In-N-Out Burger Read online

  Perhaps as a result of Harry’s brief flirtation with communism and his disgust with economic inequity, he always exhibited a soft spot for those in need. He had a real eye for potential and took a special interest in developing those individuals who worked for him. While Steve Gibbs managed the raceway, Harry paid for him to take a Dale Carnegie course. (Carnegie, of course, was the early American guru of self-improvement, salesmanship, and corporate training, and the author of perennial best seller How to Win Friends and Influence People.) “He was always trying to make things better,” recalled Gibbs. “I was a blue-collar guy. You know he didn’t have to that.”

  It was during this time that Harry Snyder met Paul Althouse at the burly dragster’s San Dimas shop—Harry was impressed enough to make him an offer. Althouse (husband of Valerie Althouse, another Dale dragster) had grown up in the trailer parks of Baldwin Park and on In-N-Out burgers. By the time he met Harry, the veteran Southern California racer and master of the four-speed had also made a name for himself fixing cars and building innovative street hot rods that were fast and affordable. The ’65 Chevelle he built for Geno Redd was one of the first to have a 375-horsepower 396-engine; the Chevelle went on to set a record time of 11.54 seconds, and win a major race at the Lions Dragstrip in 1965.

  Every three or four months, Harry made an appearance at Althouse’s shop to have some work done. Their initial interactions were simple enough. “At first, I didn’t even know who he was,” Althouse claimed. “I knew the boys who worked at the track.” Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, a teenaged Guy Snyder came to him and said, “My dad wants to talk to you.” The two men knew each other slightly at best, but Harry asked Althouse if he would like to open a Tuneup Masters on his property. “He offered to finance it 100 percent,” said Althouse. It was an extraordinary opportunity, and Althouse was as surprised as he would have been if he had been told he’d won the lottery. Still, he chose to decline the offer. “I told him it sounds like a good deal to a point, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t have the education to do it and do it properly. He very much appreciated that.” Nevertheless, Althouse remained within the Snyder family’s orbit for several decades after that first meeting in the family’s living room. Said Althouse, “Harry was the kind of man that if he believed in you, there was nothing he wouldn’t have done.”

  Harry used to say, perhaps only half-jokingly, that one of the reasons he had invested in the Dale was to keep his sons off the streets and out of trouble. For the Snyder boys, their jobs at the Dale became more than just work and a way to earn pocket money. Those days at the track became a way of life. Like the In-N-Out Burger stand, the raceway became the Snyders’ playground. Working the snack stands and being around the cars and racing became more than just a hobby for Guy and Rich; it became a lifelong pursuit. The brothers raced as soon as they were old enough, and they began collecting and fixing up cars: muscle cars, funny cars, old Willys, and roadsters. It was during those days at the track that the Snyder brothers’ primary interests took root and their futures took shape. At the raceway, Guy’s singular love affair with drag racing and Rich’s enduring love for running In-N-Out were born. As Steve Gibbs explained, “The boys got the bug, particularly Guy. He was a real racing nut, but Rich, he took the company.”

  Around 1972, Harry sold his interest in the raceway. Five years later, the Dale was shuttered for good and the tracks were plowed under to make way for a giant Miller Brewery. Friends said they thought the track had never been more than a fun and profitable sideline for Harry and that it was his burger chain that was always his first priority. Although Harry Snyder ended his formal business relationship with the Irwindale Raceway, that did not necessarily signal the end of In-N-Out Burger’s involvement with hot rods and drag racing. If anything, the Irwindale days were just the beginning of a lifelong association between the Snyders and dragsters. But for now, Harry’s full attention turned to In-N-Out Burger. There were about ten In-N-Out Burger locations, and the independent chain was not only growing but prospering. At the same time, the little chain was facing some serious issues concerning the future direction of the company. While In-N-Out operated exactly as it had on the first day it opened for business in 1948, the same could not be said for the rest of the fast-food industry.

  CHAPTER 7

  Harry shrugged his shoulders at the rapid changes taking place all around him and quietly dug his heels into the ground. Fast food was spreading at a fevered pitch, cementing its place in American culture. Before long it made up a major piece of the nation’s economy as well. As it happened, the dawn of what came to be thought of as the all-American meal collided with a new era in American history: the Nuclear Age. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik—the first satellite to orbit the earth—ushering in the space race. Back on earth, the public had become fascinated with technology. A belief in science ruled the day, and it was characterized by a veneration of shiny new machinery and the magic that it could perform. Bell Labs began to create artificial intelligence, and scientists developed a crude network of computers that linked government agencies and universities that later came to be known as the Internet. There were other marvels of modern science with a more immediate impact; on April 12, 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk announced to the world that he had discovered a vaccination for polio that was “safe, effective, and potent.”

  The idea that technology could enhance the everyday lives of American citizens was widely circulated. It was, after all, during this time that the Eisenhower administration came up with its “Atoms for Peace” campaign, a propaganda effort aimed at bolstering the image of nuclear energy in the public’s mind. It was none other than Walt Disney who was tapped to popularize the drive; Disney’s amusement park as well as his publishing, film, and television empire had made him, according to Time magazine, “one of the most influential men alive.” And in 1957, Disney (in conjunction with the U.S. Navy and General Dynamics, manufacturer of the nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus) produced a live-action/animated feature called Our Friend the Atom.*

  The wealthier postwar American society increasingly turned to science and technology in order to solve its problems and make daily life easier. Furthermore, new gadgets and gizmos were no longer the purview of the rich. Teenagers bought cheap transistor radios and record players; their mothers enjoyed a host of new appliances in their kitchens. Automatic electric washers and dryers, steam irons, electric can openers, and electric coffee pots all offered more than just time-saving convenience—they promised perfection, too. It was only a matter of time then before modern technology filtered down to how Americans ate, the way their food was prepared, and even what it was that they were consuming.

  Emblematic of this radical new culinary trend was the introduction in 1953 of the frozen “TV Dinner” invented by a C. A. Swanson & Sons of Omaha food technologist named Betty Cronin. The prepackaged meal of turkey and potatoes (sold for ninety-eight cents) could go from the oven to a TV tray—and when finished, just as swiftly and neatly to the garbage can. Swanson’s “Quick Frozen Turkey Dinner” was an immediate hit. Initially expecting to sell five thousand units, the company actually sold 10 million meals during the TV Dinner’s first year on the market.

  Like Cronin, food technologists across the country were spending time in their kitchen laboratories and hatching all sorts of new ways to process, mimic, reduce preparation, speed up cooking, and reconstitute everything fit for human consumption. During the 1950s, when Americans snapped up over $1 billion worth of frozen foods, a number of food-processing firsts emerged. The Seeman Brothers of New York introduced the world’s first instant iced tea, the White Rose Redi-Tea, in 1953. A year later, as the prices for cocoa spiked, Robert Welch, a Boston candy maker, gathered a group of chemists and came up with a less expensive but satisfactory replacement. In 1959, General Foods Corporation began marketing a powdered, non-carbonated, orange-flavored beverage called Tang.

  It was the era of easy, instant food. And nowhere did this buddin
g emphasis on the frozen, dehydrated, prepackaged, and automated find a more welcoming home than the growing fast-food industry.

  Leading the charge was McDonald’s. Under Ray Kroc, Dick and Mac McDonald’s basic principle of a high-volume, low-cost operation had became nothing less than a string of large and efficient food manufacturing systems. The infrared heat lamps deployed by the McDonald brothers in the early days to keep pre-made burgers and fries hot and ready and their multiple meat patty molding devices gave way to a whole slew of innovations. Kroc hired engineers and technicians dedicated solely to upgrading and mechanizing the McDonald’s process. There was the “clamshell grill” that sliced cooking time in half by cooking both sides of the meat patty simultaneously, the deceptively simple V-shaped aluminum scoop with a funnel at the end that could pack a bag of fries neatly in one fell scoop. Each order required little more than a quick assembly from a ready-made food kit.

  McDonald’s was not alone. Most of the leading chains looked for new and cheaper ways to keep up with the staggering output of food; as a result, entirely new industries devoted to the manufacture and processing of food and artificial flavors mirrored in no small measure the growth of the fast-food industry. Computerized timers were deployed to set off alarms when it was time to flip burgers, conveyor belt flame-broilers cooked frozen patties into hamburgers in under sixty seconds. Cybernetic deep fryers automatically cooked fries to perfection, and ketchup and mustard were applied to buns in uniform amounts by electronic pumps.

  As early as 1931, White Castle, the Wichita-based chain, replaced fresh beef with frozen square beef patties. Some ten years later, the chain came up with a time-saving system of punching five holes in each hamburger to facilitate quick and thorough cooking so that the patties didn’t need to be turned. But it wasn’t until Ray Kroc made the shift from fresh to frozen that nearly the entire industry followed.

  In 1968 there were about one thousand McDonald’s restaurants across the country pulling in $355.4 million in sales. To supply them all, the company was using 175 different meat suppliers. After twelve years of insisting on fresh beef, reluctantly, and after much internal opposition, Kroc made the switch. He agreed after a small, family-owned Pennsylvania meat de-boning firm called Equity Meat Company had proved that it could standardize its system of cryogenically freezing beef patties that didn’t leave the meat desiccated and tasteless. Equity made it possible to preserve frozen patties for extended periods of time. With few exceptions, this proved to be a point of no return for the rapidly expanding fast-food industry.

  Soon, Equity was converted from a strictly beef-boning operation into a manufacturing facility. With McDonald’s as its lead customer, Equity (later renamed Keystone Foods) became the world’s largest hamburger supplier. By 1970, the company reported manufacturing 1.5 million pounds of hamburger annually in the United States. Two years later, that number rose dramatically to 50 million pounds.

  Coincidentally, the same year that Betty Cronin invented the TV dinner, John Richard “J. R.” Simplot, the country’s largest supplier of fresh potatoes, devised a canning and dehydration quick-freeze plant that could freeze french-fried potatoes on a mass scale. More important, Simplot’s frozen product was nearly indistinguishable in taste, color, crispness, and uniformity from the fries made from fresh potatoes. In 1965, Simplot, a tough-as-nails Idaho entrepreneur and farmer, met with Kroc and convinced him to buy his quick-freeze potatoes. They were both self-made men, and each had made a fortune on their own terms. Simplot seemed to understand that there was really only one point on which he could persuade Kroc. As he later recalled, “I told him frozen fries would allow him to better control the quality and consistency of McDonald’s potato supply.”

  Before long, Simplot became the frozen french fry supplier for such outfits as Burger King, Wendy’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. (Soon, food conglomerates such as Lamb Weston and Carnation would provide other chains and restaurants with their flash-frozen french fries.) From frozen, processed potatoes, J. R. Simplot went on to build an estimated $3.6 billion empire on devising “labor-saving, value added foods,” for commercial use.* The shift from fresh to frozen was only one part of the changing fast-food equation. In 1946, the U.S. Department of Agriculture required that the fat content in ground beef classified as hamburger not exceed 30 percent. As a result, meat suppliers filled in the remainder with a number of cheaper non-beef additives and meat extenders such as soy protein that could absorb moisture and reduce cooking time. Low commercial value parts of cattle like tripe and cheek were ground into the beef while nitrates were used to enhance the meat’s pink color. As Jim Williams (president of Golden State Foods Corporation, a large California hamburger supplier) told author John Love, “You would negotiate a price with the drive-in and then find a way to make it work economically. All-beef hamburger was a myth. There were very few additives that weren’t used.”

  During these years, an entirely new field of artificial and chemical food additives developed, and the exploding fast-food industry was beginning to rely heavily on them. In Fast Food Nation, author Eric Schlosser’s polemic on the industry, he lists page after withering page of the numerous chemicals, additives, and coloring agents lacing the leading chains’ salads, soft drinks, condiments, and sandwich buns. In one particularly appetite-crushing passage, Schlosser listed forty-seven chemical ingredients used to make the strawberry flavoring found in a Burger King strawberry milk shake. The relentless competition and new preparation techniques had transformed the entire industry that had once uniformly prided itself on the personal touch.

  Harry Snyder was having none of it. Over in Baldwin Park, things looked much the same as they had when artist Jack Schmidt painted the original In-N-Out Burger stand in 1948. Harry was determined to do things exactly as they had always been done. He had developed and clung to his own values, focusing on quality products and quality people. Harry had clarity about his decision to stick with what by the late 1950s was already beginning to appear old-fashioned.

  Around 1961, Harry’s nod to advanced technology was to switch from gas to electric grills—but the In-N-Out hamburgers still required the human touch. It was the stores’ managers who continued to flip the chain’s burgers. There were no infrared heat lamps or microwave ovens, no prepackaged or frozen food at Harry’s drive-through. All burgers and fries were made to order. To help cope with the increased output of burgers, Harry added a second grill to the original kitchen in Baldwin Park.

  To Harry’s mind, there was just no substitute for the real thing. All hamburgers were made from fresh, 100 percent additive-, filler-, and preservative-free beef. By 1963, as many of the leading chains were beginning to use frozen beef patties,* Harry Snyder hired In-N-Out’s first butcher. He wanted to exert more control over his products, not just find a way to wring more money out of cheaper products. At one point, he purchased a ranch and hoped to raise his own beef, but found it just wasn’t cost effective. Instead, Harry built a facility near store Number One in Baldwin Park where his specially selected chucks were delivered. There In-N-Out’s butcher boned, hand-cut the chuck’s front ribs and shoulder (Harry insisted that no other part of the steer was ever used), ground it up into beef, and molded it into hamburger patties before delivering them fresh to each store. “This way,” the company later proclaimed, enabled it to “completely control the patty-making process.” While it appeared that In-N-Out Burger was either fanatical, staying behind the times, or both, Harry’s decision proved to be a critical moment in deciding just how the company would define itself.

  In-N-Out took the same approach with its french fries—the Snyders still made theirs by hand. Burlap sacks of whole, fresh Kennebec potatoes specially grown for In-N-Out arrived in Baldwin Park and were distributed to each store where they were washed, peeled, cut, and cooked in cholesterol-free, 100 percent vegetable oil. Frequently, the potatoes were picked in the morning and delivered to In-N-Out the same evening. Harry made sure to scrutinize the freshly delivered
sacks. They were inspected for starch content and a test batch of fries was made up right away. If the potatoes weren’t up to muster, the whole truckload was rejected.

  In an industry that was substituting chemically processed, prepackaged, and frozen food for the real thing, In-N-Out continued to use traditional sponge-dough buns, fresh-baked daily, that took several hours to rise—its competitors took to purchasing buns injected with chemicals that considerably reduced the rising time of the dough. As others began using cheaper and less labor-intensive concentrated ice milk mixtures (with preservatives that could be frozen later and reconstituted into milkshakes), In-N-Out refused to use anything but 100 percent ice cream in their milkshakes.

  By the time that Harry had opened about half a dozen In-N-Out Burgers, television had eclipsed radio’s longtime dominance. TV ownership had grown exponentially, from 3 million households in 1949 to two-thirds of all American homes in 1955. If the American public had come to view the fast-food hamburger as the food of a new America, this belief was soon popularized by television commercials that could blanket the message over the widest territory possible.

  Until the early 1950s, most American restaurants relied largely on word of mouth. Few if any advertised beyond placing an ad in the local Yellow Pages or announcing their establishments on billboards placed alongside highways. But the explosion of fast-food chains was accompanied by new and aggressive marketing campaigns, and the advertising of mass consumption was amplified by the strikingly effective mass medium of television.