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Ray Kroc Bio, Founder of McDonald's

Ray Kroc was born on October 5, 1902. Though the official version of McDonald's history considers him the founder of the franchise, he was in fact an early franchisee. A Chicago native and World War I ambulance driver, he held a variety of jobs between the 1920s and 1950s, and while working as a traveling salesman of milkshake machines, he met Richard and Maurice MacDonald. The MacDonald brothers had opened their first McDonald's hamburger stand in 1940 in San Bernardino, California, and in 1948 had revamped their approach to restaurateuring with the Speedee Service System, which applied Henry Ford's assembly line tactics to food preparation. Rather than making food to order, theirs was the first restaurant to prepare food continuously, assuring that nothing would cool down or go stale by offering such a limited menu that a steady stream of customers would consume everything before it was given time to accumulate in the waiting area.

Richard called this "fast food," and in order to reassure customers, the food prep area was made visible to them so that everything could be seen to be clean, orderly, and fresh-made. The savings passed on to the customer made the McDonald's restaurants popular with families. They began franchising the restaurant in 1953, a year before meeting Kroc. Kroc became a franchisee in 1955, opening a McDonald's in Des Plaines outside Chicago, and he was the one who saw the real potential of the concept -- as others had, who visited McDonald's restaurants and, inspired just as the brothers had been by Ford's assembly line, went on to found Burger King, Burger Chef, Whataburger, Hardee's, and Taco Bell, all of them using similar techniques.

Kroc was ambitious. He opened new restaurants aggressively, allegedly opening a location across the street from the brothers' original restaurant in order to hurt their business; by that point Kroc ran more locations than the founders did, and in 1961 he bought the company outright, agreeing to continue to pay the brothers a 1% royalty. Under Kroc, McDonald's expanded globally, though it never deviated from the original principles the brothers had in mind.

Kroc eventually relocated to San Diego, and bought the Major League Baseball franchise the San Diego Padres. He died of heart failure on January 14, 1984.

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