Why Soft Serve Is Not Legally Ice Cream

Dairy Queen has become synonymous with cool summertime treats. However, at none of its 7700-plus locations will you find ice cream. 

Look closely at the chain’s menu of cones, sundaes, treats, and Blizzards. Never is there an explicit mention at what many assume is their trademark food category.

1. Ice Cream vs. Soft Serve
2. The Origin of Dairy Queen Soft Serve
3. Selling Soft Serve Since 1940

Ice Cream vs. Soft Serve

The reason is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a rather detailed definition of ice cream. To be legally marketed as such, a frozen dairy product usually must:

• weigh at least 4.5 pounds a gallon 
• hold at least 1.6 pounds of solid material per gallon 
• contain at least 10 percent milkfat
• contain that milkfat as a solid, unless the milkfat content exceeds 10 percent (in which case there is a whole schedule about how much of the fat must be a solid).

Dairy Queen’s refrigerated, sweetened milk-based product is about 5 percent milkfat and is too light to reliably fit the other stipulations. So it is, technically, not ice cream.

The Origin of Dairy Queen Soft Serve

This tidbit has made repeat appearances in the Today I Learned subreddit. But don’t think that DQ’s lack of legally recognized ice cream is the result of some collapse of standards and corporate coverup (echoing the disproven claim about why KFC shortened its name in 2000). Dairy Queen has always served an alternative to typical ice cream.   

In the 1930s, two of the company’s co-founders, J.F. McCullough and his son Alex, made ice cream with milk from local farms in Joliet, Illinois. They softened and partially melted their product to fit it into containers, which were then re-frozen and delivered to nearby retailers. J.F. McCullough developed a taste for the softer stuff, which was less abrasive to the taste buds, and the two theorized that there might be a market for a smoother ice cream. 

In 1938, they enlisted one of their buyers, Sherb Noble, owner of three ice cream parlors. In a test run, Noble offered all-you-can-eat “soft serve” for 10 cents, which generated long lines outside his establishments. 

Selling Soft Serve Since 1940

The McCulloughs and Noble then opened the first Dairy Queen in Joliet in 1940 and the brand grew through franchising. Its trademark product is still soft serve, a lighter, less rigidly frozen treat that can be dispensed through a spigot. (DQ and Carvel, the cult brand of the northeastern U.S., have made competing claims of having invented soft serve.)

The USDA does allow for for products with less than 10 percent milkfat to be sold as “light,” “reduced fat,” or “low-fat” ice cream. DQ’s products might fit, but what sounds more enticing to a kid: going for a Blizzard after baseball practice, or getting a serving of reduced fat ice cream?  

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