Parents and son, a former A&W and a name that listed the menu.

Culver’s opened in Sauk City, Wisconsin, on 18 July 1984. English Wikipedia names the founders as George and Ruth Culver, their son Craig Culver and his wife Lea — and says the first restaurant opened under the name “Culver’s Frozen Custard and ButterBurgers”. Wisconsin Public Radio, marking the chain’s 40th anniversary on 18 July 2024, reported that the site had previously been an A&W drive-in operated by the Culver family, and quoted the village president, who grew up a block away, remembering the opening.

The family had worked in restaurants for decades by then. Wikipedia says George and Ruth Culver began as the owners of an A&W on Phillips Boulevard in Sauk City in 1961, bought a resort-style restaurant at Devil’s Lake called The Farm Kitchen in 1968, and that Craig Culver went to work at a local McDonald’s straight out of college in 1973. Craig Culver led the company as chief executive from its start until mid-2015, Wikipedia says.

The beginning was close. Speaking to WPR in 2021, Craig Culver said the business “just about didn’t make it” through its first year. Franchising followed. Wikipedia says the family first franchised in 1988 on a loose agreement that the franchisee walked away from a year later, after which the family set down standard franchising procedures that still underlie those of Culver Franchising System. WPR reported that, by Culver’s own account, the first franchise location opened in Baraboo in 1990, and Wikipedia says business there quickly grew, leading to restaurants in Middleton, Madison and Milwaukee.

From there the name moved beyond Wisconsin. Wikipedia records the first restaurants outside the state in Buffalo, Minnesota, in September 1995, Roscoe, Illinois, in December 1995 and Dubuque, Iowa, in November 1997, followed by a franchise in Texas in February 1998, Colorado and Wyoming in 2005, Arizona in 2008 and the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee in the 2010s. In February 2026, it says, the company announced its entry into Virginia.

The company is privately held and still based close to where it began. Wikipedia gives its legal name as Culver Franchising System, LLC, and WPR noted in 2024 that the headquarters has remained in the neighbouring village of Prairie du Sac. WPR also reported that the public libraries in both villages are named for George and Ruth Culver.

ButterBurgers, a custard cone mascot and a blue spoon.

The two products in the original name are still the core of the brand’s language. WPR described the anniversary in 2024 as 40 years of serving up ButterBurgers and frozen custard “under a proudly Wisconsin brand”, and reported that Governor Tony Evers proclaimed 18 July 2024 as “Culver’s Day” across Wisconsin, calling the company “a staple of America’s Dairyland”. Wikipedia lists the custard served in dishes and cones and blended into a Concrete Mixer, malts and shakes, alongside cheese curds and the burgers.

Colour appears in a small, specific place. Wikipedia says that in 2000 Culver’s opened a soup, sandwich and salad spin-off in Prairie du Sac called the Blue Spoon Creamery Cafe, named after the colour of the spoons used at Culver’s restaurants. A second Blue Spoon in Middleton was open for two years and closed in August 2010, and the Prairie du Sac original closed in May 2020 during the pandemic shutdowns.

The buildings have been revised to fit more sites. Wikipedia says that for much of the expansion restaurants followed a larger dining-room format, and that a smaller Metro-98 prototype was developed in 2006 and first built in Fort Dodge, Iowa, needing less land while offering less seating.

Characters carry the brand in advertising and at local events. Wikipedia says the official mascot is Scoopie, an anthropomorphic custard cone used in advertisements, community events and fundraisers, joined by Curdis the Curd and Goldie the Curd in 2018 and Sundae the Turtle in 2022. The company has also used humour. Wikipedia says an April Fools’ post in 2021 showed a large fried cheese curd in a burger bun under the name CurderBurger; after a petition asked for it, the item was sold on National Cheese Curd Day, 15 October 2021, with a limited supply at each restaurant.

Sponsorship keeps the name in front of the region’s sports fans. Wikipedia lists the Wisconsin Badgers, Minnesota Golden Gophers, Milwaukee Brewers, Milwaukee Bucks and Green Bay Packers among the teams and events Culver’s has sponsored, and says the company backed the 2025 film Green and Gold.

Design and documentation.

A regional fast-food chain is usually met first from the road. Before anyone reads a menu, the brand has to work as a sign on a pole, a shape at the edge of a car park and a colour seen through a windscreen at speed, so the name tends to be set large, simply and in a few strong tones that hold up in daylight, under floodlights and at a distance.

The building often does as much work as the sign. Many chains have used a recognisable roof line, porch, tower or façade so that a restaurant can be identified before its lettering is legible, and later remodels tend to keep some echo of that silhouette even as materials and colours change.

Closer in, the identity moves onto smaller surfaces: the drive-thru menu board, the order screen, the cup, the bag and the paper wrapper. These have to stay legible in a moving queue and in a customer’s hand, which is why names, symbols and colour blocks are repeated from the roadside sign down to the napkin.

Each guide in this group looks at one chain’s name, logo, buildings and owners in turn, separating what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

Hospitality as the house style.

Leadership passed beyond the founding family in 2015. Wikipedia names Phil Keiser as the second chief executive, from June 2015, followed by Joe Koss from January 2017 and Enrique “Rick” Silva from March 2021. Nation’s Restaurant News reported on 28 April 2025 that Culver Franchising System LLC had named Julie Fussner chief executive. She joined Culver’s as vice-president of marketing in 2017 and was appointed its chief marketing officer in 2023, after nearly two decades in packaged-food sales and marketing, including Kraft Foods, NRN said.

The company’s own pages frame the brand through hospitality rather than design. Its line is “Welcome to Delicious”, and it traces its approach to guests to Ruth Culver, who, the company says, had a way of making every visitor feel welcomed like a guest in her home. The company says it measures its success by carrying on that legacy, whether in the first restaurant in Sauk City or anywhere else.

The family appears throughout the record. The restaurant opened on a site the Culvers had already run as an A&W; the libraries in Sauk City and Prairie du Sac carry George and Ruth Culver’s names, as WPR noted; and the headquarters has stayed in Prairie du Sac. The name on the sign remains the family surname, written with its possessive.

For a design guide, Culver’s shows how a regional chain can make its name, its two signature products and a set of friendly characters do the work of an identity, with colour reserved for small, memorable details such as the blue spoon that gave the Blue Spoon Creamery Cafe its name. Compare it with McDonald’s, where Craig Culver worked in 1973, and Sonic Drive-In, another American burger chain with a guide in this series. For this guide we use spoon blue, custard cream and butter gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Culver’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.