[1] Horn & Hardart automats ushered in the fast food era and at their height, they were the largest restaurant chain in the world, with 88 locations.

[2] By introducing Philadelphia to New Orleans-style coffee, which Hardart promoted as their "gilt-edge" brew, they made their tiny luncheonette a local attraction.

The lack of a succession plan, changing demographics, the rapid rise of fast food chains, and poor strategic decisions from the early 1960s on were too much to overcome and the last restaurant was closed in 1991.

Joseph Horn had traveled in Europe and experienced the revolutionary new form of restaurant known as the Automat, pioneered by Max Sielaff [de] in Berlin.

Using the advertising slogan, "Less Work for Mother," the company popularized the notion of easily served "take-out" food as an equivalent to "home-cooked" meals.

[6] The Horn & Hardart Automats were particularly popular during the Depression era, when their macaroni and cheese, baked beans, and creamed spinach were staple offerings.

[7]By the time of Horn's death in 1941, the business had 157 retail shops and restaurants in the Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore, areas, serving some 500,000 patrons a day.

They featured prepared foods displayed behind small coin- and token-operated glass-doored windows, beginning with buns, beans, fish cakes, and coffee.

With success the chain began lunch and dinner entrees, such as fish, beef stew, and Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes.

Carolyn Hughes Crowley described the appeal of the Automats: In huge rectangular halls filled with shiny, lacquered tables, women with rubber tips on their fingers — "nickel throwers," as they became known — in glass booths gave customers the five-cent pieces required to operate the dispensers.

As a customer removed a compartment's contents, a worker quickly slipped another sandwich, salad, side dish, or dessert into the vacated chamber.

[citation needed] The television premiere of The Horn & Hardart Children's Hour appeared on WCAU-TV in Philadelphia in 1948, succeeded by WNBT in New York in 1949, telecast on Sunday mornings.

[11] Horn & Hardart further expanded its fast food operations in 1981, acquiring the Bojangles' Famous Chicken n' Biscuits restaurants, which it sold to a California investment company in 1990 for $20 million.

While they did not open any restaurants, they reproduced a dozen of the most famous food items, including macaroni and cheese, Harvard beets, tapioca pudding, and cucumber salad.

[citation needed] The Horn & Hardart name was used for a now-dormant chain of coffee shops in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

[27] As of November 2022, the official Horn & Hardart website announced that the brand had returned with a recreation of the original Automat Blend of coffee.