A drive-in near a campus, two partners and a card game.

Hardee’s takes its name from Wilber Hardee, who opened his drive-in hamburger restaurant in Greenville, North Carolina, on 3 September 1960, English Wikipedia says. The Associated Press, reporting in June 2008, placed that restaurant near the East Carolina University campus and described a drive-in without tables or waiters that built a loyal following for hamburgers cooked on a charcoal broiler. The same report said Hardee went on to launch a number of lesser-known restaurants in North Carolina, among them Biscuit Town, Hot Dog City and Beef and Shake.

Expansion came through two partners from Rocky Mount. The AP reported that the North Carolina businessmen Jim Gardner and Leonard Rawls formed a partnership with Hardee to spread the chain through the South. Wikipedia says the company store they opened at Rocky Mount in May 1961 was known inside the chain as building number 1; the building was demolished in 2007 and replaced by a veterans’ park named after Jack Laughery, a former Hardee’s chairman. The business, known originally as Hardee’s Restaurant Company and later as Hardee’s Food Systems, went public in 1963 with Rawls as president, and built a headquarters complex of offices and warehouses in Rocky Mount.

Hardee himself did not stay long. According to the AP, Hardee told his family that he bet his newly issued Hardee’s stock during a card game with his partners and lost, leaving Rawls and Gardner with a controlling share the next morning. Wikipedia records that Gardner and Rawls disputed that story and that they bought Hardee out and began franchising in 1961. Hardee died in Greenville, the town where he had opened the original restaurant, in June 2008, the AP reported.

Rawls and Gardner sold their early franchises to a small group of friends and acquaintances, who formed their own companies and built hundreds more restaurants over time, Wikipedia says. By the end of the 1960s the chain operated across the Midwest and Southeast and had opened outside the United States in West Germany, and it moved into the mid-Atlantic states through Hardee Northern, a franchisee owned by the Philadelphia grocery chain Acme Markets. Gardner left the company after he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1966.

Imasco, CKE and a borrowed star.

Hardee’s grew in the 1970s partly by acquisition. Wikipedia says it bought the Sandy’s chain in 1972 and the Utah burger chain Dee’s Drive-In later in the decade. In 1977, after a test at a Virginia Beach restaurant run by the long-time franchisee Boddie-Noell Enterprises, the chain introduced a breakfast menu built around made-from-scratch biscuits across its system — the part of the menu that would later keep Hardee’s distinct inside CKE.

Ownership then moved to Canada. The Montreal company Imasco bought Hardee’s in 1981 and, Wikipedia says, bought the Burger Chef chain from General Foods in 1982, converting many of those restaurants to Hardee’s and letting others change to different brands or close. In the early 1990s Hardee’s also acquired the Roy Rogers restaurant chain, and for a time it owned Rax Roast Beef.

In April 1997 CKE Restaurants, the parent of Carl’s Jr., bought Hardee’s from Imasco. The original plan, Wikipedia says, was to rename Hardee’s as Carl’s Jr. while keeping its breakfast under the Hardee’s name, and the company tested that in Peoria, Illinois, and Oklahoma City. Instead CKE brought Hardee’s into the Carl’s Jr. imaging, including the Happy Star logo and parts of the lunch menu, while keeping the Hardee’s name and its breakfast menu intact; the Oklahoma City restaurants kept the Carl’s Jr. name. Hardee’s headquarters moved to St. Louis in 2001, and the Rocky Mount complex was vacated, with the last executives leaving in 2015.

Ownership of CKE then passed through private equity. Wikipedia says Apollo Management acquired it in 2010, and Nation’s Restaurant News reported on 26 December 2013 that Roark Capital Group had completed its purchase of a majority stake in CKE Inc., bringing Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s into its portfolio. When the Associated Press wrote about Wilber Hardee in 2008, the chain was a division of St. Louis-based CKE; Verdict Foodservice described CKE Restaurants Holdings in March 2025 as a privately held company based in Franklin, Tennessee.

Design and documentation.

A quick-service brand is met first from the road and only then at the counter. Its identity has to work on a pole sign seen from a moving car, on a roofline, on a lit window after dark, on a drive-through menu board read in a few seconds, and on a cup, bag or box that leaves with the customer. Signage, neon and backlit panels, building shapes, uniforms, mascots and printed packaging all carry the same name, often in very different sizes and materials.

Because many of these restaurants are run by franchisees rather than by the company that owns the name, a sign, a menu board or a paper bag may be ordered, installed and replaced locally, while the mark itself is set by the franchisor. Names, owners and headquarters can also change over the decades as chains are sold, merged or taken private, even when the sign out front looks much the same.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — who started it and where, who owns it now, and how its signs, logos and packaging have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A script name beside a shared star.

Since 1997 Hardee’s visual identity has been tied to its merger with Carl’s Jr. Wikipedia says a new logo unveiled in 2006 set the name in script lettering while keeping the Happy Star, drawing the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. brands closer together. For years the two chains often shared advertising, airing the same commercials under one name or the other depending on the region, and in March 2017 a campaign built around a bearded founder figure called Carl Hardee Sr. introduced modernised logos for both.

In June 2018 CKE announced that Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s would be separated as brands, with distinct advertising and remodelled Hardee’s restaurants, Wikipedia says. That year Hardee’s launched its “Tastes Like America” campaign, with music by Big Wet. For it, the chain brought back its 1976 logo, now in white, with the Happy Star standing in for the A in “Tastes”; the previous logo stayed in use as well.

The star remains shared. Marketing Dive reported on 22 September 2022 that CKE had refreshed the identities of both Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s with the design consultancy Design Bridge, giving the Happy Star and the motion lines behind it, which the company calls its flavor trail, a charbroiled texture, aligning the typography with the angles of the star, and renaming the brand colours Charbroil Black, American Cheese Yellow, Flame Red and Biscuit Cream. The report said the changes would run across uniforms, in-store signage, packaging and advertising, tied to the brands’ “Feed Your Happy” campaign line.

Franchisees remain part of the picture. Boddie-Noell Enterprises, the operator where the breakfast menu was tested in 1977, bought 34 company restaurants in North Carolina from CKE in 2007, Wikipedia says, and in 2026 it converted a Virginia Beach Hardee’s into a new breakfast-biscuit and chicken concept of its own.

For a design guide, Hardee’s shows how a regional chain can take on a partner’s symbol after a merger and still keep its own name, lettering and breakfast identity beside it. Compare it with Carl’s Jr., the CKE sister brand whose star it adopted, and Burger King, another American hamburger chain. For this guide we use brick red, star yellow and biscuit cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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