Burger King - RBIberia

Fast food chain.

Burger King was founded in 1953 in Jacksonville, Florida, as Insta-Burger King by Keith J. Kramer and his wife's uncle, Matthew Burns. Their first stores were centered around a piece of equipment known as the Insta-Broiler, which was very effective at cooking burgers. It proved so successful that, as they grew through franchising, they required all of their franchises to carry the device.

While the Jacksonville chain kept expanding, two friends named James McLamore and David R. Edgerton, both alumni of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration were seeking an opportunity to open their own business. McLamore had visited the original hamburger stand belonging to Dick and Mac McDonald in San Bernardino, California, and sensing potential in their innovative assembly line-based production system, decided to open a similar operation.

McLamore and Edgerton acquired a license to operate an Insta-Burger King franchise and opened their first location on 4 December 1954 at 3090 NW 36th Street in Miami. By 1959, the pair had stores at several locations within the Miami-Dade area, and operations were growing at a fast rate. However, the partners discovered that the insta-broiler units' heating elements were prone to degradation from the drippings of the beef patties. The pair eventually created a mechanized gas grill that avoided the problems by cooking the meat patties in a different way inside the unit. The new cooking appliance, which they called a flame broiler, moved the patties over the flame vertically on a chain link conveyor over the heating elements, a design that imparted grill lines on the patties similar to those made on a charcoal grill. The new unit worked so well that they made the decision to replace all of their Insta-Broilers with the newly designed unit