Dairy Queen

Dairy Queen sells soft serve with a curl on top and burgers off a grill, usually from the same building. Franchisees own almost every restaurant, so the operator behind the counter is a local business rather than head office. Berkshire Hathaway has held the parent company since the nineties.

Dairy Queen History below covers the dairy that worked out the formula, the first store and the estate the chain trades from now. Bloomington, Minnesota holds the head office. Texas carries more restaurants than any other state.

Dairy Queen History

John Fremont McCullough worked out a soft serve formula with his son Alex in 1938. Sherb Noble ran the Illinois ice cream shop that agreed to test it. The queue that afternoon settled the argument. Dairy Queen opened its first store in Joliet, Illinois in 1940, selling nothing but the frozen product itself. Franchising carried it outward fast, from ten stores in 1941 to a hundred by 1947 and 1,446 by 1950.

Brazier put burgers, hot dogs and fries beside the soft serve from the late fifties onward. That decision is why so many towns know DQ for supper rather than for dessert alone. The Blizzard arrived in 1985 and sold more than a hundred million cups in its first year. Turning the cup upside down before handing it across became the proof that it was thick enough to hold. Fries and onion rings came with them.

Berkshire Hathaway bought International Dairy Queen in 1998 and still owns the company. Bloomington, Minnesota holds the head office, and more than four thousand restaurants trade across the United States. Orange Julius counters sit inside a share of them, a second brand the group picked up along the way. Franchisees own almost all of the estate, which is rare for a chain that reached this size. The soft serve recipe itself never changed.

Dairy Queen Menus and Details

Dairy Queen Menus below split five ways, one page each for prices, off-menu builds, allergens, the afternoon drink window and the autumn lineup.

Every Blizzard, Stackburger, basket, cone, sundae, shake and cake priced by size, with calories beside each figure.

Birthday Cake, Puppy Chow, Butterbeer and the rest, with the ingredients to name at the counter.

Which treats and which food declare milk, egg, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts or sesame, item by item.

The weekday drink window, what it covers and the deal figure that comes with it.

Pumpkin Pie, Brown Sugar Cookie Dough and the coffee cooler that opens autumn.