A stand on Pine Street in Lodi.

A&W dates its story to 1919 and to Lodi, in California’s Central Valley. The San Francisco Chronicle, writing for the chain’s centenary in 2019, reported that Roy Allen, who had bought a root beer recipe from an Arizona pharmacist, opened his root beer business on Pine Street in Lodi, putting up a temporary stand in time for a parade celebrating soldiers returning from the First World War. English Wikipedia gives the date as 20 June 1919.

The initials came a few years later. The Chronicle said Allen partnered with one of his Lodi employees, Frank Wright, and that the pair expanded to Sacramento; Allen bought Wright out soon afterwards, “but the name stuck: A&W.” Wikipedia dates the partnership to 1922, the Sacramento drive-in to 1923 and Allen’s purchase of Wright’s stake to 1924, and says curbside service there was provided by “tray boys” and “tray girls.”

Franchising followed in the mid-1920s: Wikipedia says Allen began franchising the root beer while franchisees added other menu items, and that most of the early stands sat on Central Valley highways, serving travellers. One early franchisee went on to a much bigger name: in 1927, according to Wikipedia, J. Willard Marriott took A&W franchise rights for Washington, Baltimore and Richmond, and his root beer stands became the Hot Shoppes, the business from which the Marriott hotel company grew.

Allen sold the business and retired in 1950, the Chronicle reported. After that, it said, A&W changed ownership several times, spun off an independent Canadian chain, expanded into Asia and built a bottled-drinks business — the three strands that now sit under different owners. Wikipedia’s article on the drink adds that the business was sold in 1963 to the J. Hungerford Smith Company, which had produced Allen’s root beer concentrate since 1921.

Taubman, Yum! and the franchisees.

The restaurants and the root beer separated over time. Wikipedia says the mall developer A. Alfred Taubman bought the restaurant company in 1982 but not the beverage business, restructured a chain he considered outdated, and kept the conventional orange-roofed restaurants alongside a newer sit-down format. It also records a marketing story from his years: A&W offered a Third Pounder in 1985, and Taubman wrote in his 2007 memoir that research suggested many customers took a third to be smaller than a quarter. In 2021, Wikipedia says, the chain brought the burger back as the “3/9 Pound” burger, playing on the same story.

In December 1994, according to Wikipedia, Taubman sold A&W to Sidney Feltenstein, and from January 1995 Grotech Capital Partners backed the business with Feltenstein as chief executive; in 1996 its restaurants were renovated in a style Feltenstein called “contemporary nostalgia.” The parent company was bought by Yum! Brands, the owner of KFC, in 2002, Wikipedia says.

Yum! sold the chain in 2011. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported on 9 December 2011 that the buyer, A Great American Brand, was led by Kevin Bazner and owned by a partnership of the national A&W franchisee association, an overseas franchisee and Bazner, and that the company would move its headquarters back to Lexington, Kentucky, where A&W had been based before Yum! acquired it. Bazner had come to Lexington, the paper said, when A&W moved its headquarters there after buying the seafood chain Long John Silver’s in the late 1990s. Wikipedia describes the chain as owned by its franchisees since that sale. A Great American Brand has owned A&W Restaurants since 2011.

The name is shared by other businesses. Wikipedia says the A&W restaurants in Canada have been part of a separate chain since 1972, and that Keurig Dr Pepper owns the rights to the A&W root beer brand outside Canada and licenses it to the U.S. restaurant chain, while A&W Food Services of Canada is independent of both.

Signs, canopies and pie cases.

The brands in this group are diner, drive-in and roadside restaurant names. A restaurant brand of this kind is carried less by a single product than by a set of things seen from the road and at the counter: a sign on a pole, a canopy over parked cars, a menu board, a pie case and the colours repeated on cups, bags and uniforms.

Drive-in signage was built to be read from a moving car, so names are often short, lettering is large and colours are few. Carhop canopies, where they survive, turn a car park into part of the building, and their shape can become as recognisable as the logo itself. Inside, diners and family restaurants lean on menus, booths and display cases, and a pie case or a dessert counter can work as a piece of branding as much as a piece of furniture.

A name like this can change hands over time, passing between founders, franchisees and restaurant groups. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its signs, menus and marks have changed, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Frosty mugs, carhops and a bear.

A&W’s identity rests on a few repeated objects. One is the frosty glass mug. Pete Knight, who began at the San Rafael A&W as a teenager and now owns franchises in Lodi and St. Helena, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2019: “We serve our root beer in frosty glass mugs like Roy Allen did in 1919.” The paper reported that the restaurants sell the mugs, including centenary editions, and that a collection of vintage mugs is displayed in Lodi; Wikipedia says the chain announces a Collectors’ Mug each year with a single design.

The second is the drive-in. Wikipedia says a number of A&W restaurants still operate as drive-ins with carhops, and the Chronicle published a photograph of a carhop serving customers at an A&W in Visalia. The third is a mascot: Rooty, the Great Root Bear, who according to Wikipedia gained recognition in Canada in 1974, appeared in American and Asian advertising for both the drinks and the restaurants through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, faded in the late 1990s and came back in 2011 under A Great American Brand. In June 2019 the Lodi restaurant marked the chain’s centenary with a commemorative sign, the Chronicle reported.

For a design guide, A&W shows how two initials, an ampersand and a frozen glass mug can hold a brand together while its restaurants, its drink and its Canadian namesake sit with different owners. Compare McDonald’s, another American burger chain built on roadside signs, and KFC, the fried-chicken chain. For this guide we use a root beer brown, an orange and a cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep A&W Restaurants’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.