Soft serve ice cream
As with other ice cream products and modes of consumption, the development of soft serve ice cream has more than one individual claiming credit. Soft serve ice cream wasn’t developed until the 1930s, in the United States, and it contains lesser amounts of milk fats, with an injection of air, which when introduced in the proper amounts accounts for the smooth, creamier texture of the product. The more air, the whiter the appearance of the product (before flavorings).
According to one invention story, soft serve came about as the result of a misfortune. Tom Carvel suffered a flat tire on his ice cream truck while in Hartsdale, New York. Carvel parked the truck for the weekend (it was Memorial Day weekend, according to the story) in a nearby parking lot and managed to sell his entire stock of ice cream off the truck over the course of the weekend. This suggested that a permanent location and soft ice cream was a good business model.
Although there was no Memorial Day weekend in 1934, when the event occurred (Memorial Day was a Wednesday that year) the idea nonetheless led Carvel to open a store on the spot where he had parked his truck in 1937, selling a soft serve ice cream created with a secret formula. Thus Carvel claimed the invention of both the soft serve product and the means of selling it from a fixed location.
The claim, as is seemingly all things involved with ice cream, is disputed. J.F. McCullough and his son Alex claimed to have developed the soft serve ice cream formula. They took their product to a friend in Kankakee, Illinois who owned an ice cream store, Sherb Noble. Noble agreed to allow them to experiment with sales and after selling more than 1,600 servings in a few hours they knew they had a hit product.
They opened a store dedicated to selling soft serve ice cream products in Joliet, Illinois, naming their new business Dairy Queen when it opened in 1940. Since then many other companies dedicated to the sale of soft serve ice cream have opened in the United States and other countries. Throughout the United States, many small soft serve locations are open only in the summer, and in small towns their opening is a hallmark of the arrival of the season.