes cut up the meat, prepare it, sometimes marinate it, and package it and get it ready for sending off to the restaurants.

And so at the time, ADP had begun to receive an unusual number of complaints from Popeye's franchisees about its chicken. And this was at the time when complaints from other clients, they say, hadn't been increasing at night. nearly the same rate. So they were wondering what was going on. And then one day, the president of ADP says he got a call from a chicken wholesaler that he's known for years. And this person said to him, hey, I've got this guy coming in. He's buying large amounts of chicken. And he mentioned that he's been selling it to Popeye's restaurants. This wholesaler knew that ADP was a supplier to Popeyes, and he thought the president of ADP would be interested in this. And so the president looked at these unusual number of complaints looked at this tip about what seemed to be an unauthorized supplier

to the restaurants. And he began to wonder if there was a connection. And how many complaints are we talking about here and what exactly were they about? Yeah, ADP was receiving 15 to 17 complaints per month, which they say was just an unusual number for them, like a normal course of things they might get one complaint every month or two. And that could be anything from chicken damaged and transit to, you know, quality issues, but nothing at this volume. And what were the complaints about? So we don't know exactly what the complaints were about. All we know is that there is a system that exists in Popeyes in this large fast food chain

where when a franchisee wants to ask for a refund from a supplier for whatever reason, they file a complaint through this centralized system and then that gets passed on to those suppliers. And so it's not clear why a complaint would go to a supplier if it wasn't about their own product. But ADP took a look at their chicken, took a look at their processes. They say they have these really rigorous safety protocols. And they just didn't believe that this could be their product. And they thought something was wrong. What did this company ADP do to test whether there was something wrong with their chicken?

So ADP says that they have all kinds of controls to make sure that the chicken that they process is safe. Everything from regular testing, they have sensors on their machines to detect things like pieces of metal that can get into chicken when it's being processed and being cut up. They have very rigorous temperature controls. They maintain what they call a cold chain to ensure that the meat is always properly refrigerated or properly frozen at every stage of the process and indeed, including when it's handed off to their transportation partners for delivery to the restaurants. And so they looked over their facilities and they just said, we don't believe this is us. And also, with no similar level of complaints from other clients, they thought this

just didn't seem right and they thought these complaints were legitimate. Right. So after this unusual number of complaints, what happened next? And so when the president of ADP got this call from this wholesaler, he decided unusually, he wanted to check it out for himself. So he asked this wholesaler he knew for the address of the man who had been buying all of this chicken, got in his car, and went to the guy's house. And that sounds highly unusual? It's highly unusual, yeah. So he basically was a poultry processing executive turned amateur sleuth.

He went to the house. He staked it out for a number of hours until he saw this man come to the house and saw him drive away in his truck. And that's when he decided to follow him. And so he followed him through traffic in the GTA and observed this truck stopping at three locations that he said were the back doors of Popeye's restaurants, unloading boxes and bringing them into the restaurants. That's his account of what he saw. And he believed that this showed that something unusual was going on. And so ADP took that report to restaurant brands international or RBI, which is the parent company of Popeyes. Did the president of ADP confront this man that he saw driving around the chicken?

No, he decided to follow him and just get the lay of the land, see what he was up to. And when he saw him going into some Popeye's restaurants, he believed he needed to report this to Popeye's. Okay, that sounds like kind of an odd thing to see. But that's just one instance. Is there any evidence that this kept happening? Well, that's what happened next. So after reporting it to RBI, ADP sort of went back to its business. They say that they heard from RBI executives, we're going to look into this.

We take this very seriously. And so they said, okay, we've done our job. We've reported this. We're just going to go back to supplying the restaurants. But after a few months passed, they were still getting this high level of complaints from franchisees. and they thought something was still going on somewhere in the supply chain of Popeyes that might explain this. And so at that point, in the spring of 2023, they decided to hire a private investigation firm and to gather much more data about the activities of this man

whose name is Amjad Farouk. And what did this private investigator report back to them? So this private investigation firm followed Mr. Farouk for a total of 20 months at a cost of about $250,000 to ADP was following Farouk on a weekly or sometimes a monthly basis, taking photographs of his movements, writing up reports about what he was up to and giving that to ADP. And what ADP says they have and what they have shown me examples of are a number of private investigators reports that, again, never confront Farouk directly, but at a distance, follow him making deliveries around Toronto and the surrounding areas to what they say are the back doors of Popeye's restaurants.

And this might sound like kind of an obvious question, but how did the private investigator know that he was delivering chicken? That's a really good question, because we can't know that 100% for sure. Here's what they do know. They have a tip from a chicken wholesaler about a man buying large. amounts of chicken. They have the address of that man, and that's the man they go to follow. They see that man visiting both wholesalers, a chicken wholesaler, as well as large retailers like Costco, coming out of those places with sometimes dollies of boxes that he then loads into

his vehicle, goes back to his residential address, and they observe him going to what they say are Popeye's locations and unloading boxes. Because of the nature of covert surveillance, like this. You're never going to get right up next to him, open up the boxes, and take a look at what's inside. Right. But they say they believe that all of those things together suggest the possibility that this man was delivering chicken and was delivering it in an unsafe way. He was driving his own car or truck. These are unrefrigerated vehicles. He was storing products at his own residential address where there are not the kinds of safety protocols we expect for commercial food products that are being handled. And that's the evidence they say they have. The last thing that the private investigator did was also to visit the chicken wholesaler, I mentioned, where they had observed him making visits and walking away with things. And they photographed boxes that were on the loading dock of this chicken wholesaler,

which they compared with photos of boxes that were in the back of the truck that Mr. Farouk was driving and showed that the boxes looked quite similar, had quite similar labeling on them. Okay, so what did ADP do with this? information they got from all of this covert surveillance, as you called it. So ADP says that they reported what they found to RBI on more than one occasion and that they were assured that this would be fixed, but they say that they saw no evidence that this behavior was stopped. And then what did RBI do? So all of this continued for many months. And eventually in December of last year, RBI ended its supply relationship.

with ADP, something ADP says that they were quite surprised about, and they finally ended their private surveillance of Mr. Farouk in January, because of course, no longer being a Popeye supplier, they no longer had any reason to continue doing any research into this. But they say that by the time they stopped that surveillance in January, they had seen no evidence that this had been curtailed. We'll be right back. All right, Susan. So how do we get from RBI canceling its contract with ADP direct poultry to a lawsuit? Yeah, so the lawsuit followed just a few months after that happened.

ADP filed this lawsuit back in May. And the lawsuit alleges that at least two dozen Popeye's locations in the greater Toronto area bought what they call, quote, rotten and, quote, unsafe meat from Mr. Faroo. They say in the lawsuit that he sometimes stored the meat in a residential garage that lacked proper refrigeration or freezing procedures and that he transported raw chicken refrigerated or frozen in vehicles that were also lacking the proper refrigeration procedures. So how much are they asking for in terms of damages? Yeah. So the lawsuit names a number of parties. They name Popeye's parent company RBI.I. A number of the franchise. It also names Mr. Farouk directly and a company that manages RBI's supply chain, a third-party company that's involved in the supply chain of the restaurants. And ADP is asking for fairly significant damages, a total of $36 million from Popeyes and its

parent company and that supply chain company I mentioned, which is related to the alleged unsafe supply. a further million dollars from RBI and Popeyes for alleged defamation. And what that alleged defamation goes back to is when we wrote the initial story about the lawsuit being filed back in June, RBI provided a statement saying they believe that this is a case of a disgruntled former supplier who had lost their contract for a number of what they say are legitimate reasons. ADP says that's defamatory and has added a claim of libel to their suit. How important was the contract to ADP with Popeyes? Definitely losing the Popeye's contract was a blow to ADP.

The president of ADP, a man named Algo Pino, told me that Popeye's represented about 10% of their business at the time that they were a supplier. So they have lost out on a fairly sizable business and also on the opportunity they say to expand that business. ADP says that before the Popeye's contract was cut off, they had been told to prepare to scale up the business quite a bit. And they claim also that there were discussions about ADP beginning to supply Burger King restaurants, which RBI also owns. RBI is a large fast food conglomerate that owns not just Popeyes, but Burger King, Tim Hortons, and a chain called Firehouse Subs. So that's ADP's side of things. What has RBI said about it? So RBI has yet to file its statement of defense in this case, but has said that they intend to defend themselves.

They provided a statement saying they take food safety very seriously and looked into these concerns in both 2022 and 2024 when the supplier ADP came to them with what they had found. They say they acted quickly to look into them, visited restaurants, investigated the claims, and found, quote, no evidence of the systemic issues they are claiming. What about the man accused of being the unauthorized chicken supplier? Mr. Farouk has not responded to our requests for comment on this story. Have any of the franchisees responded to this? So two of the Popeye's franchisee companies filed a statement of defense and they have denied ADP's allegations. Okay, I want to go back to the central allegation here, Susan, that some Popeye's locations were taking

meat from this random guy with a pickup truck. Why would they do that? Yeah. So when things are working as they're supposed to in a large restaurant business or a large fast food business, a person can't just show up at the back door of a restaurant selling supplies. Franchise businesses exercise a great deal of control over their franchisees. And I should probably step back here and explain what that means. So when you look at a big chain like Tim Horton's or maybe McDonald's, which RBI does not own, or any other well-known fast food chain, many of these are franchise businesses, which means effectively that they're like a conglomeration of small business owners.

There are people who own sometimes just one or two or sometimes a number of restaurants, and those restaurant owners are responsible for operating the day-to-day business at each location. The parent company of a franchise business like this, like RBI, owns all the insurance. intellectual property of those brands. They help franchisees sometimes with sourcing product. They ensure consistency. They, you know, design the marketing of these brands.

So when we talk about the controls these parent companies place on franchisees, it's because one of the big draws of these businesses is consistency that people know these brands. They know what to expect when they walk into a location, whether it's in Mussini or in Animo or Kitchener. they always know what they're going to get when they walk into one of these places. So a company like RBI will dictate to its franchisees where they can buy things. They have approved suppliers, and that's where you get everything from your chicken to your

napkins to your milk, and franchisees have to abide by that. So to get all the way back to your question, why would a franchisee do this? ADP has posited that the reason for using an authorized, supplier would be cost savings. They point out that even though it's alleged that Mr. Farouk was buying chicken at retail in some cases, which is the whole point of a wholesale business is buying at scale is supposed to save you money, but suppliers who have to follow all kinds of rigorous safety protocols, that increases the cost of doing business. And so what ADP said is that they believe that franchisees would be facing a situation where an unauthorized supplier

like this might well be able to undercut the price, even of an authorized wholesale supplier because allegedly this person did not submit to any safety investigations, did not have to maintain a commercial facility, did not have to pay employees, did not have to own a refrigerated vehicle in which to transport the meat. And so if franchisees are looking to save money, theoretically, they might turn to another source. That is risky, though, because of course it is not the terms of the contract that they have with their parent company.

And we've seen franchise companies shut down restaurants in the past for not adhering to the terms of a franchise agreement, not just in terms of the suppliers, but there are all kinds of clauses in those agreements that restaurant owners have to. abide by. And if they don't, a big brand like a Tim Hortons or a Popeyes has the right to take that restaurant away from them. And Susan, I should ask, is there any reason to believe that the chicken and some GTA Popeyes is unsafe to eat? It's really important to note here that none of these allegations have been tested in court at this point. And RBI in its statement to me said, quote, we pride ourselves on a rigorous and proactive food safety program that regularly includes

unannounced restaurant visits, third-party audits, and ongoing supply chain monitoring. Popeyes says its food is safe. However, these are extremely serious allegations. They're allegations that will require a robust response from Popeyes in order to ensure that its customers continue to trust the integrity and the safety of its products. Yeah, I mean, these accusations are quite serious. It's a very contentious situation, to put it mildly. How would you describe what both sides have at stake here in this lawsuit?

Both sides have a lot at stake in this lawsuit. ADP, by bringing this forward, has opened itself up also to the accusations that RBI has made publicly about its processes and its brand. And that is why they've added a defamation claim to their lawsuit because, of course, that harms them. For them, it's also about the loss of a major opportunity and a major client. For RBI, what's at stake is obviously customer trust, which is crucial to the value of these businesses. And it's not just crucial to RBI, of course. We mentioned before the structure of a franchise business involves restaurant owners all across Canada who own these businesses. And so you can have a restaurant owner in B.C. or Alberta who has nothing to do with this,

but who is going to have to reassure their customers, then indeed they are following all the protocols and that everything is safe and people can feel comfortable going into their restaurants. So I imagine that this is a huge matter of concern, not just for RBI, but also for its restaurant owners all across Canada. And before we wrap up, what's next for this story? So RBI has yet to file its statement of defense. It likely will. And there could even be countersuits down the road. It's possible that their statement of defense could include a counterclaim of defamation against ADP, for example, potentially.

We also haven't yet seen statements of defense from all of the franchisee owners that are named in the lawsuit or from the third-party supply chain company. So there's a lot to come still in this case. Susan, you've been covering Canada's retail sector for years now. We talked early on about how you've never covered anything like this lawsuit. So I'm curious to know what's your takeaway from all this? Yeah, you know, it's a really, really unusual case. And one of the things that's unique about it is that these relationships between, between large companies and their suppliers are quite sensitive and confidential.

And it's unusual to see a fight like this bubble up to the surface. And when it does, we get a glimpse inside how these kinds of businesses work, how these relationships function. And it gives us really a sense of how high the stakes are in these business relationships. Susan, fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. That was Susan Krasinski-Robertson, the Globe's Retailing Reuters.

reporter. That's it for today. I'm Laura Stone. Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thank you for listening.