Ray Kroc

Raymond Albert Kroc was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1902 and held several early jobs, including paper‑cup salesman and musician, before becoming the exclusive U.S. distributor for the Multimixer milkshake machine in the late 1930s and 1940s. As a traveling Multimixer salesman he encountered the McDonald brothers’ restaurant in San Bernardino, California in 1954 and was struck by their assembly‑line method for producing hamburgers, fries and shakes quickly and consistently. Convinced the concept could scale, Kroc negotiated to become a franchising agent and in 1955 founded McDonald’s System, Inc., opening the first of his new restaurants in Des Plaines, Illinois on April 15, 1955. He emphasized uniform standards — portion sizes, cooking techniques, packaging — and required franchisees to operate their own units, creating a system that produced predictable food quality and fast service across locations. Kroc pursued an aggressive expansion strategy and, with the advice of executives such as Harry J. Sonneborn, adopted a real‑estate model in which the corporation controlled property and leased it to franchisees — a financial structure that proved crucial to McDonald’s profitability and growth. In 1961 Kroc bought the McDonald brothers’ equity in the business for $2.7 million, securing control of the brand and accelerating nationwide and then international expansion. Kroc served as president (1955–1968), chairman (1968–1977), and senior chairman (1977 until his death) of McDonald’s, overseeing the company’s rise from a few dozen restaurants to thousands worldwide; by the time of his death in 1984 there were roughly 7,500 McDonald’s locations. He also established Hamburger University to train franchise managers and helped professionalize franchising as a business model, leaving a complex legacy celebrated for business innovation and critiqued for aggressive tactics toward the McDonald brothers and for broader social impacts of fast food.