On November 3rd, 2011, America experienced one of her greatest calamities.
I probably don’t need to tell you what it is, you probably remember: somewhere in Western
Kentucky, Dippin’ Dots filed for bankruptcy.
What was meant to be the ice cream of the future was about to be a thing of the past—in
an instant, all the color drained from the sky, birdsong slipped into a minor key, and
we all prepared to wave goodbye to the taste of hope, joy, and Dots forever.
But now, it’s twelve years later… and they’re still around.
My outside correspondent Amy basically makes a daily pilgrimage, and the dots are as rainbowy
and delicious as they ever were.
But how are they still here?
How did we get so lucky?
Turns out the answer is… fake meat.
Well, that’s the headline, but it’s a bit more complicated, and it begins in 1987,
at Kentucky’s Alltech Biotechnology.
There, a gentleman by the name of Curt Jones—that’s not him, but just imagine a human man—was
researching technology to make flash-frozen animal feed.
The story goes that he was explaining this tech to his family over dinner when he had
one of history’s great realizations: if you applied the same process he was researching
for piggy snacks to ice cream mix, it would make fun little ice cream pellets.
He tried it out in his parents’ garage, and upon Dippin’ Dots’ official launch
in 1988, they became the most exciting thing to ever come out of a parents’ garage…
that is, until my middle school post-punk band hit the scene.
But how, exactly, do the Dots get made?
Regular ice cream gets churned until it’s about negative 1.1 degrees Celsius or about
thirty degrees America, and in the process, a lot of air and ice crystals get into the
mix to create the icy, creamy, airy texture you know and love.
Dippin’ Dots start from a similar base of dairy, sweetener, and flavorings, but it never
gets churned.
Instead, they drip the base into a vat of liquid nitrogen at about negative 184 degrees
Celsius—or negative three hundred degrees Freedom.
When the base hits the nitrogen, it freezes instantly without taking in air or ice crystals,
creating a tiny, dense, slow-melting bead of deliciousness that has to be stored at
roughly fifty below zero Celsius OR Fahrenheit to keep its dotty shape.
Dippin’ Dots opened a bunch of stores and became a staple at theme parks, zoos, stadiums…
basically, a force multiplier anywhere you were already having fun.
The country smiled.
But by 2011, Dippin’ Dots was frowning: the recession had hit them pretty hard, they
owed like twelve million dollars to a bunch of people, and the court froze 20.2 million
dollars of their assets, which would usually be good news for an ice cream company but
was bad news here.
In 2012, two guys, Scott and Mark Fischer, bought Dippin’ Dots as some kind of father-son
bonding thing and it cost them less than a used superyacht… but required a similar
amount of work to keep afloat.
Here’s the thing: innovating in the food world is hard.
Dippin’ Dots had rethought ice cream, but people were trying to reinvent the meal in
other parts of the market, too.
Companies like Beyond Meat—founded in 2009—and Impossible Foods—founded in 2011—wanted
to make plant-based meats that approximated the real thing, but it was proving difficult.
Replicating the texture of a juicy, fatty burger without the naturally occurring fats
present throughout hunks of flesh is tough.
If only you could have some kind of oil bead… like a miniature pellet of frozen, plant-based
fat that you could put in your fake burger that would melt when you cooked it and help
create that texture… see where I’m headed here?
Under Scott FischerPost-sale, Dippin’ Dots created a new lifeline for their business.
It wasn’t selling more ice cream dots—though they sold a bunch—it was finding more uses
for their patented flash-freezing process.
So along with flash-freezing oil to make little fat beads for plant-based meats, they also
did some work for pharma companies and—in an homage to their origins—animal feed suppliers.
Basically, if anyone needed high volumes of flash-frozen little beads of somethin’,
or a first step for freeze drying, they could all call Dippin’ Dots, or more specifically,
Dippin’ Dots Cryogenics LLC.
Yep, that’s right, they kept the Dippin’ Dots branding for all of this stuff.
The side hustle was super successful: they opened up a giant new facility to handle all
the new production, provided flash-freezing equipment to customers around the world, and
were able to weather the pandemic despite shutdowns at theme parks, zoos, and other
attractions—the backbone of their ice cream business.
In 2022, the Fischers sold Dippin’ Dots, which they’d bought for a measly 12.7 million
dollars a decade prior, for a full 222 million dollars—by one estimate, enough money to
put on the entire Eras Tour… twice.
So where are they now?
Well, the Fischers sold Dippin’ Dots to J&J Snack Foods Corp, the conglomerate that
also owns SuperPretzel and ICEE.
Now, they’re running a company called Cryogenics Processors LLC to expand cryogenics use in
non-ice cream industries…
also, unfortunately, the younger one is up to this, so the cryogenics aren’t really
the first thing I associate with him anymore.
In more charming news, Curt Jones has 56 LinkedIn endorsements for “Food,” and left Dippin’
Dots in 2015 to sell frozen pebble-ized coffee and creamer which…
man, I wanna trust him, but that can’t possibly be good, right?
Meaning all the key players in this story have left Dippin’ Dots but are basically
still making Dippin’ Dots.
So yeah, Dippin’ Dots are a novelty snack food from the eighties.
But today, they’re actually all around you… if you know where to look.
For six dollars, Dippin’ Dots will give you access to exactly one small cup of tasty
ice cream nuggets that you can enjoy for a few minutes.
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