Why does Dairy Queen sell food?
Why does Dairy Queen sell food?
Isn't it supposed to be ice creams and milkshakes and stuff?
69 comments
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They’ve got to do something with the cows once they’re too old to milk.
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That makes too much sense :/
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And they need to do something with calves. Cows only produce milk after giving birth, and dairy producers are not going to keep a freeloader around. /s
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That's the veal industry
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DQ has surprisingly good chili dogs. Their burgers aren't bad, if you omit the ketchup.
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Their chicken tenders are some of the best fast food tenders you can get too. Plus they come with sourdough toast
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Here's the fun part: while you're all talking about their ice cream, technically it's not legal to call their product that. You won't see it anywhere on the menu. I think it has to do with the milk/cream/egg/sugar amounts? There may not be egg at all, but can't remember for sure.
Anyway, all you'll ever see on the menu is "soft serve"
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Ice cream has to be at least 10% butterfat and 20% milk solids according to the FDA.
DQ soft serve is 5% butterfat so would not legally qualify as ice cream, though it would qualify as low fat ice cream.
I do believe that most soft serve is a similar fat percentage, and also has much more air per volume than traditional ice cream.
Also, I must say as an ice cream aficionado, I do love me some soft serve and I would never disparage it by calling it "not real ice cream."
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Funny enough, the milk they use (at least the supplier to the store I managed) is nonfat milk. So the first listed ingedient is nonfat milk, and the second is milk fat, lol.
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Oh, for sure. Especially during pumpkin pie blizzard season. Plus they always seem to feed my FOMO with some other flavor so I go twice during that season alone
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Yeah, soft serve is just frozen sugar milk, comes in cartons like regular milk and you can totally just drink it, tastes a bit like whole milk but clearly with an unhealthy amount of sugar in it.
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If you have n icecream shops in highly sought after retail locations where people are buying food, it would be kinda crazy not to sell food.
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Define "food."
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Hot eats cool treats. That was the slogan 20 years ago. Get some chicken strips and a blizzard.
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Dairy Queen has been selling food since 1958. They are not "an ice cream store" any more than McDonalds is
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Well only because the machine is always broken at McDonald's.
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Also ymmv because my local McDonald's always has a functioning ice cream machine!
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This is insane to me, for some reason I thought they were an ice cream store.
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The market bears what the market bears 🤷
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One other thing I haven't seen mentioned is selling ice cream is only a sustainable business for a few months out of the year in many places. Whereas you can sell burgers/dogs/etc year-round. But yeah, as far as I know they've always sold fast food - their burgers were a fave of mine when I was a kid in the 70s.
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Wow that's neat. There's a Dairy Queen sort of near me, I've driven past it a million times, but I thought they only sold ice cream so I've never gone in.
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So you can get dinner and dessert at the same place.
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This makes a lot of sense actually.
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Salty and sweet, man! Clearly you've never dipped fries into a milkshake. Your lack of life experience is concerning.
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Maybe they're English. Nobody there thinks that they should dip their chippies in a frozen creamydoodle.
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Because no one should do that. It seems super gross (and I'm American)
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I would never do that to a French Fry.
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Dude, their burgers are awesome. It's one of the few, if only fast food joints that still cook burgers on an actual flat top.
I just wish they hadn't switched to the soggy as fuck steak cut fries.
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That is entirely different store to store. The one I managed and our sister store (owned by the same family) used a conveyer belt style flame broiler (automatic broiler). Far more consistent and less labor intensive.
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How long have they been a fast food store? I thought they were an ice cream shop
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They first started selling hamburgers in 1958.
The wiki has all the info you need.
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Decades and decades ago. Not remotely new. Your question was outdated 25 years ago.
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1990's? At least in Canada.
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Like 30 years at least. They're famous for their ice cream, but their burgers are great too.
There's also the fact that DQs outside of Texas are slightly different than other states. Or at least that was true 15 years ago in Louisiana.
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french fries and a blizzard is fucking fire
69 comments
Once upon a time there were two types of Dairy Queens. Some were just ice cream, but the ones called "Dairy Queen Braizer" sold hot food too. Eventually they all sold hot food.
Thanks for the actual answer!
I mean, it's not an actual answer. It's just a historic fact.
The actual answer is that diversifying your product offerings gets you more business. People like desserts after eating a meal, so it makes sense to also sell that meal.