Faithful Customers Have No Beef With In-N-Out Burger

Darren Clow has just plowed through a couple of Double-Doubles with a side of fries at the Arcadia In-N-Out Burger restaurant, and he’s feeling a special kind of contentment.

“They’re messy, they’re juicy and . . . just a little greasy,” said the 25-year-old building contractor with a look of exquisite satisfaction.

In-N-Out’s most expensive menu item may not be the kind of food that a nutritionist would recommend. But the Double-Double--a shot-put-sized serving of beef, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and bun, smeared with a mayonnaise and relish sauce, all for $2.20--has been pulling people in for 42 years.

“I’d come here more often if the lines weren’t so long,” said Clow, nodding at the double line of cars idling in front of the hamburger stand on Santa Anita Avenue.

In the high-stakes hamburger game, In-N-Out is a bantamweight in a field of heavyweights, a family-run business jousting with mega-corporations. Fast-food connoisseurs know the Baldwin Park-based company for serving food that tastes homemade. Motorists know it for those bumper stickers.

Oh, those In-N-Out Burger bumper stickers, say company officials, verbally wringing their hands. Young people have taken to modifying them, slicing away the first and last letters in “Burger” to broadcast a more risque message.

“Some people are offended by it,” said Susan Grear, the company’s director of marketing. “We have a new bumper sticker now--with a picture of a Double-Double instead of the word ‘burger.’ ”

But the company--which just opened its 61st Southern California outlet in Vista in San Diego County--has been feeling its oats lately. Two weeks ago, company officials approached the City Council of Baldwin Park to change the name of the corporate headquarters’ street from Virginia Avenue to Hamburger Lane.

It only seemed right, In-N-Out officials say, for a company that has been a Baldwin Park mainstay, with 14 restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley alone. “It would make it easy for the customers to remember where we’re at,” said In-N-Out President Rich Snyder, 38, a big man with an explosive laugh.

More than 50 other businesses on Virginia Avenue petitioned against the Hamburger Lane designation (“It’s a totally inappropriate name for anybody who isn’t in the hamburger business,” said Brent Taylor, president of neighboring Award Metals.) The council rejected it on a 3-2 vote.

But Snyder hasn’t given up. “We’d like to work with the city some more on it,” he said. “Virginia doesn’t have a lot to do with Baldwin Park, does it?”

In-N-Out has been a fixture in the San Gabriel Valley since Rich’s father, a visionary ex-G.I. named Harry Snyder, opened a hamburger stand on Garvey Avenue in Baldwin Park in 1948.

Folks on the Palm Springs-Los Angeles route just started lining up at the little hut with the striped awning, said Esther Snyder, Harry’s widow. “Eddie Fisher and Debbie used to stop in a lot,” said Esther, 70, who still works five days a week at the company. “Dinah Shore and her husband came once. They were having car problems, so Dinah came over to the house to watch her own TV show.”

In those days, Esther peeled potatoes, sliced tomatoes and made the hamburger patties by hand, and Harry manned the grill. On their first evening of operation, Oct. 22, 1948, the little In-N-Out stand at Garvey and Francisquito sold 57 hamburgers. This year, the company’s goal is to sell 34.3 million.

The Snyders lived in a house across the street, the current site of In-N-Out University, the company’s training facility, and Harry could keep an eye on the store and its two-man night shift from his living room window. “He’d be watching TV, and he’d just get up and go over and help out,” said Rich Snyder.

This was no ordinary hamburger stand. The elder Snyder, who died in 1976, foresaw the central role that the automobile would play in California, his son said. The hamburger stand became a “drive-through,” with a long driveway leading to a service window. In place of carhops to take the orders, Harry, an amateur electronics buff, installed a “speaker box” for motorists to relay their orders.

“People weren’t used to ordering through a speaker,” said Rich Snyder. “It scared them. But we just kept doing it, and over the years, people got accustomed to it.”

“One restaurant magazine calls us the granddaddy of the drive-throughs,” said his mother.

In-N-Out will remain a family business as long as Rich Snyder has any say in the matter. His brother, Guy, 39, is company vice president. Esther, who until two years ago signed all the checks, still oversees company finances.

“We could have gone public and made tons of money,” said Rich Snyder, who started out working for the company as a child, picking up waste paper in In-N-Out parking lots. “But what happens to quality then? What happens to all of our associates? In the long term, we’d rather grow the way we’ve been growing.”

Since Rich took over, that growth has been at a rate of three new restaurants a year. Rich also oversaw the design and construction nine years ago of the company’s eye-catching corporate headquarters, a two-story California-style building, with balconies and sandstone balusters and a terra-cotta roof, on a street of inelegant factories and offices.

Next to the office on the nine-acre In-N-Out plot is a maintenance facility crowned with a mission bell tower.

The Snyders take pride in the food they sell. The company president shows off the 75,000-square-foot processing plant, where a production line of a dozen butchers slices meat from sides of beef.

The less processing the better, said Snyder. “Meat is muscle,” he said. “Squish it too much, and all the flavor rolls out.”

In-N-Out’s beef gets fed directly from the butcher line to the grinder, without using the intermediate mixer-blender, Snyder said. And the hamburgers, shaped into patties at a rate of up to 1,200 per minute by five hamburger-making machines, are delivered unfrozen to the restaurants.

The potatoes for the french fries are fresh--”Sometimes they’re picked in the morning and delivered to us at night,” said Snyder--and they’re cooked only in cholesterol-free vegetable oil.

Local nutritionists aren’t impressed. “Fat is fat,” said Claudia Forbes, a cardiac rehabilitation dietitian at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena. “Just because something has no cholesterol doesn’t mean it’s healthy or OK.”

A standard In-N-Out lunch of a Double-Double, french fries and a milk shake amounts to more than 1,500 calories. “That’s quite high,” said Debbie Kawamura, assistant director of nutritional services at Arcadia Methodist Hospital. “It’s more than the amount recommended for a woman on a low-calorie diet for a whole day.”

Try telling that to some of In-N-Out’s veteran customers. “I’ve been buying their hamburgers since my kids were little,” said Jim Kurten, a retired aviation company operator. “My son is 42, and my daughter is 36.”

A pair of nurses from a CIGNA Healthplan center were in the outdoor eating area at the Arcadia In-N-Out Burgers the other day. Sure, they acknowledged, the food could be healthier. One of the nurses shrugged. “But it’s still good,” she said.