Don Carlos Edwards

Don Carlos Edwards was a restaurant owner and creator of fry sauce. He was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He was born in Logan, Utah, on October 6, 1899. He was a veteran of World War I. He opened his first restaurant in 1924 when he “hooked up a food trailer to his truck and transported it to carnivals and fairs.”[1] In 1941, he created the restaurant Don Carlos Bar-Be-Q. He established the first Arctic Circle Drive-In Restaurant in 1952 in Salt Lake City and the franchise expanded, at one time, to more than 250 locations in sixteen western states. The restaurants now number 28 company stores and 45 franchises.

At Edwards's Arctic Circle franchise located in Provo, Utah, and owned by Ellis Peay, an employee named Ron Taylor and Peay's son Max experimented liquid combinations and came up with "pink sauce," a 2 to 1 mixture of mayonnaise and ketchup. Later, another franchiser in Las Vegas, Archie Groft, tweaked the sauce by combining Arctic Circle's proprietary mayo burger sauce with ketchup. The resulting fry sauce caught the attention of Don Edwards in 1958, and he immediately transitioned all his restaurants to the sauce. The fry sauce is made from a mixture of ketchup, mayonnaise, garlic, dill pickle juice, and a closely guarded list of other ingredients.[2]

Edwards eventually closed his barbecue restaurant and devoted most of his time to his Arctic Circle chain.

Edwards created other crowd pleasers that caught on with other restaurants, such as a kid’s meal, a chocolate-dipped ice cream cone (brown toppers), a ranch burger, and the exclusive use of Black Angus beef in burgers and halibut in fish-and-chips.

He died on December 26, 1971, just one year after retiring. He and his wife, Minnie, were the parents of two sons.