The Fast Food Chain That Once Delivered Burgers Anywhere In The US (Within 24 Hours)

Even if you don't personally use all those apps, food delivery has become so ubiquitous that DoorDash is now making Diddy jokes at the Super Bowl. Although the service has only just reached peak market saturation in recent years, the idea of food delivery has been around for decades. Food delivery may have been synonymous with pizza throughout the second half of the 20th century, but it wasn't the only food group on wheels. In fact, this fast food chain tried to one-up it by taking to the sky.

White Castle was the first-ever fast food restaurant, but it hasn't been one to rest on its laurels. The slider-slinging icon entered the 1980s with a frankly hare-brained scheme in the form of the Hamburgers to Fly program, which ran for several years and ended in 1987 (per The New York Times). The basic premise was that you could pay White Castle to fly its burgers out to anywhere in the United States, and it would deliver within the next 24 hours if that's what you wanted. The service had its own toll-free number you could call to order this way.

The wildest part about the whole thing is that when the promotion ended in 1987, White Castle only existed in 10 states, which were exclusively huddled in the Midwest and on the East Coast near New York. That didn't stop people as far afield as California from ordering the burgers, though, which were delivered in a container filled with dry ice much like many mail-delivery food services do today.

With Amazon rolling out its mind-boggling one-hour delivery service for everything under the sun, it may not seem like that big of a deal to get burgers in a day, but this was the 1980s. A lot has changed since then — at that time, food delivery on that scale simply wasn't a thing yet. Because the infrastructure wasn't really there to support this type of service, White Castle struggled to keep it alive and ultimately failed at doing so.

Speaking to the New York Times in 1988, the year after Hamburgers to Fly was officially over, then-CEO E.W. Ingram III said of the program, "We didn't make any more money on them than selling them over the counter ... And we went to an awful lot of hassle.” No increase in profit and a lot more work sounds like bad business, to be sure, which makes you wonder how the delivery service managed to get into the air in the first place. White Castle has adapted to the times over the past century, but maybe the world just wasn't ready for this one. To be fair, the world may still not be ready for a Hamburgers to Fly 2.0. But that's alright — it doesn't need to be. The burger chain has since pivoted to selling its food in the frozen aisle of grocery stores, including White Castle's Cheeseburger Bites and sliders.