History
The first Waffle House opened on Labor Day weekend, 1955 at 2719 East College Avenue in Avondale Estates, Georgia. That restaurant was conceived and founded by Joe Rogers Sr. and Tom Forkner, who both continue to own a majority of the company today. Rogers had started in the restaurant business as a short-order cook in 1947, at the Toddle House in New Haven, Connecticut. By 1949, he had become a regional manager with the now-defunct Memphis-based Toddle House chain, and was moving to Atlanta. He met Tom Forkner when buying a house from him in Avondale Estates.
Rogers' concept was to marry the speed of fast food with table service and around the clock availability. He told Forkner "...You build a restaurant and I’ll show you how to run it,"’ recalls Tom Forkner.
Forkner suggested naming it Waffle House, as waffles were the most profitable item on the 16-item menu. The fragile nature of waffles also made the point that it was a dine-in, not a carry-out, restaurant, but it confused patrons as to meal availability other than breakfast.
Rogers continued to work with Toddle House, and to avoid conflict of interest sold his interest to Forkner in 1956. In 1960, when Rogers asked to buy in to Toddle House, and they refused, he moved back to Atlanta and rejoined Waffle House, now a chain of three restaurants, to run restaurant operations. Shortly after Joe returned full-time, Tom followed suit and left Ben S. Forkner Realty.
After opening a fourth restaurant in 1960, the company began franchising their restaurants and slowly grew to 27 stores by the late 1960s, before growth accelerated. The company is privately held and doesn’t disclose annual sales figures, but says they serve 2% of the eggs used in the nation's food service industry. The founders limit their involvement in management, and currently Joe Rogers, Jr. is CEO, and Bert Thornton is President.
Although the Waffle House chain is concentrated in the Southeast, it has reached as far to the north as Austinburg, Ohio, near Ashtabula, as far to the west as Goodyear, Arizona, in the suburbs of Phoenix, as far to the south as Key West, Florida, and as far to the east as the Atlantic Ocean at many points along the East Coast between Florida and North Carolina inclusively.
In 2007, Waffle House re-purchased the original restaurant which was sold by the chain in the early 1970s and was most recently a Chinese restaurant. The company restored it using original blueprints for use as a private company museum. The museum is used primarily for internal corporate events and tours but will occasionally be open to the public.
In 2008 one of the biggest Waffle House franchises in the southeast, North Lake Foods, was bought out by Waffle House, Inc. North Lake Foods has been forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as well as close a couple of stores. Waffle House, Inc. plans to rehabilitate the franchise. In early 2009 East Coast Waffles bought NorthLake Foods to become a new franchise.
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