"Once the system is established, it is easy to institute it at each new store," he adds. That is the reason KFC opened only 10 stores in the first five years, and then stepped up the pace to 100 stores by June 1996 and 1,500 by 2005.

The foreign fast food chains also have a strict evaluation system for choosing sites, based on where to locate and how much to invest in a specific region.

There is a training system as well. McDonald's trains its staff at its corporate schools, Hamburger University. One is located in Hong Kong. At KFC, each new employee must go through a 200-hour training program and attend courses at a KFC education development center especially tailored for China.

By comparison, homegrown fast food chains either modeled themselves after their foreign counterparts superficially, or were only interested in expansion.

"Chinese-flavored fast food should have sold better, but they could not live up to market expectations. The quality of the food was not consistently good and consumers had to wait too long before the food arrived," Su says.