A Ridiculous History of 'Soft Serve'

Summary

---

Ridiculous History: A Ridiculous History of 'Soft Serve'

Podcast: Ridiculous History by iHeartPodcasts
Hosts: Ben Bowlin & Noel Brown
Date: August 4, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the bizarre, innovative, and mouthwatering history of soft serve ice cream. Hosts Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown, with contributions from super producer Max Williams, dig into the food science, business rivalries, cultural impact, and myths surrounding this summer staple. The conversation uncovers the multiple contenders behind soft serve’s invention, the rise of iconic brands like Carvel and Dairy Queen, the evolution of marketing strategies, and quirky trivia like Margaret Thatcher's rumored involvement and the neuroscience of ice cream trucks.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Personal Connections to Ice Cream

(00:35–05:33)

• The episode opens with nostalgia for “cool treats” and the memorable Dairy Queen slogan: “Hot Eats, Cool Treats” (01:25).
• Max Williams discusses his favorite flavors and the difference between intense and simple ones:

  “I kind of like just going like, I don’t like anything that’s like too intense of a flavor… the one that tastes like blue and stuff like that.” —Max Williams (02:57)

• The hosts reminisce about spumoni, regional chains, and iconic American ice cream institutions.

2. What Exactly IS Soft Serve?

(08:45–12:58)

• Soft serve isn't as simple as it seems. It’s a product of food science, mechanical refrigeration, and mass marketing.
• The hosts emphasize that prior to modern refrigeration, frozen desserts existed globally (e.g., Inuit whale ice cream), leading to the eventual innovation of soft serve as a unique creation.
• DIY ice cream (hand crank machines) gets a shoutout for its “bonding experience.”
• Soft serve differs from hard ice cream by consistency and temperature—softer, creamier, and immediately ready.

3. The Race to Invent: Taylor, Carvel, Dairy Queen

(12:58–16:19)

• Charles Taylor: Patented an early mechanized ice cream machine in 1926. Seen as a precursor rather than the final product.
• Tom Carvel:
  • (Carvel’s story begins, 14:51)
  • Memorial Day Weekend, 1934: Carvel’s ice cream truck broke down; he sold the melting product to passersby, leading to a revelation:

    “He wasn’t able to keep his ice cream properly frozen, but he needed to sell this stuff. So he started to sell the partially melted product…and they actually seemed to like it.” —Noel Brown (15:11)

  • Developed the batch freezer and franchised the model, spreading soft serve via equipment sales and personal marketing (e.g., voicing his own radio ads).
  • Pioneered the mainstream ice cream cake (“Fudgy the Whale”), linking marketing to product innovation.

4. The Dairy Queen Story & Parallel Invention

(22:46–26:01)

• J.F. McCullough and Dairy Queen:
  • Around the same time as Carvel but independently, the McCullough family (with Sherb Noble) debuted their version in Illinois (1939).
  • Huge success:

    “Customers consumed more than 1600 servings in just a couple of hours during the first sales experiment.” —Noel Brown (25:03)

  • Opened their first Dairy Queen in 1940, rapidly franchising the concept.

5. What Makes Soft Serve… Soft?

(27:07–29:29)

• It’s about aeration and temperature:
  • The “overrun” — air whipped into the mix — gives soft serve its lighter texture.
  • Served at a warmer temp than hard ice cream, melts faster, and is more immediately palatable.
  • Uses the same core ingredients as regular ice cream but is a “different stage of development,” like ripening peppers.

6. Franchising, Families, & the ’50s Boom

(30:10–34:36)

• Post-war prosperity and the rise of the American family brought ubiquity:
  • Franchising allowed for predictable products anywhere in the U.S.
  • Soft serve was the “food of the future,” a symbol of modernity like automats and drive-ins.
  • By 1956, some 12,000 U.S. locations were selling soft serve.

7. McDonald's Joins the Soft Serve Era

(34:36–37:08)

• Fast food’s explosion in the mid-century further mainstreamed soft serve.
• McDonald’s used Taylor’s machines, integrating dessert into the quick-service model.
• Notable missed opportunity:

  “Apparently McDonald’s came to Carvel first and Carvel said, ‘I don’t see it. I don’t see people wanting ice cream after a burger.’” —Noel Brown (37:15)

8. The Soft Serve Experience: Ice Cream Trucks & Mr. Softee

(41:31–45:31)

• Iconic brands—like Mr. Softee—rolled into neighborhoods, heralded by instantly recognizable jingles.
• The jingle itself is a registered trademark, ingrained in American nostalgia:

  “It’s behavioral programming…even as we record in 2026, you hear the jingle, all the kids get excited and the adults run out to meet the truck.” —Ben Bull (44:27)

• Ice cream trucks = summer, joy, and childhood for multiple generations.

9. Soft Serve’s Canvas: Toppings, Innovation, and Modern Trends

(46:37–50:35)

• The soft serve cone evolved as a “base” for new combinations—dipped cones, sundaes, Blizzards, and McFlurries.
• Parallels: Build-your-own Bloody Mary bars and modern self-serve (Menchie’s).
• International takes:
  • UK: “Mr. Whippy”
  • Japan: Regional specialties, high butterfat Hokkaido soft serve
  • Philly/NJ: “Gelati” combos with Italian ice

10. Debunking the Margaret Thatcher Myth

(54:27–56:22)

• While future UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher worked as a food chemist, her link to soft serve is exaggerated:

  “Depending on who you talk to…you might hear people…tell you with full sincerity…that Margaret Thatcher invented soft serve. That’s as misleading as saying Al Gore invented the Internet.” —Ben Bull (56:02)

11. Soft Serve’s Enduring Legacy & the Future

(53:45–end)

• Soft serve’s regional variations, adaptability, and cultural resonance keep it relevant.
• New “gelati” and international styles suggest ongoing innovation.
• The episode wraps with personal cravings and producer shoutouts.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "They called me Ben Bull. And you were Noel Brown. And Noel. We were talking off air...what better way to celebrate summer than to talk a little bit about cool treats?" —Ben Bowlin (00:41)
• “I do love a dipped cone that comes from a truck. Something about that. It’s different, right?” —Noel Brown (04:21)
• “Soft serve does seem like a simple invention… but the history is actually… a threefold story. Food science. Refrigeration. Roadside attractions and entrepreneurship. And of course, marketing.” —Noel Brown (08:45)
• “Even if you yourself personally don’t feel the call of chilled sweetness with the ice cream truck… you gotta admit, ice cream and later soft serve. These are amazing inventions.” —Ben Bowlin (05:47)
• “You could say the difference between soft serve and ice cream is the same as the difference between a potato chip and a puffed crisp.” —Ben Bowlin (19:03)
• “McDonald’s came to Carvel first and Carvel said he didn’t see it. I don’t see people wanting ice cream after a burger. It just doesn’t make sense to me.” —Noel Brown (37:15)
• “Mr. Softee…is a federally registered trademark. And it does have lyrics, apparently. It’s the creamiest, dreamiest soft ice cream…” —Noel Brown (45:31)
• “Soft serve is treated increasingly like… a base or an ingredient atop which other things are added…consumers at home are figuring out what other stuff they can add to the basic soft serve cone.” —Ben Bowlin (46:37)
• “Margaret Thatcher…should not be considered the sole inventor of soft serve. And we got one more bit of trivia here that I’m gonna leave out for one of our…listicle episodes…” —Noel Brown (56:22)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|--------------------| | 00:35–05:33 | Ice cream nostalgia, favorite flavors, and the Dairy Queen “brazier” debate | | 08:45–12:58 | The food science and industry behind soft serve | | 12:58–16:19 | Early inventors: Taylor, Carvel’s origin story | | 22:46–26:01 | Dairy Queen and parallel invention in the Midwest | | 27:07–29:29 | Food science behind why soft serve is “soft” | | 30:10–34:36 | 1940s-50s franchising boom, cultural mainstreaming | | 34:36–37:08 | McDonald’s enters the scene, missed opportunity for Carvel | | 41:31–45:31 | Mr. Softee, the ice cream truck jingle, and Americana | | 46:37–50:35 | Soft serve as a customizable “canvas”; the era of Blizzards, McFlurries, international takes | | 54:27–56:22 | Margaret Thatcher’s “soft serve myth,” the real story | | 57:41–end | Wrap-up, final thoughts, and ice cream-themed credits banter |

---

Final Thoughts

The episode paints soft serve not just as a happy accident or corporate concoction, but as a unique result of American innovation, technological advances, and the collective desire for summer joy. It is a story with many claims of origin, a symbol of postwar optimism, and a canvas for continuous reinvention—perfect for generations of “ridiculous historians.”

---

For more Ridiculous History:
Visit the iHeartRadio podcast catalog, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite platform.

Transcript

[Ben Bull]

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartradio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you, as always, so much for tuning. Tuning in. That's our super producer, Mr. Max Williams.

[Noel Brown]

There he is. I'm here.

[Max Williams]

And I'm soft. And I'm served.

[Noel Brown]

Max. Mr. Softy Williams.

[Ben Bull]

There it is. There it is. Known around the world as a. A delicious Lothario is Max. They called me Ben Bull. And you were Noel Brown. And Noel. We were talking off air. We get a lot of our ideas for future episodes during our explorations of other topics and the world. At least these. And you. And I thought some time ago, what better way to celebrate summer than to talk a little bit about cool treats?

[Noel Brown]

Cool treats. Do you remember what Dairy Queen's logo used to be? Or not logo. Their tagline used to be.

[Ben Bull]

Oh, what was it?

[Noel Brown]

It was hot eats. Cool treats.

[Ben Bull]

Cool treats. That's right. That's right. Also, shout out to Dairy Queen for teaching a lot of young kids the word brazier.

[Noel Brown]

Well, that's what I was gonna say, Ben. It used to be.

[Narrator/Guest Speaker]

Did it.

[Noel Brown]

Was Stuckey's related to Dairy Queen? Because I swear, I would always see, like, combination Stuckey's and Dairy Queen, but

[Ben Bull]

then they would also have a deal.

[Noel Brown]

They must have been a deal. But it was a long time ago. And then that word brazier referred to the fact that they made burgers, that they. They would grill meats. But that seems very antiquated now, and I don't think they have that anymore. Except maybe like, some of the legacy Arby's that still have the giant neon hat. There may well be some Dairy Queen braziers still there in the world.

[Ben Bull]

The franchisees who didn't want to pay extra to update the signage or, you

[Noel Brown]

know, want to preserve history. Max, I know you got something to say.

[Max Williams]

Not really too much about this. I mean, it does sound like it could be like a. What is it? Rallies and Checkers? You gotta eat. But, like, they're regionally named. It could be something like that. Sure.

[Ben Bull]

Like Carl's Jr. And Hardee's.

[Max Williams]

Yeah.

[Ben Bull]

Yeah. Well, shout out to Brazier. And shout out to our research associate for today's episode, which is none other than you, Mr. Brown. You've had something on your mind for a minute. I've gotta. No. Max. Are you guys. Would you call yourselves ice cream fans? Max, just pretend the condition isn't real for a second.

[Max Williams]

Well, I mean.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, gosh, yeah. The condition.

[Max Williams]

Yeah. I mean, I. I do enjoy ice cream. Back when I could eat the back When I could eat ice cream, I did thoroughly enjoy ice cream.

[Ben Bull]

It was like your flavor was your go to.

[Max Williams]

Oh my God. I don't, I don't know, I'm not too picky. I kind of like just going like, I don't like anything that's like too intense of a flavor. You know, you have those ones like, like the quadruple chocolate or like the blue one or the one that tastes like blue and stuff like that.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, I love the one that tastes like blue.

[Max Williams]

Yeah.

[Ben Bull]

Very Frank Reynolds, Danny DeVito. I liked. I, I was looking this up. Maybe we'll talk about it in a different episode, but if you guys remember a place called the Spaghetti Factory, they were to themselves famous. They were self confirmed famous for an ice cream flavor they had called spumoni.

[Noel Brown]

Spumoni is a, is a very famous just Italian flavor that you'll see at a lot of like Italian restaurants. There's actually a place in New York in, I believe it's Queens called, or maybe it's the Bronx called Spumoni Gardens. And it's a very well loved local kind of Italian joint that does spumoni. I had spumoni for the very first time recently and it's got kind of mixed fruit in it, like cherries, I believe. Pistachio nuts and fruit.

[Ben Bull]

Pistachios, hazelnut, strawberry, really good.

[Noel Brown]

Those are my favorite nuts, by the way. Pistachio and hazelnut, those two favorite nuts. Put them together, you got yourself a flavor party. Ben, by the way, Stuckey's and Dairy Queen did share a deep corporate background. And we'll get to that a little bit later in today's episode about the history of soft serve. Ben. I like weird flavors, unlike Max. I love a blue. I love a double, double chocolate trouble. I really, really, though quite especially in the summer, love soft serve ice cream. There's something about the texture and the things you can do with it. I love a dipped cone, be it a Dairy Queen one or even be it. I think McDonald's does a dip cone. Maybe they used to, but they don't anymore. And I do love a dipped cone that comes from a truck. Something about that. It's different, right?

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, I think it's because it's an off the books business so often. But also folks, to get in front of the opprobrium and the outcry, we are going to be using the phrase software serve ice cream pretty often in this episode. We are aware that there are some litigious people out there, perhaps pedants who might object to that phrase, as we'll see. But look, legal specs and requirements aside, we're not going to be the fun police here just yet. We got to admit, whether you consider yourself a person with a sweet tooth or not, I don't particularly have a sweet tooth on my own.

[Noel Brown]

You got it sweet enough as it is. Ben.

[Ben Bull]

Thank you. Yeah, I was going to rip off that Guy Ritchie line as well. What is it? It's Bricktop, right?

[Noel Brown]

Who is the guy that feeds people to his pigs, Right.

[Ben Bull]

Bricktop, a London gangster in one of the Guy Ritchie films is midway through threatening a group of would be thugs. And then he gets some tea and they ask him if he wants sugar and he's like, no thank you Turkish, I'm sweet enough. And then he proceeds to, as you said, almost feed people to pigs. But no, what we're saying is, even if you yourself personally don't feel the call of chilled sweetness with the ice cream truck and that song that programs us all, you gotta admit, ice cream and later soft serve. These are amazing inventions. And they're kind of simple, right?

[Ad Voice 1]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

[Noel Brown]

This episode of Ridiculous history is brought to you by Grainger.

[Ben Bull]

This is the story of the 1.

[Noel Brown]

As a maintenance tech at a university, he knows ordering from multiple suppliers takes time away from keeping their arena up and running.

[Ben Bull]

That's why he counts on Grainger to get everything he needs, from lighting and H vac parts to plumbing supplies, all in one place.

[Noel Brown]

And with fast, dependable delivery, he's stocked and ready for the next tip off.

[Ben Bull]

Cole 1-800-Grainger Click grainger.com or just stop

[Noel Brown]

by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Ad Voice 2]

This is Troy Millings from Earn your leisure. When you think about discovering small brands, what store pops in your mind? Well, it should be Walmart. Seriously. Walmart has thousands of small brands and they're all in one place. Just go online or in store, discover and shop. It could not be easier. Every one of these brands has a real story and real people behind it. They're true American success stories. And you can find them all at Walmart. Discover thousands of small [e-mail] today.

[Ad Voice 1]

Getting to a great idea is hard. In college, nonsensical essays, cringe inducing presentations and seemingly unsolvable problem sets. But then the first thought becomes a final thesis. Jumbled slides transform into a polished keynote. And that midterm assignment gets a lot less mid because the road to great ideas is littered with bad ones. You just have to keep going until something clicks. Great ideas. Start on Mac. Find out more on apple.com college hey everyone, it's Kalpen.

[Kal Penn]

I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Noel Brown]

The food science and just the engineering aspect and this the kind of like, I don't know, stroke of genius that led to this becoming such a booming industry is worth the price of admission alone. And Ben, to get ahead of the legal beagles out there, to your point, I'm just gonna refer to it as soft serve because it's fun to say. So soft serve does seem like a simple invention. It's a cold, creamy ice cream treat that comes from a machine that swirls into a little cone. But the history is actually, like we were saying, a threefold story, Fourfold, fivefold even. We've got food science. Yeah, we've got refrigeration, which is of course a huge part of the history of being able to, like, move things from parts of the country or the world where they grow to other places without having them spoil. Huge part of the history of the world. Roadside attractions and entrepreneurship, the idea of franchises and of course, marketing. And one thing I think we both find a little interesting about the story of soft serve, and this comes into play with a lot of inventions that parallel thinking factor that, you know, I love to to mention. We're not quite sure. We can't really point to a single inventor that led to the creation of the soft serve industry as we know it today. But we're going to at least discuss some of the prime candidates.

[Ben Bull]

Absolutely. And folks, just to set the bar here, we have to make sure everybody knows ice cream itself. The iced creams, as Noel once called them a few years back, that concept is a lot older than this, called soft serve, because even before modern refrigeration, which was a game changer, frozen desserts of some kind existed in various forms. I'm thinking, of course, of things like the Inuit whale ice cream. But that's because they lived in an environment that was naturally refrigerated.

[Narrator/Guest Speaker]

Sure.

[Noel Brown]

Okay. I didn't think about that, Ben. And folks, you may want to go back and visit an episode we did not too distant past on the history of ice Cream trucks, right?

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, yeah.

[Noel Brown]

So there might be some redundant stuff in this, but we are focusing primarily on soft serve specifically, which is gonna. A big part of that's gonna be the Carvel company, which we'll get to in just a bit. So to your point, Ben, we're talking kind of hard serve, right? Like hard scooped ice cream that in order to, you know, you churn it, then harden it at very low temperatures, often involving like salt, rock salt. And it does require a scoop or a spoon to get it out. And, you know, as we all know, anyone that pulls a pint of Ben and Jerry's out of the freezer, you kind of want to let it sit for a second or even put it in the microwave for 10 seconds or so. Otherwise it's like, you know, digging into the frozen tundra, it's hard to get purchase. So this kind of created a bit of a practical problem for the folks that were trying to sling this stuff. The product had to be stored at such temperatures, such cold temperatures in order to keep it firm. And serving it required a bit of effort because you had to scoop it out. So the development of mechanical refrigeration and the special ed freezers opened the door to something a little bit different. A frozen dessert that could be frozen, aerated, and then served right away. Like, it's like all in one, one stop shop. You're basically making it to order.

[Ben Bull]

And by the way, folks, I want to shout out everybody who grew up with one of those homemade ice cream creation kits.

[Noel Brown]

The crank.

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, because you had to crank it in the circular fashion. It's a bonding experience with your kids, but it does take a while. And if you are a parent in these very hurried days, you may have a moment where you think, we should just go to the grocery store. But it's fun. It's the experience. And also, to be clear, Alaskan ice cream or the stuff made by traditional first nations people up north. That is not what you think of when you think of ice cream. It does have sweet stuff sometimes, like raspberries and blueberries, but it is made from seal oil, caribou mousse, or walrus tallow.

[Noel Brown]

So this is a meat cream. A meat. Love that. You know what? I'd try it. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not averse to trying some meat cream. So this guy named Charles Taylor, important figure, who in 1926 came up with this idea to have an ice cream machine that used prepared ingredients, whipped them into a smooth consistency, and then dispensed them essentially. It wasn't exactly a soft serve machine, but it was very, very much the predecessor to what we think of as the, you know, the lever you pull and then the little swirl that comes out. I'm having a hard time picturing this. And because it is definitely older technology that isn't as viable anymore, I had a hard time finding an actual image of one. But I think my understanding is that it is more of a mechanized version of that hand crank machine that you're talking about.

[Ben Bull]

Ben Ah, yeah, that absolutely makes sense. He did Taylor. Taylor is a fascinating character, folks. And he did, as we said, he did appear to be the first to the market filing a patent for that ice cream machine. And I think I want to say maybe it was stuff of genius where we talked a little bit about him. But as you said, we have many other inventors and entrepreneurs in the fold here. One of the classic ridiculous history stories involves another guy, a guy named Tom Carvell. That's a surname a lot of our ice cream fans will recognize because he founded the the Carvel ice Cream Company. And he's got a weird, he's got a weird story about it that happens Memorial Day weekend way back in 1934, for sure.

[Noel Brown]

Ben and Carvel to folks living in our neck of the woods in the southern part of the US it's not necessarily going to be something that you grew up with. I think maybe. Ben, you of course remember things like Baskin Robbins to a lesser degree. Cold Stone, which came along a little bit later. But we did.

[Ben Bull]

Dazs made up word.

[Noel Brown]

It is a made up word. We didn't really grow up around Carvel. That was more of a little more northern, north, northeast kind of thing. And that you will find them. There are some around in Atlanta, as we will discuss later, their stock has fallen considerably and there are far fewer locations there ever were. But in their heyday, they were pretty ubiquitous and they definitely were much more concentrated in the northeast of the U.S. so what happened was Tom Carv during Memorial Day weekend, as he said, Ben in 1934 had an ice cream truck and the truck had the misfortune of suffering a flat tire while roaming around the streets of Hartsdale, New York. And basically disabled out in the field like that, he wasn't able to keep his ice cream properly frozen, but he needed to sell this stuff. So he started to sell the partially melted product to folks that were happening by. And the thing that was surprising to him was that they actually seemed to like it. Yeah.

[Ben Bull]

Because think about it Folks, it's easier to eat. You don't have to have a high endurance spoon or scooping mechanism. You can walk around the block of Hartsdale and just lick a bite to your heart's content until you get the brain freeze. And Carvel recognized this opportunity. He's a lot like Percy Spencer, the guy who figured out microwave ovens when a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. So Carvel, obviously nobody wants a flat tire. But Carvel sees the creamy silver lining here and says, I've got an opportunity. Folks actually like this ice cream at this temperature. It's softer, it's easier to eat. And what if I made a business where I just sold this softer ice cream?

[Noel Brown]

Pretty smart. Quite an aha moment. And Carvel set about figuring out a way to do this at scale. He went on to develop specialized freezing equipment and a formula for soft serve ice cream. And by the late 30s and early 40s he had turned the idea into just that, a scalable bill business. Smithsonian does a great job of describing the equipment that he created. It was essentially a batch freezer that later he patented and converted into sellable equipment. You know, mass marketed equipment that he sold to other operations which helped spread the technology beyond his own stores. And for a while that was kind of his main thing was selling these machines to other companies. And then I believe he even had like master classes where he would teach them how to. He was also like the voice of the company because he was driving around. I think he heard like a radio ad that was created for his company. He didn't like it, so he went to the radio station and asked to redo the ad in his own voice. So he kind of set the standard for like the Colonel Sanders's and you know, Tom Beaudet of the world, Dave Thomases of the world, in being not only the CEO and the creator behind the brand, but also the face of the brand. And Fudgy the whale, you may know, again, not really something that I grew up with, but it is like an ice cream cake. And Carvel was also very important in the mass marketing and proliferation of the ice cream cake. It's literally this like chocolate whale shaped cake with like whipped cream and ice cream layers and really, really popular for birthdays and father's days and stuff like that.

[Ben Bull]

And there's one spoiler I've got to put in here. Fellow fellow ridiculous historians, you'll enjoy, enjoy this and you'll see where we're going with it. You could say the difference between soft serve and ice cream is the Same as the difference between a potato chip and a puffed crisp. Aha.

[Noel Brown]

That's a very good point, Ben. Is it to do with how, like, whether it kind of comes from, like, real ingredients or like some sort of. Is it like a dairy treat, dairy dessert rather than, like cream? You know what I mean? Like, what is it? Cheese product versus, like actual whole milk cheese?

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, let's get into it. As we're, we're, we're planting that seed there, that soft serve tree is going to grow here momentarily.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? You probably think of Walmart as the store that carries just about everything under the sun and maybe not as the place to discover small brands. Well, two things can be true at the same time, because Walmart is home to thousands of small brands founded by people who had an idea, took a chance, and built something of their own. Behind every one is a real story and a lot of hard work. So why not take a little time to recognize all the people building small brands across the country and support everything they're creating? Walmart is proud to give those brands a place on its shelves and online. It's never been easier to find and support small brands. So take a look at Walmart. You might come across something new, something unexpected, or a brand whose story speaks to you. You never know what you're missing until you look. Discover thousands of small [e-mail].

[Kal Penn]

hey, everyone, it's Kal Penn. I'm the host of Irsay The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project, Hail Mary, Massive sci fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone, very far from Earth.

[Narrator/Guest Speaker]

I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no. At this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that. That deeply, emotionally affected me. And I left it on the mic. That's great because it served the story. People will say like, oh, my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too.

[Kal Penn]

Listen to Irsay the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bull]

Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.

[Noel Brown]

Now.

[Ben Bull]

I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a [e-mail] upfront payment of

[Ad Voice 1]

$45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes me slow when network is busy.

[Working Forests Initiative Spokesperson]

See terms Working force professionals in the US Plant more than they harvest while also caring for water, wildlife and more. It's how we grow a sustainable future. Learn more at workingforestsinitiative.com.

[Ben Bull]

Nolan the research you point out thanks to softserveperth.com that there was a growing industry popping up in different parts of the US we mentioned Dairy Queen. We have to let you know folks, that around the same time that Carvel was becoming a legend, there was another completely unrelated group of folks looking into what we call soft serve out in the Midwest.

[Noel Brown]

Yep, it's that parallel thinking, man. I mean, it's like, you know, people can have an idea at the same time and not necessarily be stealing at almost the exact same time. To your point, Ben, the McCullough family, headed up by John Fremont JF McCullough, along with his son Alex, had developed a soft serve formula of their own. In 1939 they tested the product at the ice cream shop belonging to a friend of theirs with a fabulous name, Sherb Noble. Is that nominative determinism there, Ben? Sherb. Sherbert Sherbet. How do you say it?

[Ben Bull]

I love the concept of nominative determinism. I've been whinging about it for years and I like the idea that maybe he had some very specific opinions about Sherbert. But Sherbert might be a little bit outside the scope of soft server. Is nola's soft server? Is Sherbet soft serve?

[Noel Brown]

I don't think so. Sherbet is a hard pack ice cream as well. I think it just has to do with the cream content. Once again, there are some Venn diagrams.

[Ben Bull]

Oh, Sherbet has like 1 to 2% milk fat, so way less than ice cream.

[Noel Brown]

Right. And it tends to be more, you know, fruity flavors. But that's all I really know about Sherbet it's never been my go to. Although I will say, when it is presented to me, a nice orange sherbet is pretty refreshing and tasty.

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, it's. I'm not so much on the orange. Orange flavors, but I'll tell you, it's lime sherbet. Sherbet is. Yeah, it's one of those things. I love the fruity flavors, most of them. Sherbet's one of those things where, like you, if I'm in an area and somebody offers it, I'm not going to get mad at them, but I don't stay up late at night wondering if I'll ever eat sherbet again.

[Noel Brown]

Well, it seems to be the general consensus because I don't know that I see sherbet doesn't seem to be nearly as popular as it may be once was. But that is just a conjecture on my part. The test at Sherburdery in Kankakee, Illinois, was a smashing success as you might have imagined, Ben. According to the Dairy Queen historian, customers consumed more than 1600 servings in just a couple of hours during the first sales experiment.

[Ben Bull]

Very first day, folks.

[Noel Brown]

Very first day. Man, this is a good sign. The McCulloughs joined forces with Noble to subsequently open the very first Dairy Queen breakfast and mortar store in Joliet, Illinois. Just a year or just a couple years later, 1940 was open for business. That's when the company started rapidly expanding through franchising. And this is all before Ray Kroc and McDonald's, if I'm not mistaken.

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, I believe that's correct. And this is also why our question about who invented soft serve is similar to the story of so many other inventions. There isn't a simple answer that everyone agrees on. Instead, there are multiple contenders saying, hey, we were first to the post. Carvel and Dairy Queen for a while are like our Coke and Pepsi. They have both credible claims to pioneering the commercial soft serve business and the machinery and freezing technologies involved. So maybe it's best for us ridiculous historians to think of soft serve as a techno model that emerged through multiple innovations starting in the 1920s and 30s and just got more delicious as we go along. But you've got to riddle me this here, Noel. We keep saying the phrase soft serve and we talked about the temperature, but what actually makes soft serve, you know, soft.

[Noel Brown]

That's right. I mean, if you think about it is kind of bordering on milkshake consistency. Like maybe think about if you have a milkshake that's a little too hard to Drink through a straw that's kind of the consistency of a soft serve, like a Wendy's Frosty, for example. You could drink that with a straw if it melted a little bit. But when it comes right out, it's a little tricky. You gotta eat it with a spoon. And that is because the soft serve machine simultaneously freezes part of the water in that mixture, whips air into it, aerates it, which makes it nice and fluffy and creamy. And then it keeps the product at a precise temperature that is warmer than fully hardened ice cream. And the most important part is that it dispenses it directly into the cone that is then passed directly off to the customer. And I mean, you will notice if you're. I was just hanging out at a park in Queens and got a soft serve cone from a delightful truck and got it dipped and everything. It starts melting and dripping real quick if it's a hot day. So you got to really get right on that. Whereas a hard, you know, pack ice cream scoop will eventually start melting, but you got a little time is on your side a little more when it comes to the melting of that.

[Ben Bull]

And that's. This is why I'm making that earlier comparison to potato chips versus, you know, potato puffs or crisp. The air that goes into your soft serve is called overrun in the industry. And that creates this light, light, smooth, Sade esque texture that makes soft serve different from those denser scoops. And because it's at a higher temperature, it is going to be a different tasting or consumption experience. But to be clear, soft serve is not a completely different food. It's a kissing cousin of ice cream and it uses most of the same basic ingredients from ice cream. So like you were saying, Noel, think of it more as like, you know, how bell peppers would be another example. You know how bell peppers in the US you'll typically get them in like yellow, orange and red or green. Those are just different stages of the peppers development. So we could say that soft serve in a similar way is a different stage of development of ice.

[Noel Brown]

Funny. It's funny you say that not to zrel. We're talking about food and I didn't quite know that thing about peppers, but it does make sense because you'll even notice, Ben, if you keep a certain pepper long enough and it doesn't go bad, it will start to change color.

[Ben Bull]

Yep, yep.

[Noel Brown]

It'll get a little darker, but not like in a bad way. Just like it's literally transitioning into another phase.

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, yeah. It's a natural ripening process. I want to be clear there. Since I derailed this, peppers have a unripe green state, and then they get to a final vibrant hue. That that depends on the genetics and then breakdown of chlorophyll. And that's not what we're here to talk about. We are here to talk about soft serve.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, for sure, Ben. But I appreciate the pepper talk because I have been really enjoying some of those little sweet peppers lately that you get at the store in, like, a bag. They got, like, red, green, and yellow, and you can snack on them, slice them up, put it in a salad, just, you know, eat them. I grilled some the other day. Very, very good. Back to soft serve and back to the 1940s, where technology is really turning this into a scalable business and a lot of people are jumping on the train. It was a crucial time because soft serve became more than just an interesting kind of, like, you know, wave of the future product. It became a repeatable retail system. Carvel helped popularize those machines and eventually developed the franchise model. The Smithsonian's archival history of Carvell says that Carvel sold these freezers to other operators and later became deeply involved into franchising themselves. Dairy Queen, as we mentioned, did follow a similar path, expanding through franchising. That model was particularly well suited to soft serve because the product could be made using standardized mixes and specialized machines. So if your franchisee has the machine and then you send them the proprietary mixture, you got yourself a repeatable, you know, prediction, predictable products, right?

[Ben Bull]

You sure do. And you also see the kind of timing that people cannot predict but can make or break a new invention. Soft serve is riding the wave of post World War II American Transformation. These are the halcyon days of the nuclear family. A car in every garage everybody can afford, a home, 2.5 kids, et cetera, et cetera. Big part of the American myth and obviously didn't apply to everybody, but it brings in this idea of a bold new future, right? And along with this bold new future doesn't just come the ubiquity of the automobile. We also see the bold future of ice cream, the soft serve. And when you're traveling by car, you're taking your kids on the summer vacation to the beach or out to the Grand Canyon. You are going to see all these tourist spots. What do they sell? Soft serve. You also see it at drive ins, at diners, at shopping centers. Because to your point, Noel, once you, as a business, get that machine, you're printing money 100%.

[Noel Brown]

Ben and I Love your point about not only the nuclear family, but like nuclear power and like the nuclear bomb. This idea of the age of atom and the future, like automats, you know, even just getting food or frozen things dispensed from trucks felt vaguely like futuristic. Right. Because of refrigeration technology and all of this stuff. So soft serve definitely was kind of World's Fair material. You know what I mean? It was like, definitely seen as a novelty, right?

[Ben Bull]

Yeah. Like Dippin Dots back in the 1990s.

[Noel Brown]

100% and dippin dots. You know, it's funny. Dippin Dots did. I wouldn't say it took off like soft serve, but it's still around. And there are other companies that do a dipndot type thing, so I'm glad to see them hanging on, but definitely never reached the same heights that soft serve did. So by the 1950s, soft serve was becoming a little bit less of that novelty, and it had become mainstreamed into American food culture. Smithsonian said that by 1956, we had around 12,000 places in the United States that were offering soft serve ice cream.

[Ben Bull]

Yeah. And one important point we have to make here, fellow ridiculous historians, is that that soft serve became mainstreamed in this world of emergent franchises because it was a predictable treat. Right. Because the machines, even from competing inventors and manufacturers, because they all used a very similar process. If you were taking your kiddos out to your Dairy Queen or out to another place, you wouldn't have to worry that mom and pop made the soft serve a different way. It'd be predictable for your kids, so they'd always get the same treat. It's a huge part of the success. And we're talking about repeatability and predictability. We gotta talk McDonald's.

[Noel Brown]

We do. They kind of crack the code on that. The aforementioned Ray Kroc, who did, to be fair, steal the whole thing from two brothers.

[Ben Bull]

Check out that film. What's the name of that film?

[Noel Brown]

The Founder, I think is what it's called.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah.

[Noel Brown]

So Michael Keaton plays Croc. You know, definitely a bit of a snake in the grass, but oftentimes big, big thinking business people are. I mean, look at Elon Musk. He really. He never met an idea that he didn't want to steal. That's sort of his whole vibe.

[Ben Bull]

Including the Odyssey.

[Noel Brown]

That's true. He really is excited about making an AI version of the Odyssey. He's very upset about that. I don't quite get it. But you know what?

[Ben Bull]

He's a heck of a drug.

[Noel Brown]

I do hope he's he's doing well. This is important though, Ben. McDonald's did usher in the fast food revolution. McDonald's began offering soft serve in 19 as a complement to their burgers. As a way of getting dessert, getting everything in one place, right. You got your meal, your drink and then your dessert. Of course this was all thanks to machines manufactured by the first guy we mentioned, that Charles Taylor, who did go on to develop further evolutions of his original design that did end up including soft serve machines. So this really started to mainstream soft serve even further. Fast food restaurants were that perfect match because they could finish their burger and their fries and then get themselves a cone or a sundae or a shake all from the same counter. Because you can make a shake out of soft serve. You know, like all of this stuff. It's like a one stop for the ingredients that then can be combined with other ingredients to make different menu items.

[Ben Bull]

And hang with a creepy clown. Everybody. Check out our two part series on McDonald's mascots. And check out that those original versions of Ronald McDonald's in here for even

[Noel Brown]

like at some locations. I haven't seen him in a long time but there used to be like a bench outside where it was Ronald McDonald statue on it and his arm would be. So he could put his arm around you.

[Ben Bull]

Nothing weird, but it is a brilliant idea because again it goes back to consistency and predictability. We did solve the question, by the way, about why the McDonald's ice cream machine is always broken in the modern day. Check out stuff they don't want you to know for that one. But this, this.

[Noel Brown]

Well, you could blame the Taylor company. They still are, they're. They're still the company that provides the machine. And I believe to hint at that a little bit, it had to do with the fact that. Right. To repair stuff.

[Ben Bull]

Yes. Yeah, they have a monopoly on it. It's been very good for the Taylor company. Not that great for the consumer. But can I point out real quick

[Noel Brown]

something that's not in the doc here, Ben. I. I was watching a video on the history of Carvel. Apparently McDonald's came to Carvel first and Carvel said he didn't see it. I don't see it. I don't see the vision. I don't see people wanting ice cream after a burger. It just doesn't make sense to me.

[Ben Bull]

And Sean Connery almost got to play Dumbledore and Gandalf and didn't understand the scripts. So everybody has their big accidental wins and their big accidental misses. McDonald's is amazing. For the consumer because it is, is inexpensive, it is consistent, it is reliable, you know what you are going to get. And part of this results in soft serve and as you said, the milkshake becoming the kind of the part of the triumvirate of the meal, right? You get a sandwich, you get some fries, you get a drink or a dessert. And this propels soft serve past the point of mainstream novelty into international ubiquity.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? You probably think of Walmart as the store that carries just about everything under the sun and maybe not as the place to discover small brands. Well, two things can be true at the same time because Walmart is home to thousands of small brands. Brands founded by people who had an idea, took a chance, and built something of their own. Behind every one is a real story and a lot of hard work. So why not take a little time to recognize all the people building small brands across the country and support everything they're creating? Walmart is proud to give those brands a place on its shelves and online. It's never been easier to find and support small brands. So take a look at Walmart. You might come across something new, something unexpected, or a brand whose story speaks to you. You never know what you're missing until you look. Discover thousands of small [e-mail].

[Kal Penn]

hey everyone, it's Kal Penn. I'm the host of Irsay the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weird Audiobook project, Hail Mary Massive sci fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone, very far from Earth.

[Narrator/Guest Speaker]

I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo. Is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no. At this point, it would kind of be betraying the truth the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply, emotionally affected me. And I left it on the mic. That's great because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too.

[Kal Penn]

Listen to Irsay the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Working Forests Initiative Spokesperson]

Keeping a working forest growing takes a massive commitment that's why working forest professionals plant over 1 billion seedlings annually in the U.S. ensuring more trees are planted than harvested. But it takes more than planting to sustain these ecosystems. It means caring for everything in the forest, from clean water to thriving wildlife. Because when we take care of our forests, they'll thrive for generations. Learn [e-mail] you ain't heard about Moto Casino?

[Ad Voice 2]

Moto has real Vegas slots. Any game you can find on the floor in Vegas, you can play it on Moto.

[Noel Brown]

I like my slots hot.

[Ad Voice 2]

Moto's free to play like food stamps in line at the grocery store, at a funeral, in traffic.

[Ben Bull]

Keep your eyes on the road.

[Ad Voice 2]

Hop on Moto Casino. Moto Casino got jackpots that are bigger than my belly. Moto America's hottest Free to play Social Casino.

[Noel Brown]

Download the Moto Casino app. Today, Moto Casino is the social casino board.

[Working Forests Initiative Spokesperson]

We're prohibited.

[Noel Brown]

No purchase necessary. Visit Moto us for more than.

[Ben Bull]

That's why by the 1960s and the 1970s, you see soft serve or somebody shilling soft serve at pretty much any public gathering, right? Like your fairs, your malls, your amusement parks, for sure.

[Noel Brown]

I mean, and there is, you know, there is a barrier to entry. Anyone can't get in on the game, you got to have some pretty pricey equipment. Equipment. Whereas with hard pack ice cream, you could make it yourself at home and then bring it in a cooler or something like that. But that's absolutely right, Ben. Ice cream parlors, malls, all that stuff. Fast food restaurants, schools, the mobile ice cream trucks that we've also been talking about that we're going to talk about a little bit more. The ice cream truck in particular was a really iconic part of childhoods for generations. I mean, ours to a lesser degree, they're still around. But I think, you know, kids growing up in certain parts of the country at certain, certain times in history particularly just it was, you know, magical to hear the sound of the ice cream truck coming down the street. Soft serve was also increasingly beginning to be paired with other desserts. So instead of just getting like a cone, they started to offer banana splits, sundaes, the dipped cones, and elaborate specialty desserts where you might mix it with, say, Italian ice. We'll get to that in a minute. But just to give a little bit of history about kind of the scaling of the ice cream truck model, Mr. Softy is something that anyone who spent any time in the northeast would, would recognize. James Conway started the company. William and James Conway, the brothers, started the company in Philadelphia the idea was bring soft serve ice cream directly to neighborhoods in a colorful truck. Along with that, that little jingle that let everybody know that a treat was just around the corner.

[Ben Bull]

And we all recognize the song, right?

[Noel Brown]

Move, kids.

[Ben Bull]

Get out the way. Get out the wave.

[Max Williams]

Get out.

[Ben Bull]

We're doing that because we legally, by Little John. That is ludicrous. Most famous. You know, there are three big names in soft serve. It's Carvel, Taylor, and obviously Ludicrous Luda.

[Noel Brown]

Indeed. You know, it's funny, Ben, I associate the ice cream truck song with a couple of things. There's Bicycle Built for Two, you know, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Then there's also, like, Dana. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. So none of them are copyrightable. They're all such public domain old kind of nursery rhyme songs, but they're different. And I think depending on where you grew up, you might remember a different one, or it might be that Mandela effect, because I couldn't tell you what the Mr. Softee jingle was. And maybe there's one that it's always been and maybe it's changed over time. But what we do know is the business grew super fast. Mr. Softee became incredibly popular along the east coast, where generations of families began to associate that sound with the feelings of summer and childhood nostalgic memories.

[Ben Bull]

It's Pavlovian. It's behavioral programming. And we know that Mr. Softy encountered Carvel level success. It's become a part of Americana, part of the zeitgeist and pop culture. They, like other companies before them, expanded through a franchise model, meaning that you can be an independent operator, kind of a contractor, and you can run Mr. Softie Trust trucks in communities all across the United States. It's still the basic process we described. Even as we record in 2026. You hear the jingle, all the kids get excited and the adults run out to meet the truck. And you've got multiple items you can order, but it's still going to be a relatively small menu because they are on a truck. And it's just nostalgia. It's the kind of thing that advertisers love but cannot create themselves. It's almost lightning in a bottle, for sure.

[Noel Brown]

And speaking of marketing and advertising and lightning in a bottle, anyone who grew up around this Mr. Softy stuff is probably screaming at their podcast device. When I said that their song may have changed over the years, and then I don't know which one it was, it might have been Bicycle Built for Two, et cetera. Absolutely not. Just look this up. They have an I that is a registered sound trademark and is officially titled Jingles and Chimes. That was adapted around 1960 by an ad man from Philly named Les Was, who based the melody on a public domain piece of music, Arthur Pryor's the Whistler and His Dog. It is heavily linked to the brand and it is a federally registered trademark. And it does have lyrics, apparently. It's the creamiest, dreamiest soft ice cream you get from Mr. Softy. For refreshing delight supreme look for Mr. Softy my milkshakes and my sundaes and my cones are such a treat Listen for my store on wheels ding a ling down the street S O F t double e Mr. Softee.

[Ben Bull]

And so of course you know, Mr. Softy is referring to the fact that there's soft serve and their ice cream is not super hard. And over the intervening years from then to now, your basic, or what they sometimes call vanilla soft serve cone starts becoming more than a novelty on its own. It becomes a staple or a base for these increasingly opulent and delectable creations. So everybody in the market and consumers at home are figuring out what other stuff they can add add to the basic soft serve cone. We talked about chocolate dipped cones. The science behind the high fat content of the freezing syrup is fascinating. You get the hard shell, right. But they also. It reminds me of how people started getting really weird with Bloody Marys and putting all sorts of chicken wings and stuff in them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not, you know, pickle

[Max Williams]

juice, olive juice and mustard.

[Ben Bull]

Those are celery.

[Max Williams]

Mustard is excellent in it.

[Ben Bull]

For, for a while there was a time where this definitely, I'm sure still happens. Max would know better than us. But for a long time I remember there would be places that had that touted Bloody Mary buffets.

[Max Williams]

Yeah, that's very much a thing. You go up there, you make your bloody Mary, you get, you get your condoms like that.

[Working Forests Initiative Spokesperson]

Yeah.

[Noel Brown]

Is it an all you can e Bloody Mary buffet that seems dangerous?

[Max Williams]

I don't think so. I think all, it depends state by state. But like I know state of Georgia, like an all you can drink is special is very much illegal.

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, it's. It's also, it's probably a thing where you can pick any of the accoutrement to your heart's content in the Bloody Mary buffet, but when it comes to the actual drink, it's different.

[Max Williams]

Yeah. And to make this even lamer, the reason why it's illegal to have an all you can drink in Georgia is not because like, oh, we're so worried that people are going to get too drunk. No, no, it's a tax reason. It's taxes. It's only taxes.

[Ben Bull]

Well, luckily the I, the, our Bloody Mary comparison I was making is, is leading us to maybe a different episode in the future. But Noel, you see the comparison I'm making here. Like people had the basic soft serve and they said, what other, what other sweet or savory things can we put atop it? The only real rule is that they don't want a bunch of hot stuff.

[Jacob Goldstein]

For sure.

[Noel Brown]

They do sometimes do hot fudge, which requires a specialty piece of dispensing equipment. You know, the one that's been most top of mind for me is a company called Menchies that I believe, you know, kind of entered the game and gave folks like Carval and Dairy Queen a run for their money. They do all these different rotating soft serve flavors and sometimes they're really fun ones like UBE and taro and stuff like that. And you get your soft serve and then there's like a little bar with a sneeze guard on it that's got like, you know, boba and cookie dough bites and you know, fresh strawberries and all kinds of stuff. And then various cold syrups and compotes. And then there's hot fudge or hot marshmallow fluff or whatever. A lot of fun. And then they weigh it, which is really smart. You know, they, depending on how much topping you put on it, they weigh it. So that's sort of the more modern version of what we're talking about here. But yeah, it really did blow the doors wide open in terms of nuts, sprinkles, cookies, candy, fruit brownies, bits of cake. And that paved the way to the Dairy Queen Blizzard, the McDonald's McFlurry where he actually mixed the things into a cup kind of version.

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, and we also see here a continuing expansion. Now soft serve is treated increasingly like, as I was saying, a base or an ingredient atop which other things are added. The concept spreads, as we mentioned, across the globe. In the United Kingdom, in Britain in particular, you'll hear the name Mr. Whippy. In other countries, we see regional identities and serving traditions. It's like the expansion, I would argue, of so many ethnic cuisines. People take it and they adapt it to what is available to them or their pre existing cultural taste. Right.

[Noel Brown]

And then, you know, maybe because of this branding, like in the uk, they don't call it soft serve at all.

[Ben Bull]

They call it a whippy yeah, yeah. It became an eponymous trademark for sure.

[Noel Brown]

And you know, as. As you know, I'm sure in Japan, specifically in Hokkaido, they have their own very specialized kind of regional takes on soft serve. The Hokkaido one in particular is starting to make its way over here now. You're starting to see that in like places like Hipst, Brooklyn. And it's like a very high milk fat content. Mega, mega, mega creamy.

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, yeah. The butterfat content is the real difference between soft serve, gelato and ice cream flavoring aside. And I've been to, as you know, Noel, I've been to Hokkaido in winter, which was not my smartest decision because it's so far north. The ice cream was awesome. But we also see soft serve be being incredibly famous throughout Japan. And you know how Japan is really great at doing, at making each little town or community unique. Everybody's got a yokai based mascot or a mascot based on their local agriculture, their turnips or what have you. Their soft serve is like that too. Every local area is known for its unique, hard to get flavors that you can't find find everywhere else. You know, you'll see this when we go. I'm sorry that we're just ships in the night this year, but you'll see it when you go. You can find this stuff served in shrines and temples. It's very not off putting, but it's a very unusual thing I think for a lot of us from the west because we think of shrines and temples as holy sites, which they are. And it feels kind of like going to a Catholic church. Church and buying ice cream inside for sure.

[Noel Brown]

But it's my understanding too that they do. I mean this is not meaning that they're implying a dismissiveness or like, you know, they don't let you take pictures. They're very, very, very. There are a lot of social kind of mores surrounding visiting a shrine and like you're not supposed to approach monks and. Yeah, there's just like a lot of like kind of social contract stuff that they do expect people to approach abide by.

[Ben Bull]

Absolutely. We also know that you can combine soft serve or another cousin, frozen custard and Italian ice. This leads us to what we mentioned earlier, gelato or gelati. This comes from Philadelphia in South Jersey in the mid-1980s, which makes it younger than a lot of people may have assumed. I think we realize that there's still so much more or on the horizon for soft serve, for ice cream, for all associated frozen treats. So you fellow ridiculous historians might be the next People to add to the story.

[Noel Brown]

Exactly. Yeah. Jalotti is our favorite. Me and the kiddo and their sister, they order from a place in town called Jeremiah's. And they did.

[Ben Bull]

Oh, I like that. Whoa.

[Noel Brown]

My God, it's so good. The concept, I believe, was originally popularized in Philly yet again in the 80s by a Philadelphia firefighter. But it's made its way here to Georgia. And it's a combination of delicious creamy soft serve and different flavors of Italian ice. And it's layered in such a cool way, I just. We love it. And yeah, this one's run a little long, but not quite two part material. So we're gonna end with a little bit of tangents and trivia. The first one involving the Iron Lady, Margaret, Maggie to her friends, Thatcher. You might occasionally hear a claim that Ms. Thatcher, who later, of course, became Britain's Prime Minister, helped to invent soft serve. Like many urban legends, there is a kernel of truth behind the story, but the version that gets kind of spread around is a bit misleading. I didn't know this, Ben, but Margaret Thatcher, before her career in politics, was quite a high level chemist working in food science.

[Ben Bull]

Yeah, yeah. And one of the versions of this story you will hear says that during her time in the food science labs, she researched frozen desserts and the science of incorporating air into ice cream or aerating ice cream. And this often gets transformed or embellished the way good stories do. And even now, depending on who you talk to or whom you talk to in the United Kingdom, you might hear people of a certain age tell you with full sincerity and conviction that Margaret Thatcher invented soft serve. That's as misleading as saying Al Gore invented the Internet.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. As he would have you believe. Yeah, definitely a bit of a misnomer. Soft serve already had multiple commercial pioneers and applications in the U.S. by that point, Carvel and Dairy Queen had already entered the chat. Smithsonian does, however, identify the Thatcher connection as one one of several competing origin stories, rather than an established fact of the invention itself. So while Thatcher's scientific career is fascinating in and of itself and something that I didn't know about may have intersected with food science, she definitely should not be considered the sole inventor of soft serve. And we got one more bit of trivia here that I'm gonna leave out for one of our. One of our listicle episodes where we take all the bits that didn't make it into the episodes and do a whole one on that. Ben, what a fun conversation, man. I'm definitely craving a little bit of iced cream.

[Ben Bull]

At this point, tis the season. Yeah. And I'll report back. I'll report back in advance of our mutual trips to Japan with the best soft serve we find in our travels. Thank you for the research here, Noel. Big, big thanks to our super producer, Max the Freight Train Williams. Big thanks to AJ By Bahamas Jacobs. And of course, Jonathan Strickland, AKA the Quizzter, a known ice cream fiend.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's sort of like the Noid for pizza or the Hamburglar for burgers. Only he will come for your soft serve.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He will.

[Ben Bull]

He comes in the night, he gets upset, realizing that other people have soft serve. Like, he will text me sometimes and say, ben, you better not be softer.

[Noel Brown]

No, no, no, no.

[Ben Bull]

If he ever listens to these credits.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, we do. We do always remind him that we mentioned him every episode. And I think it warms his black heart. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show shows.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? When you think about discovering small brands, what store pops into your mind? Well, it should be Walmart. Seriously, Walmart has thousands of small brands and they're all in one place. Just go online or in store, discover and shop. It could not be easier. Every one of these brands has a real story and real people behind it. They're true American success stories. And you can find them all at Walmart. Discover thousands of small [e-mail] today.

[Working Forests Initiative Spokesperson]

Keeping a working forest growing takes a massive commitment. That's why working forest professionals plant over 1 billion seedlings annually in the U.S. ensuring more trees are planted than harvested. But it takes more than planting to sustain these ecosystems. It means caring for everything in the forest, from clean water to thriving wildlife. Because when we take care of our forests, they'll thrive for generations. Learn more at workingforestsinitiative.com here's golf legend John Daly.

[Kal Penn]

Hell, yeah.

[Noel Brown]

These wins are piling up faster than my divorces. I only spent on Moto America's social casino. You know, I've won a couple of majors, and on Moto, I've won majors, grands, and epic jackpots on their clothes. Classic Vegas slots with huge, huge bonus rounds. Moto Casino adds new games and awards. Players free coins every single day. Grip it and spend it on Moto Casino. Download the Moto Casino app today. Moto Casino is a social casino board with prohibited.

[Ad Voice 1]

No purchase necessary.

[Noel Brown]

Visit Moto Us for more details. Casino America Social Casino.

[Ad Voice 1]

This is a stunning story based on the hit true crime podcast Betrayal. He was a tall, handsome police officer, the man of her dreams. Caroline knew right away he was the man she would spend her life with. But then she got a text that changed everything. The man she loved was a severe sex addict, having affair after affair with so many different women in his cop car while on duty. I implore you to watch Betrayal. Dirty Secrets now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.