Wendy's has had its famous chili on the menu since the very first restaurant opened in
1969. Here's the story of why Dave Thomas wanted chili on the menu when he launched
Wendy's.
The full name of Wendy's is Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers. Wendy's famous burgers have propelled
the company for more than 50 years and informed its menu — even in non-traditional fast
food side items. According to the chain's website, the first restaurant opened for business
on November 15, 1969, with just one outlet in Columbus, Ohio.
"I started Wendy's with one restaurant and a philosophy: Don't have hamburgers sitting
around. Serve them hot off the grill."
The initial menu was brief and extremely uncomplicated. Wendy's sold burgers, fries, soft drinks,
the Frosty, and, in a wild card play that immediately differentiated itself from other
fast food outlets — chili. It cost just 55 cents, the same as a single-patty hamburger
did at the time
Over time, Wendy's grew into one of the biggest and most dominant hamburger chains on the
planet, serving both classical and experimental takes on the beef/cheese/bun formula, along
with plenty of other standard fast food items like fries, chicken sandwiches, chicken nuggets,
and kids' meals. Even after more than 50 years on the scene, not too many other mainstream,
hamburger-oriented fast food outlets have ever bothered to take Wendy's lead and sell
an original-recipe chili.
It's such an anomaly that in his book Dave's Way, Wendy's founder Dave Thomas admitted
that people have often asked him why we chose to have chili on the Wendy's menu. His justification
is viable both in 1969 and today: It was a way to cut down on food waste and turn a small
profit off of meat that would ordinarily have gone into the trash.
Fast food workers have to work, well, fast, and sometimes that means grilling up enough
burgers to meet anticipated demand. But what happens to patties that get cooked but not
sold or eaten? Some restaurants would just throw them away and suffer financial loss.
Wendy's doesn't do that — it saves unsellable meat for its famous chili.
"That's a heck of a good idea."
Even though Dave Thomas wanted hot chili on the Wendy's menu before he even opened his
first store in 1969, he was briefly stymied on just how exactly he was going to pull it
off. Thomas wrote in his memoir, Dave's Way,
"The recipe was the hard part."
The exact combination of beef, spices, vegetables, and multiple kinds of beans was struck upon
only after what Thomas called, quote, "marathon cooking sessions" that took place in his own
kitchen at home, led by his wife, Lorraine, and in the kitchen of Charlotte Immke, spouse
of Len Immke, a car dealer and close friend of Thomas who also helped secure the real
estate to open the first Wendy's. Lorraine Thomas and Charlotte Immke developed and finalized
the recipe for Wendy's chili that was sold in the first restaurant on the first day,
and hasn't really changed all that much since.
Wendy's says it's chili is chili, and upon a quick examination, it certainly seems like
chili. It smells like onions and tomatoes and is made with beef and tasty spices and
flavorings, after all. But some chili purists could argue that Wendy's chili is not technically
that. It's full of vegetable chunks as well as beans.
In Texas-style chili, vegetables are cooked and broken down or pureed until they're part
of the whole, reddish-brown mixture, while beans are generally not included at all. And
all those ingredients float inside of a fairly thin broth, unlike the rich, thick, gravy-meets-marinara
texture of Texas chili. Wendy's chili, in other words, is a beef-and-bean soup.
But whatever it is, Wendy's uses a not-so-secret recipe for its signature spoon-and-bowl hot-and-soft
spicy mush. According to Secret Sauce, in 1994 Wendy's founder Dave Thomas contributed
his recipe for "Old Fashioned Chili" to Colorado Cooks For Education, a charity cookbook sold
to raise funds for Colorado schools. From the brain of Thomas himself, the key ingredients
in Wendy's chili are ground beef, tomato juice, tomato puree, red kidney beans, small red
beans, onion, celery, chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, salt, pepper, oregano, cayenne,
and sugar.
Countless diners swear by fast food value menus, which allow them to feed themselves
and their families for just a couple of bucks a pop. As an added bonus, diners can build
a meal from a wide array of cheaply-priced small-to-medium entrees, sides, beverages,
and treats. Burger King debuted its value menu in 1998, and McDonald's launched its
first Dollar Menu in 2002, both more than a decade after Wendy's originated the concept.
During a fast food price war, in which Burger King and McDonald's deeply cut the price of
the Whopper and Big Mac, respectively, to 99 cents, Wendy's took a different approach
by creating a whole menu with 99-cent items. And so, in 1989, Wendy's launched the Super
Value Menu. The new menu promised the attractive idea of several popular Wendy's items that
each cost a dollar minus a penny. Among the first, most attention-getting sides: Wendy's
flagship Frosty and chili. Caused a rift in the Violent Femmes
A 2007 commercial for Wendy's chili featured the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun."
Probably the best-known song of the Milwaukee indie rock trio, it appeared on the group's
self-titled 1983 debut album and has popped up in many movies and TV shows. Composed by
Femmes frontman Gordon Gano, "Blister in the Sun" is an early college rock classic, and
it's also a song about teenage sexual frustration, which are only two of the reasons why it's
surprising that it ever appeared in a Wendy's chili ad.
OnMilwaukee columnist Andy Tarnoff discussed his bafflement, and Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie
wrote in to explain the situation. Ritchie wrote:
"Gordon Gano is the publisher of the song and Warners is the record company. When they
agree to use it there's nothing the rest of the band can do about it."
Ritchie also had this to add:
"[W]hen you see dubious or in this case disgusting uses of our music you can thank the greed,
insensitivity, and poor taste of Gordon Gano, it is his karma that he lost his songwriting
ability many years ago, probably due to his own lack of self-respect."
According to Billboard, Ritchie sued Gano, seeking proper recognition as co-writer of
several Violent Femmes songs while also calling out his bandmate for sullying the group's
good name by allowing its music to be used in ads.
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