07/10/2023
The first McDonald’s restaurant was opened in 1948 in San Bernardino California. Today we tend to think of McDonald’s as the pioneer fast food franchised restaurant. But by the time that first McDonald’s opened, there were already over 100 Dairy Queens.
In 1938 in Moline, Illinois, John Fremont McCullough and his son Alex developed a way to make soft-serve ice cream. They convinced a friend to offer the product at his ice cream store in Kankakee, Illinois, and it was an immediate smash hit with his customers. Realizing they had a great business opportunity but needing a better way to dispense the ice cream, the McCulloughs soon discovered a freezer invented by Harry Oltz of Hammond, Indiana that dispensed a steady flow of ice cream. The rest, of course, is history.
The McCulloughs opened the first “Dairy Queen” (taking its name from the term the elder McCullough used for “cow”), in Joliet, Illinois on June 22, 1940, eighty-three years ago today. By 1947 they had over 100 franchised locations and just three years later they had over a thousand. Today there are more than 6,000 Dairy Queen locations, in 27 countries.
The first American fast food chain restaurants were White Castle, and that is a story for another day.
