Dairy Queen

• 1. Introduction

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  Dairy Queen sold more than 1,600 servings of a brand-new dessert in the first two hours it was on sale. The seller was Sherb Noble, who ran an ice cream store in Kankakee, Illinois. The dessert was soft serve, and that first rush hinted at what was coming. Today the company is headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota.

  This documentary follows that dessert from a single friendly experiment to a chain with thousands of stores. Along the way it asks some odd questions. Why does a company built on frozen dairy refuse to call its product ice cream? Why does an employee turn a cup upside down at the counter? Who steals a giant red spoon? And how did one American state end up with its own hot menu?

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• 2. Soft-Serve Beginnings

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  John Fremont McCullough, known as J.F., worked out the soft-serve formula in 1938 with his son Alex. The two needed someone to put it in front of customers. They turned to a friend and loyal customer, Sherb Noble, and convinced him to carry it.

  In 1940 Noble and the McCulloughs opened the first store to carry the Dairy Queen name, in Joliet, Illinois. Noble owned and operated it himself. It opened on the 22nd of June 1940.

  The Joliet shop closed in the 1950s. Even so, the building at 501 N Chicago Street is a city-designated landmark today.

  The system that would carry the name far beyond Joliet was franchising, and the chain has relied on it since that very first year.

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• 3. The Franchise Machine

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  Ten stores in 1941 became 100 by 1947. By 1950 the count had reached 1,446, and by 1955 it stood at 2,600.

  Canada's first location opened in 1952 inside a quick freeze plant in Melville, Saskatchewan. A standalone store followed in Estevan in 1953. The oldest freestanding location that still survives opened in Port Colborne in 1954.

  In 1962 the company became International Dairy Queen, Inc. This parent firm sits above American Dairy Queen Corporation, Dairy Queen Canada Inc., and other entities that franchise the concept. It bought the Orange Julius chain in 1987, and Berkshire Hathaway acquired it in 1998.

  During the 1990s, investors began buying stores that individual owners had run. They hoped economies of scale would lift profits. One of them, Vasari, LLC, became the second-largest Dairy Queen operator in the country, running 70 stores across Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. It closed any store that lost money. On the 30th of October 2017 Vasari filed for bankruptcy and announced it would close 29 stores, ten of them in the Texas Panhandle.

  The price of entry is steep. A new owner needs $400,000 in liquid capital and a net worth of at least $750,000. The initial franchise fee is $45,000, and the total investment runs from $1.5 million to $2.5 million. Owners then pay a 4% royalty plus an advertising royalty of 5-6%. The agreement lasts 20 years and can be renewed. The franchise figures cite 5,700 operating units.

  Dairy Queen offers no financing of its own. Third-party lenders cover the franchise fee, startup costs, equipment, inventory, accounts receivable and payroll.

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• 4. Many Kinds Of Store

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  Red mansard roofs mark the Brazier locations, which carry larger food menus and second floors used for storage. The Brazier system debuted in Georgia in 1958, when many owners were adding hamburgers, hot dogs and fries to compete with other fast food chains. It featured broiled burgers and hot dogs and later became the national standard. Operator Jim Cruikshank developed it. Dairy Queen vice president Lane Schmiesing said Cruikshank chose the name Brazier "after he decided the charcoal broiler was the way he wanted to prepare his burger line."

  Limited Brazier locations sell hot dogs and barbecue beef or pork sandwiches, and sometimes fries and chicken, but never hamburgers. Full Brazier restaurants serve a typical fast-food menu of burgers, fries, grilled and crispy chicken, frozen treats and hot dogs. Some of the simplest stores offer only a short menu of frozen treats and close for winter, while most restaurants serve hot food all year.

  Mall food courts got the Treat Center format. It served drinks and foods from the Orange Julius menu alongside the Dairy Queen treats, and the company preferred it for small new locations. Some early Treat Centers also sold popcorn from Karmelkorn.

  In December 2001 Chattanooga, Tennessee, hosted the first two Dairy Queen Grill and Chill restaurants in the United States. The format is now the concept for new and renovated full-service restaurants, in larger buildings with a completely new design. Menus can include breakfast, GrillBurgers and grilled sandwiches. Customers still order at the counter, but food comes to the table, and self-serve fountains allow free refills.

  In 2023 a large red spoon statue vanished from the front of a Grill & Chill in Phoenix, Arizona. It turned up three days later on a baseball field beside a Phoenix middle school, and it was returned to the restaurant.

  In one state, though, none of these menus governs the hot food.

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• 5. Small Towns And Texas

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  Texas has more Dairy Queens than any other state, and every one of them is owned and operated by a franchisee. Minnesota leads when stores are counted per person, using the 2010 census.

  All Texas locations use a separate hot menu called Texas Country Foods, even when the building looks like a Brazier or a Grill & Chill. Hungr-Buster burgers replace the Brazier and GrillBurger offerings. Only in Texas can customers order the Dude chicken-fried steak sandwich, steak finger country baskets, T-Brand tacos, or the BeltBuster, a half-pound double meat hamburger.

  The Texas Dairy Queen Operators' Council runs its own marketing website, separate from the national one. For many years the chain's Texas spokesman was Bob Phillips, host of the syndicated television series Texas Country Reporter. Dairy Queen co-sponsored his program at the time.

  By the end of 2014 the company counted more than 6,400 stores in 27 countries. About 4,500 of them, roughly 70%, were in the United States, and more than 1,400 sat outside the United States and Canada. The largest Dairy Queen in the world is in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

  In the 1950s and 1960s a Dairy Queen was a fixture of social life in small Midwestern and Southern towns. It turns up often in stories and memoirs of small-town America. Larry McMurtry wrote Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond, Robert Inman wrote Dairy Queen Days, and Bob Greene wrote Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights. S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders belongs on the same shelf, as does Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation.

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• 6. Menu Inventions

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  Malts and milkshakes joined the menu in 1950, followed by banana splits in 1951. Dilly Bars arrived in 1955, brought to the franchise by Robert Litherland, co-owner of a store in Moorhead, Minnesota. Mr. Misty slush treats came in 1961. They were later renamed Misty Slush, then Arctic Rush, and as of 2017 the company again calls them Misty Slush. The year 1964 brought Jets, Curly Tops and Freezes.

  David Skjerven invented the Buster Bar in 1962 in Grafton, North Dakota. It is vanilla soft serve covered in peanuts and chocolate. In 1971 Forrest "Frosty" Chapman introduced the Peanut Buster Parfait at his franchise in St. Peter, Minnesota. It layers peanuts, hot fudge and vanilla soft serve. The Chicken Strip Basket followed in 1995, with chicken strips, fries and cream gravy. In Canada the cream gravy is called simply gravy. The menu also lists sundaes and a blended coffee drink called the MooLatte.

  Breeze, launched in 1990, was a frozen yogurt dessert made with nonfat, cholesterol-free yogurt as a lower-calorie option. A company representative said regular soft serve has 35 calories per ounce, against 25 for the yogurt. Even so, the company phased the yogurt out of all its stores in 2001, citing a lack of demand.

  In May 2016 Dairy Queen committed to buying eggs only from approved cage-free suppliers in the United States and Canada by 2025. Since the pledge, 67 percent of shell eggs, liquid eggs and house ingredients containing eggs in the United States have converted or been reformulated without eggs. In Canada the figure is 39 percent. Some regard cage-free production as more humane than the conventional methods that dominate in both countries. There is no mention of the commitment in restaurants outside those two countries.

  US Food and Drug Administration labeling rules require ice cream to contain at least 10% butterfat, and Dairy Queen soft serve contains only 5%. That gap is why the company does not use the term ice cream for its frozen dairy products.

  The next item in this story is named for a storm.

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• 7. The Blizzard

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  In 1962 a conventional thick milkshake called a Blizzard sold for the premium price of 50 cents. Samuel Temperato invented that original version, offered in vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, with malt on request. The 1960s also introduced the custom of flipping the shake upside down when handing it to the customer.

  The Blizzard most people know arrived in 1985, a year in which Dairy Queen sold more than 100 million of them. It is soft serve blended mechanically with mix-ins such as sundae toppings or pieces of cookies, brownies and candy. Some argue the idea came from the concrete served by Ted Drewes, a St. Louis business.

  The name describes the texture. The treat is so cold and thick that the cup can be held upside down without anything falling out. Employees often demonstrate this. Company policy says one Blizzard per order should be flipped. If that does not happen, the customer may ask for a coupon for a free Blizzard on the next visit, though the franchise owner decides.

  Oreo cookies, chocolate chip cookie dough, M&M's and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are among the popular flavors. So are Heath Bar and Butterfinger, which Canadians know as Skor and Crispy Crunch. Canada also has a Smarties Blizzard, discontinued temporarily in 2015 and added back in 2018. Seasonal flavors include pumpkin pie in October and cotton candy in June.

  On the 26th of July 2010 Dairy Queen introduced a mini Blizzard in a 6 oz. cup. For the 25th anniversary, two special flavors appeared: Strawberry Golden Oreo and Buster Bar. Salted Caramel Truffle came in 2015 for the Blizzard's 30th anniversary and the chain's 75th, then left the menu. More than 170 flavors have been featured since 1985. A Blizzard Cake, in flavors such as Oreo and Reese's, is aimed at celebrations and birthdays.

  In 2011 International Dairy Queen asked a court for a preliminary injunction against Yogubliz Inc, a small California frozen yogurt chain. It argued that the names Blizzberry and Blizz Frozen Yogurt could confuse shoppers because they resembled Blizzard. U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner denied the request.

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• 8. Mascots, Slogans, Logos

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  Little Miss Dairy Queen began appearing on Pennsylvania signage in 1961. She wore a Dutch bonnet that echoed the ellipse logo, a pinafore apron over her dress, and wooden shoes.

  Dennis the Menace appeared in the marketing from 1971 until December 2002. He was dropped because the company felt children could no longer relate to him. From 2006 to July 2011 the ads centered on a large mouth licking its lips, which morphed into the logo.

  In 2011 the agency Grey New York replaced the mouth with outlandish spots starring a dapper, mustached man played by John Behlmann. After announcing tasty menu offers, he would do something outrageous. He blew bubbles with kittens inside them, water skied while boxing, and broke a piñata that spilled out the Olympic gymnastics great Mary Lou Retton. The same firm later made commercials built around odd situation titles, with the logo placed somewhere in the scene. A man with an English accent narrated all of them.

  Texas ads often end with a waving Texas flag, the logo and the line "Eat Like A Texan." Earlier Texas slogans included "That's what I like about Texas," "Nobody beats DQ Treats & Eats," "DQ is Value Country," and "This is DQ Country." In the early 1990s, Texas ads for children's meals featured the Fun Bunch Munch. The group included Kangachew the kangaroo, Hungrizzly the bear and Chompanzee the chimpanzee.

  From 1979 until 1981 the chain used the slogan "It's a real treat!" For many years it said "We treat you right." The early-to-mid 1990s brought "Hot Eats, Cool Treats" and "Think DQ." Later came "Meet Me at DQ" and "DQ: Something Different." In early 2011 the line was "So Good It's RiDQulous," with the logo worked into the word. The mid-to-late 2010s used "Fan Food, Not Fast Food."

  The original logo was a stylized text sign with a soft-serve cone at one end. In the late 1950s the familiar red ellipse took over. Its first shape was lopsided, with one side point reaching farther than the other. A yellow ovoid Brazier sign tucked diagonally below it. In the late 1960s a yellow trapezoid Brazier sign replaced that shape to match the roofline of a new store design. The 1990s brought a boxier look, with red strips along the roofline carrying the slogan of the era and a large blue sign recasting the early soft-serve cone.

  The name DQ became official in 2001, though people had used it interchangeably with Dairy Queen for decades. The font stayed the same as in the original signage from 60 years earlier. In early 2007 the company italicized the letters and added arced lines, an orange one above for hot foods and a blue one below for soft serve. The registered mark moved next to the letter Q. It was the first overhaul in almost 70 years, and the company said it would show brand growth and reflect the fun and enjoyment of its products. Advertising observers called it an unneeded update to a trusted brand and found the new features distracting.

  The original signage still hangs at older locations and at restaurants with a retro design. In 2015 the Milwaukee model railroad company Wm. K. Walthers released officially licensed HO scale 1:87 replicas of two restaurants, one from the 1950s with the original logo and one from 2007 with the current logo.

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