Ray Kroc

When peace came back, Kroc picked up where he left off.

America was booming.

Dairy Queen, Taste Freeze, A&W Root Beer, new soft serve franchises were starting everywhere.

In a good year, he sold 5,000 multi-mixers.

One year, he sold 8,000.

But by the early 1950s, Kroc could see an end coming.

Multimixers lived and died with soda fountains.

That's where milkshakes were made.

And soda fountains were disappearing.

Liquid Carbonic, one of the big manufacturers, had just voted to shut down their fountain division entirely.

Walgreens was ripping them out of stores.

The industry that had made Ray's living for 17 years was starting to shrink for the first time.

And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

He needed a new product.

Then calls started coming in from all over the country.

Operators wanted to know about this place in California run by two brothers named McDonald.

And they were running eight multi-mixers simultaneously, 40 milkshakes churning at once.

Ray had been selling multimixers for 17 years, and he knew every soda fountain, every dairy bar, every drive-in worth knowing.

Nobody ran eight multimixers.

What the hell, he thought.