Do you remember Burger Chef? We had at least one in Flint while I was growing up. I remember this as being far better than McDonalds or Burger King. I remember that those places didn’t even compare to the excitement of going to a Burger Chef. There was one that was fairly close to my house. My father and took me there on more than one occasion. I remember they had the first “kids meals” back in those days with the best prizes.
Well, I found out a thing or two in the course of my personal research project about Burger Chef. The franchise began as an engineer and his two sons, Frank and Donald Thomas who were (also engineers), built a milkshake machine and sold their product (the shake not the machine) at fairs and carnivals. They then developed a conveyored broiler for burgers and began to also offer burgers. The broiler, quite revolutionairy, was the first of it’s kind and was able to cook a patty faster than any known method at that time. Among other innovations, like the first real-time inventory linked point of sale cash registers (1974), they pioneered the concept of the “kids meal.”
They settled in a permanent location and quickly expanded, under the franchise model, to 584 locations until they were sold to General Foods in 1975 for $15 million. In 1981 Hardee’s purchased the franchise from General Foods and began to convert or close existing Burger Chef’s. By 1982, most of them were closed but, due to the timeline owners were given, some stayed open until as late as 1996. Hardee’s offers selected items from the Burger Chef menu on occasion, such as “The Big Shef.”