Joe Rogers, Who Built Waffle House Chain With Grits, Dies at 97

(Bloomberg) -- Joe Rogers, who co-founded the Waffle House chain of U.S. roadside diners specializing in Southern-style breakfasts served 24-hours-a-day, has died. He was 97.

He died March 3, according to a statement emailed Monday by the company. No details were provided.

“My father genuinely loved every customer who walked into a Waffle House, and customers immediately understood that,” said Rogers' son, Joe Rogers Jr., chairman of Waffle House Inc. “The customer always came first for him, and he made sure the customer came first for everyone who worked with him.”

A former short-order cook and restaurant manager, Joe Rogers Sr. teamed with real estate broker Thomas Forkner in 1955 to open their first quick-service, limited menu restaurant. Norcross, Georgia-based Waffle House grew to more than 1,800 locations in 25 mostly southern states to become the largest U.S. family restaurant chain by number of locations, according to Nation's Restaurant News. 

The diners attracted truckers, late-night revelers and Sunday church-goers. They stressed customer service and a simple menu that included eggs, grits and biscuits and gravy, as well as pecan pie and its namesake pastry.

“We serve the basic foods, and the basic foods never change,” Rogers told the Associated Press in 2005. He persuaded a skeptical Forkner to keep Waffle House open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year from the start.

Taking Credit

A plaque at Waffle House headquarters honors the “Poor Old Cash Customer Who Made It All Possible.” The chain started accepting credit cards in 2006, but its big yellow sign -- one of the company's few concessions to advertising -- remained.

“We are not in the food business,” Rogers often said. “We are in the people business.”

The two men became friends after Forkner sold Rogers a house in 1949. They decided to become partners in a restaurant in 1955. Rogers at the time was a regional manager for Toddle House, a quick-serve restaurant chain.

“He said, ‘You build a restaurant and I'll show you how to run it,'” Forkner told the AP. They called it Waffle House after the highest-profit item on the menu and painted it bright yellow, still the chain's dominant color.

Rogers handled operations while Forkner concentrated on real estate and finance.

Egg Consumption

By 1961, when Rogers joined Waffle House full time, the chain had five restaurants. Annual sales climbed to $1.03 billion in 2016. The company uses 2 percent of the eggs consumed in the U.S., according to its website.

The first restaurant, in Avondale Estates, Georgia, outside Atlanta, closed in 1973 and it became the Waffle House museum.

Joseph Wilson Rogers Sr. was born Nov. 30, 1919, in Jackson, Tennessee, according to a 2004 article in the Jackson Sun. He was the son of Frank and Ruth Rogers. His father was a railway crane operator, according to census records.

Rogers enlisted in the Army Air Corps and served as a flight instructor during World War II and worked in restaurants after the war. 

Rogers and Forkner stepped back from management in 1973, when Rogers' son, Joe W. Rogers Jr., took over as president and chief executive officer. They continued work at the Norcross office daily well into the 2000s.

In recent years, the restaurant has become the basis for the Waffle House Index, used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to measure the impact of natural disasters.

“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed that's really bad,” Craig Fugate, FEMA administrator, told The Wall Street Journal in 2011. “That's where you go to work.”

In 2000, Rogers published a memoir, “Who's Looking Out for the Poor Old Cash Customer?”

Survivors include his wife, the former Ruth Jolley; daughters Dianne and Deborah; and sons Frank and Joe Jr.

To contact the reporter on this story: Stephen Miller in New York at smiller244@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Caroline Gage at csalas1@bloomberg.net, Chuck Stevens, Steven Gittelson