The Most Popular Fast Food Restaurants The Year You Were Born

The fast-food restaurants lining the highway today likely aren't the same ones your parents frequented the year you were born. The popular chains then can give an idea of the grander scheme of things — the economy, culture, diet, and lifestyle of people at that time.

The first quick-service chains started as urban hamburger and soda stands in the 1920s. Owners followed Henry Ford's footsteps, making more consistent meals by basing their kitchen procedures on assembly lines. Then, in the '50s and '60s, people started moving out of cities, so suburban drive-ins became popular. Over the years, chains have spread dishes like fried chicken, tacos, frozen custard, pizza, and orange chicken to new areas. These recipes loosely represented a group of immigrants or a U.S. cultural region, but today they are familiar to the wider public.

The popularity of one chain over another also shows something about habits — in the '90s, health-conscious consumers preferred veggie-laden sandwiches over hamburgers and fries. Then, after 2000, different chains became popular because of their commitment to local communities. Some even invited guests to linger instead of getting diners in and out of the doors as quickly as possible. Take a look at the restaurant that was popular the year you were born, and you'll see a snapshot of the bigger picture.

In 2010, Nation's Restaurant News named Shake Shack a "hot concept." The brand started as a temporary hot dog stand in Madison Square Park in 2001. It was an accessory to a piece of installation art called "I Heart Taxis." To make the exhibit realistic, the stand offered real food — hot dogs, homemade potato chips, lemonade, and rice crispy treats. It was so successful that patrons demanded it become permanent once the art display ended. Then, it attracted crowds so large that people would wait as long as three hours for a hamburger. A decade later, the owners expanded — at first in New York City and then to other cities around the world. The height of this was in the early 2010s.

Today, Shake Shack has just over 400 locations around the world, making it much smaller than many other chains. It has a high profile, though, due to its locations in places like John F. Kennedy International Airport and the Las Vegas Strip. The chain is famous for its dedication to becoming part of local communities, maintaining exceptional quality, and responsibly sourcing ingredients. Shake Shack is giving fast food a facelift.

Domino's Pizza was already a giant in 2002 – 13 years earlier, the chain opened its 5,000th shop. The early 2000s marked a particularly fruitful time for the company, though. In 2002, Domino's earnings increased by around 17%, which the company attributed to an increase in quality and customer service over four years straight, as judged by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. By the end of 2003, the company had 7,427 locations. In the same year, the pizza delivery specialist received an honor from Pizza Today Magazine: They named Domino's the chain of the year for the first time. Then, in 2004, Domino's became a publicly traded company.

Today, Domino's is still going strong. They won two more chain of the year awards, in 2010 and 2011 after changing their recipe. Then, the chain started using special delivery vehicles equipped with a heating oven, and later they added an electric fleet. Now, Domino's is developing self-driving delivery cars. They've lost some locations since the early 2000s, though — by 2018, they were down to around 5,900 storefronts, but remain firmly among the 10 most popular fast food providers.

The '90s were an era of extreme advertising. The success of Pizza Hut and Subway in this decade is due to how they introduced new products and then presented them to the world through commercials.

Subway was already well-established in the '90s — three decades earlier, Dr. Peter Buch, a nuclear physicist funded the original shop, an idea of one of his proteges, Fred DeLuca. At the time, DeLuca needed help paying for his education, so he turned to selling sandwiches. Around 30 years later, in 1990, the company opened its 5,000th franchise. It's safe to say that DeLuca was no longer hurting for money. Then, in 1997, the chain drew even more business when it came out with its seven low-fat subs campaign – Subway appealed to health-conscious consumers. In the years to come, Subway surpassed McDonald's in the number of locations, though not in earnings.

Pizza Hut held around 25% of the pizza market in the mid-'90s and easily won against competitors like Little Caesars and Domino's because of their new product development. In these years, the pride of their restaurants and the king of their commercials was the stuffed crust pizza. This single, new product garnered over $1 billion in sales in 1995 when it came out. It raised the company's stock by about 50%.

In the early '80s, Wendy's already had more than 2,000 locations around the U.S., but 1986 was terrible for Wendy's. The year before, they'd had record sales, but an ill-fated breakfast menu and corporate corner-cutting got the company in trouble. They lost $4.9 million worth of business and 20% of their franchises were near bankruptcy just 12 months after those high numbers.

Dire situations bring out the best and worst in organizations — here, Wendy's proved itself by hiring Jim Near as president. The executive ensured that Wendy's restaurants were consistent across the country — each franchise must follow specific cooking methods and demonstrate sparkling cleanliness. He also added smaller burgers and skinless chicken breast sandwiches to the menu. By 1989, Near's guidance brought the company's sales up by a huge 25% when he discounted seven menu items, appealing to younger patrons.

Wendy's thrived and changed in the late '80s. These were years that could have brought collapse, but effective management made them brilliantly successful.

Little Caesar's is famous for three things: Detroit-style pizza, its amateur hockey league, and the catchphrase, "Pizza! Pizza!" The latter two of these came about in 1979.

When the young couple, Mike and Marian Ilitch, opened their first carry-out pizza restaurant, the idea was novel. From the first, they drew in business with memorable advertising and cheap fare. The first example of this was a sketch of a tiny Caesar saying, "Pizza! Pizza!" It meant that patrons of the pizza joint could get two pizzas for the price of one from a competing restaurant. In the late '70s, the chain also started using an innovative pizza conveyor belt oven to speed up production while lowering costs.

In 1979, there were only around 50 Little Caesar's locations operating. The commercials worked brilliantly, despite being astonishingly simple, and in the '80s, the chain grew to 226 storefronts. In the '90s, there were over 1,000. Today, Little Caesar's is the third largest pizza chain, behind only Domino's and Pizza Hut.

People love tacos, but there was a time when they were not so widely known across the continental U.S. That's to say, you could divide time into pre-Taco Bell and post-Taco Bell.

Glen Bell got his recipe for hard-shell tacos around the year 1950 from the bustling Mexican restaurant Mitla Cafe, located across the street from his struggling hamburger stand. When he added tacos to his menu, business grew. Then, Bell figured out how to mass-produce the crunchy entrees, making them fast food.

Twenty years later, in 1970, Taco Bell became a publicly traded company and had more than 300 locations. During this decade, the chain continued expanding, bringing its Mexican-inspired cuisine to people much farther from the border than where it got its start in San Bernadino, California.

Around one-third of all U.S. restaurant visits are to a McDonald's — that's nearly triple the number of its next competitor. It's been the most popular fast food since the '80s. Even before that, McDonald's had already captured the country's attention and changed the food industry. McDonald's initial success in the mid-'50s impacted how restaurants would prepare food for decades afterward. Other chains imitated the high-efficiency model perfected in these kitchens.

The McDonald brothers set up a successful business based on making uniform hamburgers and shakes quickly and cheaply. For example, they may have been the first to use heating lamps to keep French fries warm. Everything else in their kitchens was streamlined, as well, to make them super efficient. They used eight shake-mixing machines — which could make 48 shakes at once in one of their seven California drive-ins. That drew the attention of the man selling the appliances — no other restaurant had made such a big order for a single location. Since the brothers were looking for a franchising agent, he asked for the job and got it.  

The new franchising agent, who would buy out the company around a decade later, set up 228 suburban franchises in the mid-'50s and introduced Ronald McDonald to attract families. Since that time, McDonald's has grown to become the most popular and highest-grossing fast food chain in the United States, in part due to its sheer size — it has around 13,500 locations.