Dairy Queen
American multinational fast food chain from Illinois
International Dairy Queen, Inc. (DQ) is an American multinational fast food restaurant chain founded in 1940 and headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota. The first Dairy Queen was owned and operated by Sherb Noble and opened on June 22, 1940, in Joliet, Illinois. It serves a variety of hot and fried food, as well as original frozen dairy products that vary from location to location.
The company has been owned by Berkshire Hathaway since 1998.
History
First store
The soft-serve formula was first developed in 1938 by John Fremont "J. F." McCullough and his son Alex. They convinced friend and loyal customer Sherb Noble to offer the product in his ice cream store in Kankakee, Illinois. On the first day of sales, Noble sold more than 1,600 servings of the new dessert within two hours. Noble and the McCulloughs went on to open the first Dairy Queen store in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois. It closed in the 1950s, but the 501 N Chicago Street building is a city-designated landmark.
“Dairy Queen” enters the record as american multinational fast food chain from Illinois. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dairy, Queen and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1141226. 1 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 6 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1998 and 1938.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dairy Queen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.