The Ballad of Parker McCollum and Raising Cane’s

We thought it was a cute collab when Snoop Dogg worked the drive-thru at Raising Cane’s. When the brand made the stunt a series and Fort Worth’s own Koe Wetzel got in on the action, we chuckled at the great match. When Post Malone not only got Raising Cane’s to build a storefront near his house in Utah but decorated the thing — in a gorgeous pink, at that — our eyebrows shot up. And when news dropped that Cane’s was not only sponsoring country singer and Texan Parker McCollum’s tour but that he’d be doing a press conference for the brand while in DFW to perform on the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards, our eyebrows fell off our face.

If you don’t know McCollum, aside from his neo-traditionalist top 10 hits on the country charts, he is so invested in his version of authenticity that he has only done two brand deals before this. One is with Loud Lemonade, a hard lemonade for which he developed a signature flavor. The other is with Texas bootmaker Lucchese, which he has worn his whole life. It turns out, Raising Cane’s is another of those lifelong things for McCollum.

He says he’s been ordering the box combo with no slaw, extra toast, and double extra sauce since high school, with a friend’s father opened the first Raising Cane’s that he had ever seen in The Woodlands. “Anytime we were eating, it was Raising Cane’s and we were kind of obsessed with it,” he tells Eater Dallas. “Me and my buddies, on a Saturday afternoon, we’d get $15 from our parents and we’d ride our bikes to Raising Cane’s. The box combo was the cheapest one, so we had money for it and some left over to spend somewhere else.”

The deal has been less of a matchmaking situation and more of a courtship between McCollum and Raising Cane’s owner, Todd Graves, who is a “huge music fan.” Graves says that more and more, he’s encountering young artists who grew up with the brand and have a natural affinity for it, but that often, the business relationship falls into place after he meets and befriends the artists. It’s quite a contrast to the agent-brokered route brand sponsorships usually take.

“I’m into it, I’ll go see Parker at Red Rocks this summer,” Graves says. “With Koe Wetzel, who is his good friend, we were a tour sponsor last year but Charlie, my son, and I are in Montana seeing the show. When they come through Baton Rouge, they come to the original Cane’s and they come to my house. Snoop has been in my treehouse. It’s fun.”

There’s some cachet to partnering with a brand like Cane’s, which isn’t as big as a McDonald’s or Taco Bell, and has managed to position itself in the fast food market as authentic, thanks to that unique Cane’s sauce and some untangible X factor of coolness, while still managing to be a family-friendly brand. It’s a line that not many companies are able to straddle, but Graves doesn’t break a sweat.

“I’m very peculiar on who I align myself with, I don’t like to slap my name on anything or feel like it’s being phoned in,” McCollum says. “Todd and I were buddies a long time before doing business together. If I’m not already a fan of their product, I’m probably not going to do a deal with them regardless of any tangibles of the deal.” He goes on to say he loves the chicken — really, really loves it to be accurate — and then eats a basket of it while fielding questions during a press conference.

Graves gives away what makes his partnerships with musicians work so well for his chicken. It’s that he’s not afraid to go to the wall on a collaboration. Artists talk about what’s comfortable for them and how the brand fits inside it rather than making artists fit inside the brand. For McCollum, that looks pretty straight and narrow. For Post Malone, it looks like creating a Raising Cane’s in his image. “Having an organic [partnership] where the artist can feel good about that — I don’t want to stymie their artistic creation,” Graves says. “If you can just let people roll, and do what they do, then you get a better product.”

It sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s completely disrupting how brands use celebrities. And so far, it’s working.