The Cheesecake Factory Started Out As A Family Business

It seems weird to think about, but a lot of the time, huge corporations start out as small, family-owned businesses. And some of them are pretty well-known. The McDonald's juggernaut was started by two brothers named Dick and Mac McDonald before Ray Kroc bought them out and turned the company into an international icon. Walmart is named after its founder, Sam Walton, and the family still largely runs the business today. The Ford Motor Company, started by Henry Ford, still employs multiple members of the Ford family (which owns a 40% stake in the company).

But one of those brands people might not realize is The Cheesecake Factory. The restaurant known for its preposterously long menu was started in North Hollywood as a literal factory that made cheesecake. Over time, it grew from a husband and wife making and selling cheesecakes to sometimes-recalcitrant restaurant owners to the seventh-largest sit-down family restaurant in America — and it's still controlled by its founders today.

Though the Cheesecake Factory's original locations were in Los Angeles, the company's roots are in Detroit. Evelyn Overton operated an actual cheesecake factory in the city in the 1950s but moved into home production because she didn't want her kids growing up without their parents present. In 1972, David Overton, son of Evelyn and her husband, Oscar Overton, convinced his parents to move to Los Angeles to start producing cheesecakes professionally.

For the next several years, Evelyn made cheesecakes while Oscar, the salesman of the pair, drove around with cheesecakes in his car, convincing restaurants to buy them. They did okay, but their business side was lacking. Enter David, a drummer with a head for business. 

The company started doing better, but David was dreaming bigger, about a restaurant that highlighted their signature product, where they wouldn't have to go through the middleman of restaurants that weren't always convinced cheesecake was a good dessert frontier. In the process, he may have invented the entire concept of upscale casual dining.

In 1978, David Overton opened the first The Cheesecake Factory location in Beverly Hills, keeping the name (which he apparently didn't particularly like) as a holdover from what his parents called their factory for cheesecakes. The company still made its signature product there (with each cheesecake named after Overton's family and friends), of course, but now it had somewhere to sell it directly to customers.

Incredibly, the company was successful immediately — perhaps due to the fact that The Cheesecake Factory branded itself as an accessible family atmosphere on the high-rent Beverly Drive that otherwise played host to eateries seen as much more high-end. Because the locations were in an area with an excess of money, serving a niche no one else was trying for, it's not a shock the company took off. By 1987, The Cheesecake Factory had three restaurants. And in 1990, it expanded outside of Los Angeles for the first time, with a spot in Washington D.C. The rest is history.

Today, David Overton still controls the company as CEO, meaning the company is still a family business. It still operates its own cheesecake production facilities — one in California, one in North Carolina. And even after expanding internationally, the company has shown no signs of slowing down.