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Dairy Queen’s soft serve contains 5 percent butterfat, half the 10 percent minimum to be legally called ice cream. J.F. McCullough and his son Alex created the formula, and in 1938 friend Sherb Noble tested it at his Kankakee, Illinois store, selling over 1,600 servings in two hours. The first Dairy Queen opened in Joliet on June 22, 1940; the building is now a city landmark. Franchising took the chain from 10 stores in 1941 to 2,600 by 1955, with a Saskatchewan store by 1952. In 1958 Georgia operator Jim Cruikshank created the Brazier system, adding charcoal-broiled burgers, hot dogs and fries.

Texas runs its own Texas Country Foods menu with the Hunger-Buster, Belt Buster, the chicken fried steak sandwich called the Dude and T-Brand Tacos, overseen by the Texas Dairy Queen Operators Council and promoted by Bob Phillips of Texas Country Reporter. The 1985 Blizzard sold 100 million in its first year and is served upside down, while the 1990 frozen yogurt Breeze was phased out by 2001. International Dairy Queen bought Orange Julius in 1987, and Berkshire Hathaway bought the company for $585 million in 1998. It became DQ in 2001, launched Grill and Chill, redesigned its logo in 2007 and dropped Dennis the Menace in 2002.

• Franchisees invented the Dilly Bar in Moorhead, Minnesota in 1955, the Buster Bar in 1962 and the Peanut Buster Parfait in 1971.
• The upside down flip dates to a 1960s franchisee who sold a thick 50-cent shake also named the Blizzard.
• S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen feature the chain.
• The largest U.S. store is in Bloomington, Illinois, and the largest anywhere is in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
• By 2014 Dairy Queen had over 6,400 stores in more than 25 countries.