Arizona hosted the first McDonald’s restaurant opened outside California.
The location opened in Phoenix in 1953, before Ray Kroc began his own major expansion of the chain. Franchisee Neil Fox operated the restaurant, which was among the earliest McDonald’s locations established beyond the McDonald brothers’ home state. Its opening helped demonstrate that the restaurant’s limited-menu, fast-service format could travel to another regional market.
The Phoenix restaurant is especially notable in branding history because it used the early McDonald’s architectural language, including the golden arches associated with the company’s roadside identity. Those arches later became the basis of the corporate logo.
This fact is sometimes confused with the first McDonald’s opened by Kroc, which was in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. Arizona was the first state outside California to receive a McDonald’s restaurant, while Illinois became central to the corporation’s later expansion.