Carrols Restaurant Group

An offshoot of the Tastee-Freez company, the original Carrols hamburger chain was named after the Tastee-Freez co-owner Leo S. Maranz's daughter, Carol.

Herb Slotnick bought the franchise rights for the New York area and started opening restaurants in the Syracuse, New York, area in the early 1960s. They expanded over the years throughout New York State. During the 1960s, a yellow slug character served as Carrols' first mascot, replaced in 1974 by a young blonde boy wearing a tweed suit and a Fedora hat.

At the chain's peak in the late 1960s, the company had 120 Carrols restaurants throughout New York state. Most Carrols restaurant locations were converted to Burger King franchises in 1975, with less profitable stores shuttered. After the conversion, the Carrols brand was only found overseas in Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Russia – except for two stores: one on Roosevelt Avenue in Carteret, New Jersey, which closed in the late 1970s; and a single franchisee-owned store in Batavia, New York. Both of these latter two stores operated under the Carrols name into the 1980s, before closing.

The Finnish group Carrols opened up several locations in St Petersburg, Russia in the mid-to-late 1990s. In 1998 it opened its first operation in Moscow located at the then-new Ohotni Riad Mall. Because of the 1998 Russian financial crisis, the operations did not generate enough sales for Carrols, and by 2000 all Carrols outlets in Russia had been closed.

The Finnish restaurant company Hesburger started to buy out the last existing Carrols locations in Helsinki, Finland in the mid-2000s, with locations converted by 2012.

On December 9, 2005, Carrols Holdings and Mimi's Café was filed for offerings.

In February 2011 the company announced it was divesting itself of its two Central American-themed chains, Taco Cabana and Pollo Tropical, in a spin-off aimed at helping the company focus on its core Burger King operations. The sale of the two chains, collectively called the Fiesta Restaurant Group, was completed in May 2012.

In June 2012, Carrols acquired 278 Burger King locations from Burger King for approximately $150 million. In exchange, the Burger King parent, Burger King Corporation took a 28.9% stake in the company. The transaction involved a line of credit that would be used by Carrols to renovate more than 450 of its stores.