A history of "the ice cream of the future"
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A history of "the ice cream of the future"
The curious case of Dippin' Dots
Hello, Snackers. They’re still a novelty more than 30 years after they began. But, like, what’s their deal? WHY ARE THEY A THING? This is the topic most frequently requested by Snack Stack readers, so let’s finally do it—let’s dig into the sweet, messy history of Dippin’ Dots.
It’s always fascinating to see the past’s visions of the future. 2001: A Space Odyssey gave us HAL, the sentient supercomputer with a fondness for old music. Back to the Future Part II promised hoverboards everywhere by 2015. A series of French postcards from the early 1900s predicted seemingly every facet of life in the year 2000, including this wondrous version of mass transit:
But in the perpetual game of prognostication, it’s always flying cars this and robot helpers that—very few people have considered what really matters, which is, of course, the future of ice cream.
“Very few,” however, does not mean none at all. In the early 1990s, a new food brand spread around the USA and Canada, calling itself “The Ice Cream of the Future,” a selling point that others echoed on the brand’s behalf, as in this newspaper ad from 1990:
This is the story of Dippin’ Dots, a product with such a long, prominent claim to innovation and things to come that the New York Times crossword puzzle included it earlier this year with the clue “‘Ice Cream of the Future’ since 1988.”
Most food origin stories are a grandiose lie, but this one appears to be true. Dippin’ Dots are the invention of a Kentucky man named Curt Jones. In the late 1980s, when he was in his mid-20s (accounts from the time differ on his exact age), he was working as a microbiologist in the agriculture industry, for a company called Alltech. Jones had short blonde hair, a very 1980s mustache, and wore a white lab coat while he worked to freeze probiotic cultures so they could be put into animal feed.
One day, he had an epiphany, which he later recounted to reporter Sharon Thompson of The Lexington Herald-Leader, in 1988, in the very first article written about Jones’s new company:
“One of the first steps in the process is freezing the material into large thin sheets. We found that the faster we would freeze the material the better the product was. The faster it’s frozen the less ice crystals form in the product,” Jones said.
A few months later, Jones was eating homemade ice cream at a friend’s house and decided it would have fewer crystals if it had been frozen faster.
Jones experimented with freezing ice cream into tiny beads and then worked to market the concept.
The freezing process used liquid nitrogen to chill the beads, and Jones claimed their temperature dropped to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. All of this, he said, made the ice cream smoother than the conventional variety.
Jones came up with the brand name Dippin’ Dots right from the start and launched it at Lexington Festival Market in 1987 (the Times crossword clue was off by a year). He incorporated the company in March 1988 and later the same year, he and his wife Kay opened a larger store, selling both ice cream and yogurt in tiny-ball form. You can see a photo of the shop in this excellent Smithsonian story, by K. Annabelle Smith, published in 2013. As Jones recounted to Smith, that initial business venture didn’t exactly take off:
“There just weren’t enough customers coming through the door,” Jones says. “We got by because we sold one of our cars and we had some money saved up.” In that same year, he began converting an old garage on his father’s property into a makeshift factory (pictured below). With the help of his sister Connie, his father and his father-in-law, the Joneses were able to make the conversion.
It doesn’t appear that Jones or anyone was calling it “the ice cream of the future” at the beginning. The media coverage focused on the origin story and this young mad-scientist fella at its center. Here’s a photo of Jones that ran in one such article, in The Rock Island Argus, in 1989:
And here’s the headline from the same article:
This was the angle that virtually every reporter took in those early days: “Check out this crazy kid who made ice cream using tricks he learned from livestock feed!” When Dippin’ Dots arrived at the Tulsa State Fair, in 1989, a Tulsa World reporter wrote about this newfangled food, continually referring to it, unappetizingly, as “the pellets.” Not exactly the ideal PR for a growing business!
By this time, Jones had closed the shop in Lexington and turned his attention to fairs (like the one in Tulsa) and amusement parks like Opryland. Still, Dippin’ Dots wasn’t exactly a hit.
“It totally failed the first few years,” Jones told Smith in that Smithsonian story. “The people that tried it liked it, but at that time Dippin’ Dots didn’t mean anything—we didn’t have the slogan yet.”
If you look closely at the photos that accompany the Smithsonian story, you’ll see something in the background of one image, from 1989. It’s a sign with a first draft: “The ice cream & yogurt of the future. Frozen into tiny beads.”
Jones started talking up this angle, and giving a spiel on the high-tech process he used to make Dippin’ Dots, to customers at Opryland—the mad scientist as hype man. With this story, and the optimistic promise implicit in the new slogan, the ice cream (and yogurt!) became a full-fledged brand.
If you’ll forgive a bit of cheesy wordplay: The cold treat started selling like hotcakes. By the end of 1989, the Dippin’ Dots factory in Grand Chain, Illinois—just across the Ohio River from Kentucky—was pumping out 1,000 gallons every day, and Jones told the Rock Island Argus that he anticipated sales of $1.4 million the following year.
Allow me to state for the record that I don’t like Dippin’ Dots. The mouthfeel is all wrong. Ice cream is supposed to sit creamily on your tongue, in one continuous, delightful lick; with Dippin’ Dots, you can feel each individual piece. It’s texturally discordant, like a pizza made of foam or a gelatin falafel.
(That said, it’s not a complete culinary atrocity like astronaut ice cream, which is the only food you’ll ever hear me say is genuinely gross and weird and objectionable. I wrote about this a while back—they don’t eat it in space and never have! Astronaut ice cream is a scam! The stuff literally only exists to sell in gift shops to impressionable 10-year-olds who instantly regret not buying an agate instead. FACT.)
Anyway, I’m not a fan of Dippin’ Dots but you do you—don’t let me stop your love of those little pellets/balls/beads/dots. And even though they’re not for me, I get it. I understand the appeal. It looks like edible confetti; it looks like a magic trick.
That Tulsa World story offered dueling pull-quotes that summed up the treat’s novelty and appeal, and I think this contrast still holds up:
This love-it-or-hate-it quality goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Dippin’ Dots have always been a novelty food. Premium ice creams like Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs were having a cultural moment during this period, and were sold in pints at the grocery store and scoops from independent shops, as was the standard model for any ice cream company at the time. Jones’s initial vision for Dippin’ Dots was built on a similar template: his ice cream was arguably more premium than the other ones, because it was flash-frozen and, in theory, smoother. But that’s not why you buy Dippin’ Dots, and Jones seems to have figured this out after the initial struggles. His true brand wasn’t quality or quantity. It was quirk.
You can see this shift in understanding as Jones began to shift his attention to amusement parks and stadiums and malls, places where there was a broader, entertainment-focused experience. Fair foods are a whole thing, as I’ve discussed previously (you probably don’t eat a lot of cotton candy or funnel cake in everyday life)—you’re in a novel environment, so it follows that you’d eat a novelty food.
It took a while, but Dippin’ Dots had found their natural habit.
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Which brings us back to the future.
I sincerely doubt anyone has ever truly believed it represented the future in any meaningful way—it’s “futuristic” in the same manner as a million products advertised in LIFE in the 1950s. It’s aesthetically different from its competitors. That’s all.
There were plenty of futuristic visions floating around pop culture in the 1980s (Star Trek, Tron, the Back to the Future movies, etc.) but it doesn’t appear that Jones tried to associate his brand with any of this more famous imagery. There were no ads featuring robots eating Dippin’ Dots or anything like that. It was just ice cream—but even a vague nod to the realm of science fiction helped set it apart.
Still, okay, it was new and innovative at the time. Its understanding of “the future” may not have overtly connected to any other versions floating around the cultural moment, but you can see why it felt totally rad. And since sales kept going, well, the company stuck with the slogan.
It’s now been around so long that it’s become a point of ridicule. Search Twitter and you’ll find an endless line of people making the same joke: “Dippin’ Dots is not the ice cream of the future!” (Sean Spicer, famously, was one of the naysayers; it was a whole thing, covered by everyone from NPR to the New York Times to Politico.) And it does feel discordant to have something promoted as “the future” for more than 30 years. But perhaps it’s best to embrace the slogan—even if you don’t enjoy the product itself—as a charming bit of retrofuturism, a blast from the recent past.
Happy snacking!
— Doug
A history of "the ice cream of the future"
I can still clearly remember where the colorful Dippin’ Dots cart sat in my local mall growing up, mostly because my mom would never give in to our pleas to try it (the cinnamon sugar scent wafting from nearby Auntie Anne’s always won her over though). The one time I did try Dippin’ Dots, I remember how icily cold it was, so cold I couldn’t taste a thing! I agree with you, the quirk and entertainment value drives the appeal, and it’s impressive that they have lasted for so long on those assets.
Livestock? Pellets? No wonder the initial rollout of this wondrous-yet-not-really-my-jam product stalled!