the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University and later found his way into the Howard Johnson’s organization where he worked his way up to manager status in the Miami area. He told me that he had managed their restaurant located in DuPont Plaza area in downtown Miami at the same time I was operating the Brickell Bridge Restaurant a scant 250 yards away on the west side of the Miami River.
By 1953, Dave was considering the possibility of opening a Dairy Queen franchise. He knew that the margins in soft ice cream sales were high, and he was attempting to learn more about the potential profitability of this business. One of his trips took him to Jacksonville, Florida, during the summer of 1953. Driving on Beach Boulevard in the community of Jacksonville Beach, he noticed a building under construction that looked very much like a Dairy Queen. He stopped in to have a closer look and met Keith G. Cramer and Matthew L. Burns. They informed Dave that this new business would be called “Insta-Burger” and have a menu consisting of eighteen-cent hamburgers, eighteen-cent milkshakes, ten-cent French fries, and ten-cent Coca Cola, root beer, and orange soft drinks.
The concept would be called a self-service drive-in to distinguish the restaurant from a carhop operation, which was the usual kind of service offered by drive-ins during that era. Cramer’s previous experience was at Keith’s Drive-In, a restaurant he operated in Daytona Beach. Both he and his father-in-law, Matthew Burns, were experienced food-service operators, who had recently visited the McDonald’s Speedy Service System drive-in located in San Bernardino, California. The McDonald brothers were not new to the restaurant business either. They had established their first carhop drive-in in 1937. After the war ended, they opened a single very successful carhop drive-in located at Fourteenth and E. Street in San Bernardino.
Although successful, it was turning into a teenage hangout, which tended to discourage a number of would-be customers. Realizing that over three-fourths of their food sales were in hamburgers, the McDonalds decided to redesign the operation, eliminate the carhops, and introduce a new concept which was the idea of self-service. Their focus was on speed of service and low prices. In their rebuilt, but much smaller restaurant, they served a grilled ten-to-the-pound hamburger patty on a bun for fifteen cents. It was dressed with ketchup, mustard, chopped onions, and two pickle slices, their prescribed way of serving a hamburger. Customers could order it any other way at the same price, but they had to wait a long time for their order to be filled.
The McDonald brothers’ new and innovative concept of food service caught on rapidly. The quick speed of service appealed to their new customers. Fresh French fries, milkshakes, and soft drinks rounded out the menu. It was a simple matter for the restaurant to deliver quality food along with very fast service, simply because they had such a limited menu. The customer was, in a sense, waiting on himself under the self-service system. This eliminated costly overhead and assured a high margin of profit.
The year 1948 was the watershed year for what soon became known as the fast-food business. Richard and Maurice McDonald were the pioneers who conceptualized an idea which was to take America and the world by storm. Their food-service methods also marked the beginning of the end for the carhop drive-in industry, which experienced such significant growth in the thirties and forties by catering to an increasingly mobile America. After the McDonalds’ conception opened and became so obviously successful, the public became transfixed with limited-menu, self-service restaurant concepts of all kinds. This was destined to forever change the character and style of the food-service industry in both the United States and abroad.
According to the US Department of Commerce, eating and drinking place sales for 1948 totaled $10.7 billion. Forty years later the McDonald’s system was generating annual food sales of over $14 billion.
The often-told story of Ray Kroc’s introduction to McDonald’s makes the point. In 1954, Kroc was an equipment salesman selling a line of Multimixer milkshake machines. The Multimixer was a machine with five rotary spindles that could make up to five milkshakes at a time. To make a milkshake, special stainless steel containers were filled with several scoops of ice cream, some milk, flavoring, and malt. The containers were placed on the spindle assembly where the contents were blended by high-speed mixers to produce a fine-tasting milkshake. Kroc believed that it was most unlikely that a single restaurant operation would require more than one single Multimixer machine. The McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino had ordered ten of these machines. Kroc was curious about this order and wanted to see for himself why this single establishment needed ten machines with the capacity to whip up fifty milkshakes at a time. He traveled to California and witnessed the phenomenal business McDonald’s was doing. He noted that there was always a steady line of people waiting for service and standing all the way out to the street. The food was good, and it was offered at low prices and served in a clean facility. McDonald’s customers were served in a matter of seconds. Kroc probably decided right there and then that he had to be part of that.
After considerable discussions and negotiations with the two McDonald brothers, Kroc agreed to become the sole agent for the McDonald’s franchising program. He entered into an exclusive contract with the brothers to perform that service.
The success of the McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino attracted the trade press, which began publishing numerous articles about this modern-day food-service phenomena. Restaurateurs from all over the country came to California to see what this remarkable new innovation looked like. Before long, the McDonald’s operation was copied by restaurant operators in many parts of the country who thought they could create a similar success on their own.
After signing an agreement with the McDonald brothers, Kroc returned to Chicago and opened his first McDonald’s restaurant on Lee Street in Des Plaines, Illinois. That historic event occurred in April of 1955. The restaurant was successful right from the beginning.
Cramer and Burns heard about the phenomenal success of the McDonald’s unit, and like many others, wanted to see for themselves. They were greatly impressed. While in California they heard about the Insta-Machines which the inventor, George Read, described as machines capable of automating the production of hamburgers and milkshakes. Deciding to examine these machines while they were there, they met Read who demonstrated how the machines worked. They liked what they saw and ultimately entered into a contract with Read to purchase the machines under a licensing arrangement which required them to open restaurants somewhat similar to the innovative McDonald’s concept. In collaboration with Read, Cramer and Burns designed a restaurant building similar to the one they had just visited. They felt that their concept would work and hoped that Read’s Insta-broiler and Insta-shake machine would give them a competitive advantage in exploiting the opportunity.
The contract with Read established Cramer and Burns as the first territorial licensee and gave them the state of Florida to develop. The agreement gave them the exclusive right to use the Insta-Machines and the Insta- name in their territory. The agreement also authorized them to license others to operate restaurants of a uniform design using the Insta-Machines and the name. For each restaurant opened, Read was to receive a modest franchise fee, his profit on the sale of the Insta-Machines, and a share of the 2 percent royalty fee each of the franchisees were required to pay. Cramer and Burns decided that their first restaurant would be named Insta-Burger, and the building was soon under construction. What they could not have imagined at the time was how much trouble the machines would give them.
The Insta-Hamburger Broiler was something that might have been dreamed up by Rube Goldberg. The machine was about three feet long, one foot wide, and two and a half feet high. It had twelve baskets that held a patty and bun. The baskets traveled around electric calrods to broil them. After one revolution, the patty would slide down a chute into the sauce. The sauce, concocted by Read, Cramer, and Burns, was a hot mixture of ketchup, mustard, relish, and “special seasoning.” Upon receiving an order, the operator would lift the cooked patty from the pan of sauce, place it on the bun, then wrap it in paper to serve. Unfortunately, the machine often failed to mesh properly with the chute, which ground it to a halt and shut down operations until repairs could be made.
The Insta-shake machine used a process of flash freezing a liquid dairy mix into a thick milkshake that was really good. The shakes were so thick they had to be eaten with the wooden spoon they were served with. The flash freezing method was a fairly fast process that helped to justify the Insta-