William Rosenberg

William Rosenberg (June 10, 1916 – September 20, 2002) was an American entrepreneur who founded the Dunkin' Donuts franchise in 1950 in Quincy, Massachusetts, one of the pioneers in name-brand franchising, originally named the "Open Kettle" doughnut shop when established in 1948. At the end of 2011, there were more than 10,000 outlets of the chain in 32 countries. Due to financial problems, he was forced to leave school by eighth grade to help support his family, who had lost their store during the Great Depression.

Career After several jobs, at age fourteen, he went to work for Western Union as a full-time telegram delivery boy. At seventeen, he started working for Simco, a company that distributed ice cream from refrigerated trucks, rising from delivery boy to national sales manager at age twenty-one, supervising the production, shipping, cold storage and manufacturing and managing 40 to 100 trucks.

At the start of World War II, he joined Bethlehem Steel in Hingham, Massachusetts. He later became the first Jewish trade union delegate. After the war, Rosenberg borrowed $1,000 to add to his $1,500 in war bonds and used his knowledge of food distribution to open his first company "Industrial Luncheon Services", a company that delivered meals and coffee break snacks to factory workers on the outskirts of Boston. Rosenberg created his own catering vehicles, with sides that rose to reveal sandwiches and snacks stocked on stainless steel shelves, an early predecessor to the mobile catering vehicle. Within a short time, he had 200 catering trucks, 25 in-plant outlets and a vending operation.

Noticing that forty percent of his revenues came from coffee and doughnuts, he started a retail shop that specialized in those products, opening his first coffee and doughnut shop, the "Open Kettle" on Memorial Day in 1948, later renamed "Dunkin' Donuts".

In the early 1960s, Rosenberg founded a fast food chain, Howdy Beefburgers (later Howdy Beef n' Burger), in Massachusetts, locating many of its restaurants beside Dunkin' Donuts shops so they could share common parking lots to compete with larger chains such as McDonald's for retail space and customer draw. Howdy Beefburgers was inspired by The Howdy Doody Show that had run on television from 1947 to 1960, and even adapted Howdy Doody as its mascot. Serving such products as hamburgers, French fries, fish sandwiches and New England clam chowder, the chain had restaurants in as many as 27 locations throughout New England before dissolving toward the end of the 1970s.

In 1968, Rosenberg bought Wilrose Farm in rural East Kingston, New Hampshire.

In 2001, he published his autobiography, Time to Make the Donuts: The Founder of Dunkin Donuts Shares an American Journey, written with the help of Jessica Brilliant Keener. and they had three children: Bob Rosenberg, Carol Rosenberg Silverstein, and Donald "Don" Rosenberg. They later divorced. In 1978, he married Ann Aluisy of Farmington, New Hampshire.