For National Hot Dog Day, Relish the Epic Saga of ‘AAFES Hot Dog Guy’

Robin Williams, the Healthcare Program Manager for the Exchange, shares his name with a celebrity. And since 2004, he has become something of a celebrity himself.

Williams is the AAFES Hot Dog Guy. In honor of National Hot Dog today, here is his story.

This photo of Robin Williams, taken in 2004 when he was relatively new to the Exchange, was seen in Shoppettes all over the world–and still pops up on websites such as Reddit every now and then. Williams is still with the Exchange as the Healthcare Program Manager.

The “Hot Dog Guy” name was inspired by a photo taken of Williams about to bite into a hot dog, with a hungry look on his face, as he holds a soft drink in his other hand. The photo made him an Exchange celebrity and then an internet celebrity.

It all started not long after Williams arrived at Exchange headquarters in 2004 as an active-duty Air Force Senior Master Sergeant and the Public Health and Food Safety liaison for the Air Force. Williams’ arrival at the Exchange came at a time that there was a heightened concern with food vulnerability and the potential for bioterrorism attacks on the Nation’s food supply and the risk of targeting military installations in particular.

Upon his arrival, Williams sought out and got to know many of the HQ’s key personnel responsible for the Exchanges’ retail food, restaurant and theater operations and worked with them to implement protocols to enhance the food safety program. During that time he quickly developed a rapport with Reggie Dawson, the vice president of consumables at the time, and Michelle Nurse, a buyer who was working on the development and expansion of what would become the very popular and well-received Snack Avenue concept.

At the time, Express stores, still known as Shoppettes, were rolling out the Snack Avenue program, which not only served coffee and prepackaged snacks, but also incorporated a new feature with a self-serve roller grill that cooked items such as taquitos and hot dogs for the customers. Along with the implementation of this new concept came the need to rebrand and market the Snack Avenues to the customer, and this is where the legend of the AAFES Hot Dog Guy began.

“One day, Reggie called me and said ‘Hey, we want you to take some pictures for us,’” Williams said. “I was caught off-guard, but then asked what the pictures were for, to which they responded, ‘They’re for a menu.’ Being new to working in the retail business environment, the only thing I could think of was, ‘Oh, they just want some pictures for the restaurant upstairs in the building. Why not? This should be fun.’ At the time, I completely forgot about how global the Exchange was and also oblivious to the potential use of images for broader marketing.”

Williams went to the photo studio, where he found an array of food immaculately prepared and on display.  He also met a woman who introduced herself as the “food makeup” person. “Wow, I never knew such a job existed,” he said. “I did not realize at the time that there was a whole art of preparing food for photos,” he said. Then the photo shoot began, “They said, ‘Hold the drink up and look like you’re enjoying the hot dog.’ I thought, ‘This is fun.’ We had a good time taking pictures.”

After that, Williams didn’t hear anything from Reggie or Michelle, and he became preoccupied with other military public-health-related issues happening downrange and headed out on several scheduled TDYs, and he eventually forgot about the pictures.

Then, a couple months later as he was walking through the HQ building, he ran into Reggie and Michelle, who had just returned from the annual general managers conference, and with some excitement they said, “Hey, they love your picture.” “I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘The picture that you took for us, we revealed it at the GM conference and announced that it would be going on the menu boards, and will replace the Green Lady, and everyone loved it!’”

It turns out that the “Green Lady” was a photo above coffee pots in Shoppettes that had been in place so long that it had faded and eventually turned green. Williams was unfamiliar with the reference or even what a menu board was; in fact, he only expected the photo to be used in the HQ restaurant, so he was quite surprised when they informed him that the menu boards were located above the Snack Avenues, and the photo would eventually be in every Shoppette around the world.

“That’s when everything started to snowball,” Williams said. “I started getting calls from friends in the military saying, ‘Is that what you do at the Exchange? Take pictures and eat hot dogs?’”

As part of his job, Williams would do site visits to various Exchanges and on each occasion store associates would say, “I know you from somewhere.” He was even asked to provide a food safety briefing at the annual Shoppette conference in Phoenix, and as he walked around the venue, numerous people would stop him and ask, “Where do I know you from? You look really familiar.”

“Then, two days into the conference,” Williams said, “I got up on the stage to give my briefing and that’s when an observant attendee in the audience shouted, ‘Oh wow, it’s the Hot Dog Guy!’ That was followed with ‘Strike the pose!’”

The picture became somewhat viral internally, even to the point that the Exchange commander would say, “You know this guy. He’s the face of the Exchange,” whenever he saw Williams in attendance at various events.

Several years after the photo was released, Williams was tasked with an Air Force deployment that required him to travel between numerous sites downrange. To his surprise, young Airmen and Soldiers would approach him in the DFACs, and cautiously ask the SNCO if he was the Hot Dog Guy, and then ask for a picture with him.

“I figured, why not, it was the least that I could do to make their day, especially given the austere conditions that they were living and working in downrange,” Williams said. “In fact, many of them expressed their excitement and left quickly to tell their friends that they had met the Hot Dog Guy.”

Robin Williams’ son sent him this comic strip, which has its own theory about the origins of Hot Dog Guy.

The legacy of the “Hot Dog Guy” followed him beyond his assignment at the Exchange HQ. “Not too long after I PCS’d to Little Rock Air Force Base, one of the young NCOs that worked for the installation Public Affairs Office came up to me and said, ‘Chief, my friends won’t believe I met the Hot Dog Guy.’ So I said, ‘How about this? You meet me at the Express store and we’ll do a mock picture of me teaching you how to properly apply ketchup and mustard to a hot dog.” He quickly took Williams up on the offer.

The menu board photo made its way to the internet, where it went viral. Reddit users began to claim they’d seen the photo as early as 1992, more than a decade before it was actually taken. They debated whether it inspired a sight gag on the animated TV series “Rick and Morty.” Williams’ son sent him a comic strip someone had done, with its own theory (involving a genie) about how he became Hot Dog Guy.

“There were positive comments, negative comments, funny comments, crude comments,” Williams said. “The usual for social media.”

Through it all, Williams has remained good-natured about being the AAFES Hot Dog Guy and has had fun with it. He was already used to a certain amount of notoriety because of his name, which led people to mistakenly find his number and call in hopes of reaching the other celebrity with whom he shared the name.

“I was stationed in Los Angeles for three years and I’d get phone calls. People would find out my house number on base. They’d call and say, ‘Is this Robin Williams?’ I’d say, “Absolutely.’ And, when they said, ‘I love your movies,’ I would respond with a resounding ‘Well, Goooood Morning, Vietnam!’

“I’ve also gone through a variety of nicknames to include ‘Nanu-Nanu’ and “Shazbots,’” he said, making references to a couple of catchphrases from the more famous Robin Williams’ 1970s sitcom “Mork and Mindy.”

There are other things Williams would like to be known for. “Throughout the course of my career, the one thing that I try to leave behind when I move on to another assignment is a positive reputation that, ‘Robin worked his tail off while he was here. He committed to the job. He did his best.’ I want my legacy to be that I helped others, as well as the organization, or left a positive impression that inspires other people to be positive and successful as well.”

Williams has done other photo shoots for the Exchange, including one promoting recycling and another of him having a drink in the food court. But the hot dog photo still follows him around. Every now and then it will crop back up and he’ll get emails saying, “The legend lives on!” And he’s happy to play along.

“I’d tell people, ‘If you saw the hot dog picture downrange or in Germany and also in CONUS, then I can check another thing off my bucket list,’” he said. “They’d say, ‘What’s that?’ ‘International male model.’”