It's finger lickin' good.

“It’s finger lickin’ good” is best known as the long-running advertising slogan of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). It emerged in mid-20th-century U.S. commercial culture as a folksy, colloquial way to signal irresistible taste—so good you’d lick your fingers after eating. The line is commonly associated with KFC’s brand identity and the Colonel Sanders persona, and it circulated widely through print ads, signage, and especially television/radio commercials. Because it functioned as a corporate tagline rather than a literary utterance, it is often treated as “anonymous” in quotation collections, though it originated within KFC’s marketing/advertising apparatus rather than from an identifiable public speech or authored text.

The phrase uses vivid, informal imagery to equate deliciousness with an unselfconscious physical reaction. “Finger lickin’” implies food eaten by hand and a pleasurable messiness; “good” is deliberately plain, letting the sensory claim do the work. As a slogan, it compresses a promise of taste and satisfaction into a memorable, rhythmic colloquialism (including the dropped “g” in “lickin’”), projecting down-home authenticity and indulgence. Its cultural significance lies less in philosophical depth than in its effectiveness as a piece of American advertising language—an example of how a short commercial line can become a widely recognized idiom.

“Finger-lickin’ good.”; “So good you’ll be lickin’ your fingers.”; “It’s finger-licking good.”