Ray Kroc

By Tom Kirvan

Long known as “fast food’s founding father,” Ray Kroc was slow to emerge as a marketing pioneer, eventually striking it rich at the age of 52 when he transformed the franchise industry by opening his first McDonald’s in 1955.

Much of the credit for Kroc’s rise can be traced to a pair of brothers – Maurice and Richard McDonald – in San Bernardino, Calif., who operated a popular drive-in restaurant that offered tasty food at low prices. Kroc was a struggling salesman of milkshake mixers when he met the McDonald brothers, later convincing them to franchise their restaurant throughout the country, banking on a system of uniformity and value. When Kroc’s relationship with the brothers eventually soured, he opted to buy their business, including the company name and its golden arches logo, for $2.7 million in 1961.

Now headquartered in Chicago, McDonald’s has more than 40,000 outlets worldwide with annual sales topping $25 billion. It is the second largest private employer with more than 1.7 million employees, some 600,000 behind Walmart. In the mid-1990s, one company estimate boasted that one out of every eight Americans had worked for McDonald’s at some point in their lives.

Ray Kroc*

Kroc, who died January 14, 1984 at the age of 81, was a revered figure in the food industry, utilizing many of the assembly-line procedures pioneered by Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Co. He was an unabashed stickler for details, insisting on quality and consistency so that customers could expect the same experience at McDonald's restaurants around the world. His three-word slogan for McDonald’s was “Quality, Service, Cleanliness,” the so-called three-legged stool that became his motto.

“If you work just for money, you'll never make it, but if you love what you're doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours,” said Kroc, who owned the San Diego Padres baseball team for 10 years before his death in 1984.

Kroc was a noted philanthropist, starting the Kroc Foundation in 1965 to support medical research of chronic diseases, including diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and arthritis. He suffered from diabetes and arthritis, while his only daughter died from diabetes. He also inspired the creation of the Ronald McDonald House, the home away from home for families of children undergoing in-patient medical treatment. There are now nearly 400 such homes around the world.

His wife, Joan Kroc, continued the family’s philanthropic ways, making bequests of $1.5 billion to The Salvation Army and $200 million to National Public Radio upon her death in 2003.

Her husband, of course, was the source that fueled her generosity. He also left these word treasures:

“To be successful, you must be daring, be first, and be different.”
“None of us is as good as all of us.”
“Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.”
“You’re only as good as the people you hire.”
“The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way.”

*Press photo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved January 13, 2025 from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ray_kroc_1976.jpg