It’s Soft Serve Ice Cream Day!
To celebrate, we curated a list of the best spots for soft serve around the state. There’s nothing like soft serve ice cream on a hot day. Or a cool night. Or any time of day!
Soft serve has been sold since the late 1930s.
We’re closing in on almost 100 years of chocolate/vanilla twists!
There’s a little controversy over who invented this delectable dessert.
Was it Charles Taylor of Buffalo, New York?
He patented an automatic ice cream maker in 1926, reportedly the first soft-serve ice cream machine. (His Taylor Company continues to manufacture the McDonald’s ice cream machine. Which always seem to be broken.)
Or Tom Carvel, the founder of the Carvel brand and franchise?
In 1934, Carvel’s ice cream truck broke down in Hartsdale, New York. He began selling his melting ice cream to vacationers driving by. After that success, he concluded that soft frozen desserts were “potentially good business ideas,” according to the Carvel website.
Dairy Queen also claims they 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 once every 4.5 seconds,” according the Wikipedia.
Who cares who invented it? We’re only interested in eating it!
