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Soft serve

Frozen dessert

  • 8 min read
  • 3 chapters

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In the United States, soft serve is not typically sold prepackaged in supermarkets but is common at fairs, carnivals, amusement parks, restaurants (especially fast food and buffet), and specialty shops. All ice cream must be frozen quickly to avoid crystal growth. With soft serve, this is accomplished by a special machine that holds pre-mixed product at a very low, but not frozen, temperature at the point of sale.

History

Charles Taylor of Buffalo, NY, patented an automatic ice cream maker in 1926 "that used pre-made ingredients and whipped them into a smooth and consistent texture." It was considered a precursor for future soft-serve machines.

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. 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.

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. Their first sales experiment was on August 4, 1938, in Kankakee, Illinois, at the store of their friend, Sherb Noble. Within two hours of the "all you can eat" trial sale, they had dished out more than 1,600 servings—more than one every 4.5 seconds.

Carvel and Dairy Queen franchising helped make soft serve ice cream very popular by the 1950s. The United States Department of Agriculture reported in 1956 that consumption of soft ice cream had jumped over 25 percent every year since World War II. By 1956 there were approximately 12,000 locations in the United States offering soft serve ice cream. McDonald's began offering soft serve in 1956 using machines manufactured by Taylor's company, and they helped bring it to a global audience.

It is a common myth that during the late 1940s, future UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher worked briefly as a chemist for a food manufacturer J. Lyons and Co., at a time when the company had partnered with the United States distributor Mister Softee and was developing a soft-serve recipe that was compatible with the American machines. Thatcher's precise role at Lyons is unclear, but she is reported to have worked on the quality of cake and pie fillings as well as ice-cream, and researched saponification.

In the 1960s, ice cream machine manufacturers introduced mechanized air pumps into vending machines, providing better aeration.

In the 1990s, Wadden Systems, Inc. introduced the 24 Flavor System, which enables an operator to transform soft serve into 24 or more flavors of soft serve, on a cone to cone basis.

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