Historic burger joint’s journey leads it back to McHenry in Modesto. Here’s the story
If you haven’t already seen the large red and white sign as you’re driving down McHenry Avenue in Modesto, another Sno-White Burgers is coming.
Owner Adel Asumari, who also owns the Yosemite Avenue location, said he wanted to bring the graffiti-era “drive-in” back to where it first opened in Modesto on one of the city’s landmark cruising roads. This time it’ll have a drive-thru and no car hops (hence the slight change in terminology).
“I feel like the name has a lot of history,” Asumari said. “California is known for the classic American burger, fries, drive-in feel. That’s what Sno-White represents.”
The new location, at 2816 McHenry Ave., will celebrate its grand opening March 1, he said. The menu will be similar to the Yosemite Avenue location but refined with focused combination meals and best-selling items.
The hours will be 8 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday and 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday.
Sno-White is a Valley-born restaurant. The rest is muddy
While the news of the opening is fairly black and snow-white, the history of the restaurant isn’t crystal clear.
According to the Riverbank Sno-White website, snowhitefood.com, the company was founded in Stockton by Henry Nelson in the 1950s.
If you ask Asumari, he’ll tell you it was “born in 1952 in Madera.”
Dan Tanarsky, with the Galt Area Historical Society, said Henry Nelson established the first Sno-White at 240 S. Hutchins in Lodi in 1952. Lodi News-Sentinel archives show an advertisement for the grand opening of a Sno-White at that location on March 16, 1952.
The earliest indication of a Sno-White in Stockton is in 1956, and Madera in 1965 (though the person who purchased the property in 2022 is quoted in The Madera Tribune saying Sno-White has been there since 1950).
Tanarsky’s account of the Sno-White franchise, according to his post in the Lodi History Facebook group, is this:
Henry Nelson, a transplant from Oregon, settled in Lodi and became a Realtor. Around 1948, it’s speculated that Nelson got his first taste of soft-serve ice cream and thought to bring the new product to Lodi. In 1949, as a Realtor, he assisted George Foster in opening a Foster’s Old Fashioned Freeze Drive-In in Lodi. The same year, Nelson and a couple of partners became distributors of the Zest-O-Mat frozen custard/ice cream machine and opened a Zesto plant (this is confirmed by Lodi News-Sentinel records). In addition to distribution, the store sold a variety of soft-serve ice cream flavors. In 1950, the group opened a second Zesto store in a drive-in-style building.
Nelson then launched his own franchise. Lodi News-Sentinel records name Henry Nelson as president of Snow White Products in a 1950 article detailing a lawsuit Nelson filed alleging he was “frozen out” of Zesto Dairy Products, Inc.
His first (probably) restaurant opened under a similar name to his product company, Sno-White Drive-In, in 1952 near Lodi High School.
At some point between the 1950s and early ’60s, Sno-White became a franchise and had 200 to 300 locations between Chico and Bakersfield and two in Guam.
When Sno drifted into Modesto
Sno-White first came to Modesto in 1961 at 505 McHenry Ave. near Morris Avenue, according to The Modesto Bee archives.
Asumari said he was told by the Setliff brothers, early franchisees who helped coordinate the development of Sno-Whites in Stanislaus County, that there were at least two locations on McHenry Avenue at the company’s peak in the 1960s. Asumari also said according to Ron Daniel, another early Stanislaus County franchisee and father Riverbank’s Sno-White owner, there were four locations on McHenry.
Modesto Bee archives have a record of only the one.
“There were Sno-Whites on McHenry,” Asumari said. “I just don’t know exactly where, because I can’t find anything.”
When Sno-White left McHenry is another mystery, but between its last ad placed in The Modesto Bee and the date when records indicate a 7-Eleven opened at the address, it had to be sometime in the late 1970s.
A second Sno-White opened in Modesto in 1964 on Yosemite Boulevard. Asumari purchased it in 2005.
Asumari said that at the peak, there were six Sno-White locations in Modesto, including at 911 Paradise Road and 609 Tully Road — the only other two The Bee has record of.
In 1971, at age 75, Nelson retired and sold his franchises, according to Tanarsky.
“The ones that were franchises just went private. They didn’t have royalties or anything,” Asumari said. There are ones that “kept the name. There are ones that sold over the years and were converted, and ones that got demolished.”
Another fun fact: Asumari said other restaurant owners (one he personally knows) have received cease-and-desist letters from In-N-Out Burgers in the past for having a logo that includes a yellow arrow.
While Sno-White also has a yellow arrow in its logo, it’s safe from trademark issues, Asumari said, because its logo was created first. While established in 1948, In-N-Out didn’t create its iconic arrow logo until 1954, two years after Sno-White was founded.
This story was originally published February 16, 2026 at 6:00 AM.
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