April 25, 2022 – THEME WEEK DAY 1

Happy Monday! Today we’re kicking off a theme week we’re calling “What’s it Stand For?”  All week I’ll be spelling out some famous company acronyms. We’re beginning with A&W Root Beer, where the A and W stand for the 2 founders of the company, Roy Allen and Frank Wright.
Roy Allen was a hotelier in California, where he met a pharmacist who told him he had perfected a mix for root beer. Intrigued, Allen purchased the recipe, and opened a roadside stand in Lodi, California in June 1919. The night he opened also happened to coincide with a city-wide celebration for returning soldiers from WWI. He sold his root beer for just 5 cents.
During that time, Prohibition helped boost the sales of soda across the U.S., and Allen’s root beer stand was very successful. He soon expanded with stands in Stockton and Sacramento, where he pioneered drive-in curbside service with “tray boys”, who would bring customers orders out to their cars. Allen partnered with one of his employees, Frank Wright, in 1922 and the drink gained the name “A&W Root Beer”. Wright was bought out a year later, but the name stayed the same.
Allen then sold restaurant franchises, becoming one of the first restaurant chains in the U.S. Franchise owners could use the A&W name and logo and purchased the syrup needed to make the famous root beer from Allen. There were more than 170 A&W franchises by 1933. After World War II, GI loans helped A&W triple their locations, as did the popularity of the automobile and the mobility it afforded.
A&W was the first chain restaurant to serve a bacon cheeseburger in 1963. In the 1980s, they tried to compete with McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, and introduced the Third Pounder. It beat out the Quarter Pounder in taste tests and was less expensive – however the burger was unsuccessful because Americans are terrible at fractions, and incorrectly thought that the Third Pounder had less meat than the Quarter Pounder.
For A&W’s 80th anniversary in 1999, the company created the world’s largest root beer float, using 2,562 gallons of root beer! Learn more here.