Chick-fil-A opens in Erie

ERIE — A Chick-fil-A fast-food restaurant opened Thursday at U.S. Highway 287 and Arapahoe Road in Erie, creating approximately 100 jobs, according to a news release.

Louisiana native Alyssa Anderson was selected by the chain based in College Park, Georgia, to be owner and operator of the new location at 2950 Arapahoe Road.

Anderson first discovered Chick-fil-A while working summers at her father’s ice cream parlor in a shopping mall. After college, she started working in nonprofit leadership and corporate operations. Her interest in Chick-fil-A deepened when her father became a local owner-operator in 2018. Four years later, she joined his restaurant team in Corpus Christi, Texas, and after learning the business, she was selected to become the local owner-operator of a Chick-fil-A in the Alexandria Mall in Louisiana.

To mark the new location in Erie, the corporation will make a $25,000 donation to Feeding America to support the Weld Food Bank’s hunger relief efforts. The location also will participate in the company’s Shared Table program, which redirects surplus food to local nonprofits and has helped to create more than 35 million meals to date.

The new location also will recognize 100 “local heroes” who make an impact in the Erie and Lafayette communities by providing them with free Chick-fil-A entrées for a year.

Chick-fil-A Inc. is the third largest quick-service restaurant company in the United States, employing more than 200,000 people in more than 3,000 restaurants across the United States and Canada. It opened its first restaurant in the United Kingdom this year and plans to open five across that country within the next two years. Its first restaurant in Singapore is set to open late this year.

The new Erie location is open from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Chick-fil-A’s restaurants are famously closed on Sundays, reflected the wishes of its founder, S. Truett Cathy, a Southern Baptist. He opened the Dwarf Grill in 1946 near a Ford Motor Co. assembly plant in the Atlanta suburb of Hapewell, and 15 years later registered the name Chick-fil-A after discovering a pressure fryer that could cook a chicken sandwich at the same time it took to cook a hamburger. 

In the 1960s, his chicken sandwiches were licensed to more than 50 eateries including Waffle House locations and concession stands at the Houston Astrodome. The chain’s first dedicated location opened in 1967 in the food court of the Greenbriar Mall in Atlanta.

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