Worlds largest soft serve ice cream cone
Soft serve is a type
of ice cream that is softer than regular ice cream. Soft serve ice cream has
been sold commercially since the late 1930s.
Over Memorial Day
weekend of 1934, Tom Carvel, the founder of the Carvel brand and franchise,
suffered a flat tire in his ice cream truck in Hartsdale, New York. He pulled
into a parking lot and began selling his melting ice cream to vacationers
driving by. Within two days he had sold his entire supply of ice cream and
concluded that both a fixed location and soft (as opposed to hard) frozen
desserts were potentially good business ideas. [2] In 1936, Carvel opened his
first store on the original broken down truck site and developed a secret soft
serve ice cream formula as well as patented super low temperature ice cream
machines.[3]
Dairy Queen also
claims to have invented soft serve. In 1938, near Moline, Illinois, J.F.
McCullough and his son, Alex, developed their soft serve formula.[4] Their
first sales experiment was August 4, 1938, in Kankakee, Illinois at the store
of their friend, Herb Noble. They sold 1,600 servings in two hours. -Wikipedia
