 According to a case study published by the Henny Penny Corporation in 2011, Chicken Licken is the "largest non-American-owned fried chicken franchise in the world".Chicken Licken was founded in South Africa by George Sombonos, the son of a Greek immigrant restaurant owner.Sombonos learned the restaurant trade in the 1970s at the Dairy Den, his father's restaurant in Ridgeway, a suburb in the southern Inner City region of Johannesburg.