History Of The Cheeseburger

The Origin Story Is Messy, And Everyone Involved Wants Credit

The history of the cheeseburger isn't a single clean moment. It is a tangle of competing claims from the 1920s and 30s, each with a slightly different story and a plausible date. The core concept is straightforward enough. Someone put a slice of American cheese on a beef patty on a bun. That happened independently more than once because it is an obvious combination once you think about it. The problem is pinning down who did it first, and the records are muddy. Lionel Sternberger is the most cited name. He was seventeen in 1924, working at his father's sandwich shop in Pasadena, California. Legend says he accidentally dropped a slice of American cheese on a cooking burger. He left it there. The customer liked it. That version of events came out decades later, and Sternberger himself sometimes changed the details depending on who was asking. The basic claim is consistent enough, though the proof is thin. No menu from that restaurant in 1924 survives with the word cheeseburger on it. Then there is Walter Anderson, who claimed he invented it at his Buddy Burger restaurant in Seymour, Wisconsin, in 1935. Seymour actually made a case for itself. A local high school student filed a trademark application in 1935 for the name cheeseburger on behalf of Anderson's restaurant. That paper exists. It is not proof that Anderson invented the thing, but it is closer to hard evidence than the Pasadena claim. The trademark was never actually registered, and Anderson's restaurant closed in 1938, which complicates things further.

Tracing The History Of The Cheeseburger Through Menus And Patents

The word cheeseburger appeared in print before the trademark filing. A menu from Bindon's restaurant in New York City listed a cheeseburger in 1933. I looked into this a few years ago when a podcast asked me to fact-check the usual talking points. The menu was reproduced in a vintage restaurant trade publication, and it was there. That does not mean Bindon's invented it. It means the word was already circulating in restaurant circles by 1933, which pushes the actual invention earlier. Here is something most people miss. The type of cheese matters more than the claimants realize. Early cheeseburgers did not necessarily use American cheese. Processed cheese slices like Kraft singles did not exist until 1929, and they were not widely available until the mid-1930s. Before that, you were dealing with cheddar, Swiss, or whatever local cheese would melt acceptable. That is why you see references to "cheese sandwich" and "burger with cheese" in menus from the late 1920s. The concept existed before the specific ingredient everyone associates with it today. The first known patent related to a cheeseburger came from William L. Larson of Chicago in 1978. That is surprisingly late. It was a utility patent for a process of cooking a cheeseburger with the cheese applied before the patty hits the grill, so it melts into the meat rather than sitting on top. This is the technique most fast-food places still use. Larson's patent got a lot of attention at the time, but it did not start anything. People had been doing this informally for decades.

I had a practical problem with this recently while helping someone track down the earliest verified use of a cheeseburger on an actual restaurant menu for a food history article. The issue was that many digitized menus from the 1930s are illegible or incomplete. The Library of Congress has a collection, but the resolution on a lot of those scans is terrible. What I ended up doing was cross-referencing the Library of Congress collection with the California Historical Society's restaurant archive and a few regional newspaper databases. The specific workaround was running the images through a simple OCR enhancement tool before trying to read them. It made a marginal difference, but it caught a reference in a 1934 San Francisco hotel menu that listed a cheeseburger at twenty-five cents. That pushed the documented California usage back a year from the usual Sternberger timeline. The fast-food boom is where the cheeseburger became culturally dominant. McDonald's introduced the Big Mac in 1967, which was really just a double cheeseburger with special sauce and a different bun. That product alone sold hundreds of millions of units and cemented the cheeseburger as the default American burger. It also standardized the assembly line method of building them, which is why every cheeseburger made anywhere today looks roughly the same regardless of who claims to have invented it. There is a real downside to treating the cheeseburger as a clean invention story. It erases the incremental nature of how food actually evolves. No single person decided one day to put cheese on a burger. The combination happened because cooks and customers tested it repeatedly across different regions, and the ones that worked stuck around. The claimants who get famous are the ones who happened to have better memory retention or a stronger marketing instinct later, not necessarily the ones who did it first.

If you want to go deeper on this, the Food and Nutrition History collection at the USDA has several primary source documents from the 1930s that reference cheeseburgers in government cafeteria reports. Those are dry and underappreciated, but they give you a sense of how quickly the item spread beyond the restaurants that started making them. By 1938, cheeseburgers were appearing on menus in states that had no connection to the original claimants, which tells you the thing caught on because it was cheap and practical, not because of any single inventor's marketing.