From an initial "all-you-can-eat" promotion that saw 1,600 servings
sold in mere hours to a surprising FDA classification that'll blow your mind,
there's a lot you may not know about the first ever Dairy Queen.
The first Dairy Queen was founded less than 50 miles outside of Chicago in Joliet, Illinois,
home of the Joliet Iron and Steel Works. By 1921, even before the mill had "steel" in its name,
geographer Douglas Clay Ridgely wrote that its blast furnaces could output
2,000 tons of pig iron daily. Currently a park, the Joliet Iron Works occupies
52 acres of land with much of its original foundation now crumbling.
But back when it was thriving, the Joliet Iron and Steel Works was barely a 10 minute
walk from where John Fremont McCullough, his son Alex, and their business partner Sherb
Noble opened up their first location under the Dairy Queen name in 1940. In 2012, the building,
which by then had become a church, was given a local historic designation.
Coke, the coal derivative used in steel smelting and production,
produces hydrogen sulfide as a byproduct. The colorless gas
even today is notorious for producing a "rotten eggs" smell in communities
surrounding steel production plants. So it goes without saying that the first Dairy Queen and its
sweet confections would have been a refuge from the sulfuric odors coming off the steel plant.
Sherwood "Sherb" Noble was already in the ice cream business before the McCulloughs
approached him with their new soft serve creation. A graduate of Iowa
State's vocational dairy program, Noble operated his own Kankakee,
Illinois ice cream store called "Sherb's," with the McColloughs as his suppliers.
Ice cream at the time was all hard packed and tended to be harder in consistency than
what you'll find in the grocery freezer aisle today, familiar to anyone who's tried making
it at home. But in 1938 John Fremont McCullough introduced Noble to the new invention he and his
son had developed: an ice cream mixture that used a lower fat content that made it come out softer,
at a slightly higher temperature, and hopefully with a more flavorful result.
As an exercise in market testing, the new "soft serve" was sold to customers at Sherb's at 10
cents a pop. This "all-you-can-eat" promotion took place on August 4th,
1938. With Chicago area summers reaching the low triple-digits at their peak even then,
the creamy, sweet, and cool concoction was an immediate hit,
and the stock of 1,600 servings was reportedly depleted within two hours.
The soft serve that flew out of Sherb's in 1938 was all hand-scooped,
but after the smashing success of the all-you-can-eat promotion,
the McCulloughs eventually hit upon the freezer/dispenser machine they needed to
stream Dairy Queen soft serve directly into the cup or cone in its famous swirl. They
approached dairy machine manufacturers for help designing and producing the device they needed,
but the first two companies that the McCulloughs approached rebuffed them.
It was one Harry M. Oltz of Hammond, Indiana who came to the McCulloughs rescue when they
found his ad in the Chicago Tribune for his patented ice cream-dispensing freezer.
When the first Dairy Queen launched in 1940, the McCulloughs and Sherb Noble had waited
almost two years for a way to bring their soft serve to market, and they focused solely on
their flagship product: their dessert shop had a simple menu of cones, cups, sundaes,
and quarts to take home, all containing exclusively their brand of soft serve.
"In their ice cream plant that they owned and operated,
they dispensed ice cream in a soft state out of their freezers on a daily basis."
When it came time to open the first Dairy Queen in 1940, Noble found its storefront
at 501 North Chicago Street in Joliet. Situated in Joliet's downtown, and accessible to travelers
along Route 66, Dairy Queen's birthplace was characterized by Noble himself as:
"Strictly a walk-in type store [...] with very little parking."
It wasn't long before the chain began experimenting with other ways of serving
customers. The first Kankakee location opened in 1947, serving through a walk-up window. The
company acquired smoothie chain Orange Julius in 1987, making hybrid DQ/Orange Julius locations
common in shopping mall food courts. And franchisees were introduced to the "DQ
Grill & Chill" in 2002, a restaurant concept and floorplan including dine-in booths, table service,
a drive-thru window, emphasizing that Dairy Queen now offered entrees alongside its desserts.
The ice cream cone had almost 40 years of market development when Dairy Queen launched,
so it's no surprise that cones of soft serve graced the first menu the company ever posted,
alongside sundaes and cups, which were then called dishes. The 501 North Chicago Street
location offered cones and dishes in two sizes, a five cent and a 10 cent option,
and every cone after the second went for only a penny on opening day. The U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index inflation calculator would put those prices equivalent to
$1.07 and $2.14 in today's money, which isn't far off from how much an equivalent DQ cone
would set you back today. Although as the old saying goes: Prices and participation may vary.
Today, the plain dish of soft serve no longer graces Dairy Queen's menu,
although ordering a sundae without any topping or sauce would be an doable — albeit incredibly
boring – menu hack. Meanwhile, cones now come in four sizes: Kid's, Small, Medium, and Large.
By 1940, the ice cream sundae had already been around for over 50 years. At its root,
a sundae is simply sauce-drizzled ice cream, meaning that by 1940,
any ice cream parlor stocked to industry standards already had all the ingredients
needed for the upgraded frozen dessert. And Dairy Queen was no different,
offering "a most delicious sundae" at an eight cent and a 12 cent price point.
"Those curl-top sweets have a way of disappearing in a hurry. That's because they taste so good!"
The contemporary Dairy Queen menu offers simple sundaes in six varieties: chocolate, hot fudge,
caramel, peanut butter, strawberry, and pineapple varieties that include chunks
of real fruit suspended in syrup. It is unknown how many of those varieties were
already on offer when Dairy Queen first opened its doors, but we do know that it did not take
long for the soft serve giant to expand its offerings as it expanded its footprint. By
1960 Dairy Queen franchises were experimenting with unique combinations of flavors for its
sundaes that became mainstays of the brand's marketing, such as the "Jack & Jill Sundae"
which included a pour of hot fudge on one side and marshmallow-flavored syrup on the other, creating
a striking two-tone dessert that recently had a revival when an employee shared it on TikTok.
Soft serve owes its unique texture to the air distributed throughout its volume in
the mixing process, making it essentially whipped ice cream. With that air comes heat;
soft serve is around 10 degrees warmer than traditional ice cream. With all these conditions,
you might think the first Dairy Queen would capitalize on its uniqueness by making the
Joliet store the only place to acquire that soft serve, fresh from the dispenser since a
home ice box would likely turn the soft serve into standard hard-packed ice cream. But no, the first
Dairy Queen location advertised that you could buy its soft serve by the quart at 35 cents per tub.
Today, Dairy Queen locations frequently have a freezer of take-home products, including quarts
of soft serve. And with the advent of the Dilly Bar and Buster Bar, Dairy Queen's proprietary
treats of coated soft serve on a stick, its to-go selection has only ever expanded.
You might think that a mixture of milk or soda to make a shake, malt,
or float out of that soft serve would be a no-brainer, but the original Dairy Queen had
no such items on its original menu. Though soda fountains were so ubiquitous across
the U.S. at the time that even the local drug store often offered shakes, malts,
and floats, Dairy Queen apparently chose to focus on what made them unique – their
soft serve – and put off introducing any ice cream-derived drinks to its menu for nine years.
Today, the Dairy Queen drinks menu is a cavalcade of options from Orange Julius smoothies,
to the ICEE-esque Misty Freeze and Slush, to the uncomfortably-named MooLattes. And of course,
there is an ever-evolving roster of shakes and malts. Chocolate, vanilla,
and strawberry are perennial options, but the chain is still introducing new
flavors such as last year's S'mores shake. Meanwhile, Dairy Queen's competition in the
fast food world has evolved in kind, with various burger joints putting their own
eclectic shakes on the menu even as Dairy Queen has come to serve burgers and fries.
"I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"
The McCullough's version of soft serve was a game changer for them. However,
the invention of soft serve was less like a proverbial "lightbulb moment" and more like
a gold rush, with various ice cream purveyors across the U.S. racing to
find a way to reliably and consistently produce soft serve ice cream at scale.
One of the first to successfully develop and harness the power of soft serve was Athanasios
Karvelas, better known as Tom Carvel. The legend goes that the Greek immigrant was
selling ice cream from a refrigerated truck in 1934 when a flat tire on a blistering Memorial
Day weekend forced him to desperately sell his melting stock to minimize his losses.
The semi-melted soft ice cream was a hit, and Carvel created a new recipe and a new
pumping machine for an ice cream that could be kept cold but not frozen, and served with the
same texture as the semi-solid ice cream that made his near-disaster into a sterling success.
Carvel's own soft serve empire was already expanding by the time Noble and the McCulloughs
launched Dairy Queen, but his operations were exclusive to the East Coast at the time. In 1947,
Carvel created his first franchise contract, three years after the Dairy Queen team introduced the
business model. But with Carvel based in New York and Dairy Queen in the Midwest,
it took a long time before the companies expanded enough to become true competitors.
Let's get this out of the way: yes, Dairy Queen's soft serve isn't technically ice
cream per FDA standards, being that it sports a too-low butterfat percentage.
This used to get it classified as "ice milk" by U.S. food and drug laws,
though now it's called "reduced fat ice cream."
Regulations and technicalities aside, Dairy Queen's soft serve surprisingly
debuted without the words "ice cream" anywhere in sight. Instead, the Joliet storefront had a
marquee reading "The NEW FROZEN DAIRY PRODUCT", and it seems like marketing soft serve as an
all-new dessert distinct from anything before it paid dividends for the burgeoning brand.
Today, Dairy Queen's marketing and internal documents all use the term "soft serve."
Leveraging the unique identity of its core product seems to have paid off for Dairy Queen and made it
more tightly-knit in the American mind with soft serve than even Carvel, which claims to
have been first to serve the stuff. Today, Dairy Queen is associated with the brand's curl-topped
cones, while Carvel conjures memories of quirky character-themed ice cream cakes.
"You can always get a round cake. You know, anywhere.
So what we, we take a character of a cake, this is Fudgie the Whale."
When the Blizzard hit in 1985, executives called it:
"The biggest thing that has happened to Dairy Queen in the last 25 years."
It's hard to imagine what Dairy Queen would be like today without the thickened,
topping-laden soft serve handed to you upside-down, but customers at the first
ever Dairy Queen would have to wait almost half a century before getting to try it.
The Blizzard was "created" by a Missouri franchisee by the name of Samuel Temperato,
inspired by the "concrete," a dessert served by a shop called
Ted Drewes Frozen Custard. That local chain has to this day never franchised,
and sports only two locations in the Saint Louis area. Even the ritual of serving the
treat held upside-down to demonstrate its incredible thickness came from Ted Drewes.
Still, there doesn't seem to be much beef between the stores. Temperato never claimed credit for
the Blizzard for himself, while Ted Drewes said that putting candy on ice cream was not their
style. Regardless, today the Blizzard is such a pillar of the Dairy Queen brand that some
franchises have offered a rotating roster of almost 200 different flavors since 2009 alone.