Dairy Queen is owned by Berkshire Hathaway (the United States, NYSE: BRK.B), which acquired the brand on 7 January 1998.[1][2] Dairy Queen was founded in 1940 in the United States and was independent until 1998.
Dairy Queen sells soft-serve through franchised restaurants, and traces to 1938, when a father and son in Illinois developed a soft frozen dairy product and tested it at a friend's shop. Berkshire Hathaway acquired the company in 1998, and its Blizzard is served upside down to prove its thickness.
Controlling ownership as of . Brands grouped under the entity that owns them; large groups are collapsed.
Open the full Berkshire Hathaway ownership tree →
Berkshire Hathaway acquired International Dairy Queen for about $585 million. Almost every Dairy Queen is franchised, so Berkshire owns the brand and the system rather than the restaurants.
No tagged news items yet. Headlines are added nightly from public feeds; only titles and links are stored.
Headlines link to the original publisher. Brandtree does not reproduce article text.
The parent company of Dairy Queen is Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company headquartered in the United States.
Yes. Dairy Queen originated in the United States in 1940 and its owner, Berkshire Hathaway, is also headquartered in the United States.
Berkshire Hathaway completed its acquisition of Dairy Queen on 7 January 1998, after announcing the deal on 21 October 1997.
Dairy Queen was an independent company from its founding in 1940 until Berkshire Hathaway acquired it in 1998.
Yes. As of 8 September 2026, Dairy Queen is still owned by Berkshire Hathaway. The ownership record was last checked against primary sources on that date.
Last verified . Every ownership fact above is backed by one of these primary documents. Numbers in brackets in the text refer to this list.
Report a correction Opens a pre-filled GitHub issue. See our corrections policy.