99 Problems: The Ice Cream Truck’s Surprising History

When John Harkins was 5 years old, his parents were called into school by a concerned teacher: “We’ve got a bit of an issue with John,” she told them. His class, she explained, had been learning about colors. “All the other kids were saying brown,” she said. “John’s telling us it’s cola.” The pink, he told them, was “strawberry.” And most worrying of all, he was sure the blue was “raspberry.” John’s parents were able to assuage the teacher’s worries; the Harkins ran an ice cream truck (known as a van in their native UK), and little John spent a lot of time riding on it, near a lurid, triple-barrel slushy machine, churning out three flavors (or colors) of the icy stuff—cola, strawberry, and raspberry.

Ice cream is in Harkins’s blood. His childhood was spent “going to get stock, painting wheels, and flattening boxes.” Years spent perched on stacked boxes of waffle cones, short legs dangling, breathing in the particular sweet-metallic tang of the ice cream pumps had their effect. Today, aged 42 and still living in Renfrewshire, Scotland, he owns his own ice cream truck business—Bay’s Ices—and has twice won Best Mobile Seller at the Ice Cream Awards. (Run by the Ice Cream Alliance, the Ice Cream Awards have celebrated the best of the best ice cream trucks since 2005.) John loves his job, but it’s not an easy life. “When you run ice cream vans, it takes over everything,” he says. “The job is dictated by the weather; it’s not a job that anyone can decide they’re going to do set hours at.”

Like farmers, ice cream men have to make hay while the sun shines. Perhaps that’s why so many ice cream vendors are part of dynasties—it’s much harder for a newcomer to prioritize the ice cream over a family wedding or a school sports day.

In a smaller way, ice cream is in my blood, too. I grew up in South Shields, a weather-beaten seafront town in Northeastern England, which tends toward the gray, save for a handful of days a year when it is transformed into the most beautiful place in the world. Seasides and ice cream are such obvious bedfellows that it took leaving home for a landlocked town for me to realize how much ice cream was a part of my life. My first school trip, at age 3, was to an ice cream factory. It was there that I first tried monkey’s blood—a hyper-regional term for raspberry sauce, as I discovered years later upon trying to order it at university, 250 miles away.

In the UK, the most popular ice cream truck product is a 99: a classic soft serve vanilla ice cream served in a wafer or waffle cone, with—crucially—a “99 chocolate Flake” stuck on top, from which the confection gets its name. The 99 Flake, a favorite since the ’30s, is a half-length of a Cadbury Flake chocolate bar. Made of layers of rippled chocolate without a coating, it scatters chocolate shards with every bite and is transportingly delicious. Sadly, this treat has not made it across the pond, but it is such an integral part of the British ice cream van experience that Flake shortages in 2021 were attributed to high ice cream demand due to good weather.

But, for me, the classic is an oyster: a scalloped, hinged wafer dipped in mallow and chocolate, with desiccated coconut at the edges, piped full of vanilla soft serve and squiggled madly with monkey’s blood (OK, raspberry sauce). In the early aughts, when I was working in my dad’s office for the summer holidays, we would stop on our way home for ice cream. An unspoken secret between us, given that Mum had dinner waiting on the table when we arrived, and would have been appalled to know that a mere seven minutes earlier, we were driving along the seafront, car top down, the salty air whipping my long hair into the ice cream and sticky sauce. We would do this most summer nights. And our order was always the same: two oysters, please.

The ice cream men serving us on our blustery English seafront, like John Harkins and his parents, are part of a dynasty that has lasted over two centuries. It’s an industry that remains strong, with an uncanny ability to adapt to changing times. I am fascinated by its survival. After all, along with the long hours, the world of the ice cream van has been beset with accusations of adulteration, ulterior motives, and damage to children.

And even of murder.

No one knows quite where ice cream came from. There are all sorts of romantic origin stories: Marco Polo brought ice cream back from China! Catherine de’ Médici introduced it to Italy! Sadly, no evidence actually supports either of these theories. The earliest suggestion of anything like ice cream being made was in China in the Tang period (AD 618-907), where fermented yogurt made from buffalo, goat, and cow’s milk was thickened with flour, flavored with camphor (a tree extract that tastes like mothballs smell), and then refrigerated.

Freezing food by lowering water’s freezing point with salt was first described in India around the fourth century. But it didn’t arrive in Europe until 1503, where it was mostly used as a party trick. It wasn’t until the mid-seventeenth century that it really took off, in the form of water ices or sorbets in Italy, France, and Spain. By 1664, dairy-based sweet ices had appeared in Naples. But such delights were still the preserve of the very rich: At the Feast of St. George in 1671, only those diners sitting at Charles II’s table were served a (single) plate of ice cream; others could only look on in envy.

Things turned a corner in 1843, when a US woman named Nancy Johnson simplified and mechanized the process of making ice cream. Cream went into a metal canister, itself held inside a wooden bucket; ice and salt filled the cavity between the bucket and the canister. A mechanized handle rotated, churning the cream over the ice and freezing it smoothly. This, along with the newfound commercial availability of ice, finally began to democratize the frozen treat.

Slowly, ice cream became part of the street vending scene in London and New York, although there was a certain amount of skepticism around it. No one, not even the ice cream men themselves, would have bet on it surviving 250 years. As one street seller, interviewed by Henry Mayhew for his book London Labour and the London Poor in 1851, recalled:

I don’t think they’ll ever take greatly in the streets. But there is no saying. Lord! How I have seen the people splutter when they’ve tasted them for the first time . . . One young Irish fellow—he bought an ice of me, and when he had scraped it all together with the spoon, he made a pull at it as if he was drinking beer. In course it was all along his teeth in less than no time, and he stood like a stattey for an instant, and then roared out— ‘Jasus! I am kilt. The coald shivers is on to me.’

Mayhew documented up to 20 street vendors selling ice cream in London—a pittance compared to the 150 hawking pickled whelks and 300 touting cooked sheep’s trotters. Change came courtesy of Italian immigrants: Economic unrest and a paucity of opportunities caused many Italians to leave Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century. They settled in London, Glasgow, and New York, and many of them became ice cream vendors. They became known as hokey pokey sellers, possibly as a bowdlerization of their calls: Gelati, ecco un poco! (Ice cream, here’s a little!)

By the end of the century, ice cream selling in London had replaced organ grinding as the main occupation of Italian immigrants; in New York, 4,000 ice cream hawkers thronged the streets.

Selling ice cream has always been a noisy business. In the days before refrigeration, it was a race to sell the stuff before it melted, which made it a volume industry in more ways than one: Vendors would attract passersby by calling out their wares, the louder the better. Today, of course, we know the ice cream truck by its chimes. Their distinctive tinniness evokes a Pavlovian response—what writer Hattie Garrick calls an “auditory Madeleine”—little heads meerkating up at the sound of a jingle, a swarm of short legs propelling their bodies toward the truck. (Although if you were a child in the last three decades in Britain, you may have fallen victim to the greatest betrayal of our time: wily parents convincing young children that the chimes meant the ice cream truck had run out of ice cream.)

Seemingly innocent, these Pied Piper chimes have, in fact, always harbored an element of subversion. In the UK, regulations strictly control the chimes. In 2013, guidelines from the UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs relaxed a bit, permitting jingles in 12-second bursts, rather than the previous four, but only once every two minutes, at 80 decibels or less, between the hours of 12 and 7 p.m., and not in the vicinity of schools, hospitals, places of worship, or in sight of another van. Historically, people have been very, very cross about the disruption these jolly chimes can cause. Outrage at ice cream truck music frequently made it into parliamentary discussions, and the chairman of the Nuneaton and District Trades Council once denounced truck jingles as “death chimes” because of the risk of children being killed in traffic accidents while running behind the trucks. Fortunately, movement-detecting cameras and sensors have now reduced this risk.

In 1952, Rosie Monfredi, who had previously been fined for blasting her horn whenever she stopped her ice cream truck, was prosecuted for playing “Auld Lang Syne” from an amplified music box she’d fitted, or as the arresting officer put it: “tintinnabulation from some electrical device.” How times change: Today, many complain that they don’t hear ice cream truck chimes anymore. It’s tempting to assume this means the ice cream truck is dying out, but the 250-year-old industry is merely evolving. These trucks have not yet met the foe who could vanquish them for good. The icey men (as they refer to themselves) will not be dissuaded from their calling—even when the very product they are touting becomes the problem.

Public health has been at war with ice cream vendors since the very beginning. Certainly, in the early days, sellers cared little for sanitation, and it showed. The first ice cream trucks were barrows, which sold “penny licks”—small quantities of ice cream sold in a glass, that the customer would, as the name suggests, lick, before returning the glass to the ice cream man. Vendors swilled the glass in a tub of water before filling it for the next customer. When health inspectors analyzed penny licks, they found “human hair, coal dust, bed straw, animal hair, fleas, and other bugs.” Unsurprisingly, given the method of consumption and the laissez-faire cleaning method, ice cream was blamed for several mass outbreaks of illness.

But even after cones and cups and basic hygiene measures became standard, contamination remained a pressing issue. Starting in the ’20s, Harry Burt’s Good Humor ice cream trucks in Youngstown, Ohio, traded on an image of cleanliness: His men wore crisp white milkman-like uniforms and equally crisp, white caps. Good Humor even took out an ad in the ’30s which read, “Good Humor’s purity never is sullied by careless hands, unclean air, sloppy packing. Good Humor always comes clean.”

But in 1975, the company—now a subsidiary of Unilever—was charged with 244 counts of falsifying records to hide evidence of excessive coliform bacteria in their products. The New York City prosecutors alleged that 10 percent of the company’s ice cream was tainted. The company was fined $85,000 and forced to modernize its production facilities. But it quickly abandoned mobile ice cream vending altogether.

For the most part, other sanitation issues in the ice cream industry were resolved with improved environmental health and hygiene knowledge.

But death still followed the chimes of the ice cream truck.

The outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland, 1982. After the Second World War, the local council had constructed a clutch of purpose-built social housing estates outside the city center to house lower-income families. In theory, these would radically raise the living standards of the occupants, who had previously been living in significantly smaller, run-down accommodations without indoor lavatories. In reality, though, the inhabitants were stranded on the city’s edges with little infrastructure: no pubs, no supermarkets, and limited bus routes.

Cue the chimes! Ice cream trucks to the rescue—but not just as purveyors of frozen treats. With established routes and hardware, it was easy to start carrying more products. While they continued to advertise ice cream, they became more like mobile corner shops, selling everything you’d find at a newsagent’s or bodega.

John Harkins’s parents ran one of those trucks. “Every van kept the full range of chocolate and sweets that you would get at a corner shop,” he says. “Sometimes as many as 40 types of crisps. All the glass bottles and drinks, cigarettes. Everything down to the little things: kids’ dummies, little tubes of petrol to reload your lighter with, matches.” These trucks would visit 10 or 12 stops three times each night, and every stop had a rush of customers. They were as much entertainment as they were functional.

By the early ’80s, the trucks operated all over the Glasgow housing schemes, making a tidy profit—money that was too tempting for some. Turf wars among ice cream trucks are nothing new, but this was different. New gangs appeared in their own trucks on established routes, using violence, criminal damage, and threats to intimidate the regular drivers until they relinquished their area. As the late afternoons rolled around and residents rushed out with shopping lists and cash in hand, serious violence and police raids became an inevitability.

The Glasgow Ice Cream Van Wars sound like they had all the elements of a cozy crime novel, but the reality was very different. The city’s Serious Crime Squad was dispatched to investigate and stop the fighting, but quickly became the object of derision, renamed by the locals as the Serious Chimes Squad, thanks to their inability to apprehend the perpetrators.

Disaster struck one night in 1984. Andrew “Fat Boy” Doyle, an 18-year-old driver of one of the established Marchetti trucks, had refused to capitulate to rival drivers, sticking to his usual route. In the small, dark hours of April 16, someone poured gas through the letterbox of the Doyle family flat. A single match was thrown. Moments later, flames consumed the residence. Neighbors left their flats in pyjamas, peering from concrete balconies, crowding the bottom of the building. Some never made it out alive; others did, only to die on the way to the hospital. Six people were killed, including Andrew, his sister, and his sister’s 18-month-old baby. It was the largest mass murder in Scotland at that time. All over an ice cream truck route.

Thomas “TC” Campbell and Joe Steele, who were running the rival ice cream trucks, were charged with six counts of murder. They were convicted unanimously and sentenced to life with a minimum of 20 years in prison. Appeals, hunger strikes, and prison breaks followed. At one point, Steele escaped and superglued himself to the gates of Buckingham Palace. Two successive appeals failed, but in 2004, the convictions were quashed after new expert evidence threw doubt on the original confessions supposedly recorded by police. Campbell and Steele were both freed: a mess of an investigation, a mess of a court case, a mess of justice.

Today, it is widely accepted that these turf wars escalated because the ice cream trucks were fronts for drug-dealing, but there is little evidence to prove this was the case. Contemporary accounts from those at the heart of the conflict, including ice cream truck driver Teddy Rennoc, instead suggest that the principal income stream of the trucks came from the stuff they were supposed to be selling. (And okay, fine, maybe a little fencing of stolen goods.) Drugs were never really part of it—it was too good an enterprise to be a front. Still, ice cream trucks have struggled to shake the association. In his book A Folklorist Looks at Ice Cream Vans, academic folklorist Owen Davies identifies this as “memorate formation,” where an individual experience becomes part of the collective memory. “Despite successful prosecutions,” he writes, “drug dealing from ice cream vans were, and are, rare . . . false rumours that have blended inextricably with facts.” The ice cream man bogeyman became an indelible part of cultural mythology in the UK—as well as in the US, as evinced by the Cheech and Chong movie Nice Dreams—although one that the lure of soft serve has somehow managed to overcome.

Before the ice cream routes became a problem, the vehicles themselves presented their own issues. Mobile ice cream selling may have been going on for at least a century, but making and dispensing it in a motorized vehicle has been a surprisingly complex development. It began with jerry-rigged systems—people buying ice cream machines to add to their trucks. Reliable ice cream trucks need shock absorbers and the ability to keep the machine cool, so makeshift machines quickly broke down. In the ’50s, the Sweden Freezer company in Philadelphia saw a huge boom in machine sales, which were added to flawed truck systems. Two brothers working for the company, William and James Conway, realized that there was mileage in reliable truck-specific soft-serve machines, but when they went to Sweden Freezer with their plan, they were met with little enthusiasm. So, on St. Patrick’s Day, 1956, the Conways took out their own properly-kitted truck and sold their ice cream for 10 cents a cone. They’d even dyed the soft serve a lurid green for the occasion. It was a hit, and the Conway brothers left Sweden Freezer to set up their own business, Mister Softee, focusing specifically on producing ice cream machines for trucks. The green soft serve fell by the wayside (not all innovations are good), but their trucks were here to stay.

One person who almost certainly saw the Conways’ Mister Softee truck in its early days was Dominic Facchino. He returned to the UK and launched Mr. Whippy, which quickly became the British ice cream van. It’s hard to think of more British branding: In addition to the stiff-upper-lip name, Facchino brought his fervent love of King Henry VIII to his trucks. Mr. Whippy truck chimes almost always played “Greensleeves” (which was wrongly credited to Henry VIII). The Mr. Whippy logo was a cartoon head with a Henry VIII-style beret and dancing feet.

But despite their jaunty trappings, these trucks still had issues. Enter the company Whitby Morrison, which has turned solving ice cream problems into a dynasty. Founder Bryan Whitby was a tinkerer and a problem solver: People would often come to him with engineering head-scratchers that others had turned down, and he’d take them on. After a military stint, he returned to his hometown of Crewe in Northwestern England, where he began working in refrigeration engineering, a relatively new industry. A large ice cream truck manufacturer hired him to fit machines into vans powered by generators. But the generators were heavy, dirty, and inefficient. Whitby was sure there was a better way. He developed the direct drive system, which uses the van engine itself to power the machine. When the van stops, the clutch engages, turning the shaft to pump refrigerant around the ice cream and start the paddles to aerate the soft serve. The all-in-one system proved revolutionary; it swept UK trucks and quickly spread globally as well.

The Whitby Morrison factory sits on the edge of an anonymous-looking industrial estate in Crewe. As I approach, there’s one lorry unloading in a nearby lot, and a couple of cars using the snicket in the estate to perform three-point turns and reroute themselves. The car park itself is quiet. But pass through two doors and don a pair of safety glasses, and it’s a very different story.

The factory is a hive of careful activity: As you pass through the rooms, the trucks reveal themselves. First, the carcasses, then the fibreglass sprayers. Freezers are dipped into formers and filled with insulation, while steps away, an electrician’s station is surrounded by reels of cables and wires and half-finished circuit boards. Trucks line up in various stages of fitting out, awaiting their swanky Carpigiani soft serve machines, their fridges, and slushy barrels.

The real transformation happens in the final spaces, where the trucks take on their true colors. You smell the paint before you see it, fumes catching in your throat as you round the corner to freshly sprayed bubblegum pink, primrose yellow, and sea-foam green. Next door, things are even more colorful. Artists with palettes covered in a dozen different jewel tones hand-paint Disney characters onto panels. Giant, lit-from-the-inside ice cream cones are ready to be attached to the front of a truck like horns. Every part is made in the factory. The bare chassis enters the warehouse and leaves as a complete, functioning ice cream truck. It feels like its own, contained world.

The virtue of the direct drive system created by Whitby Morrison has, in turn, become its own issue. The biggest challenge now facing ice cream trucks is an environmental one. They have become the target of clean air campaigners, who object to idling truck emissions near schools or playgrounds. The direct drive system means that, even when the truck is stationary, its engine runs to power the ice cream mechanics. In the UK, campaigners have been calling for ice cream bans for some time: Along with the introduction of the ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) in London, several councils have banned ice cream trucks from a host of roads in their boroughs, making it a maze of areas where trucks are simply not allowed to go.

So Whitby Morrison returned to what it does best: problem-solving. The pandemic was, in many ways, catastrophic for the ice cream industry; the Ice Cream Alliance reported industry losses of $388 million for 2020. But it gave Whitby Morrison the time to rethink the very make-up of their trucks.It developed the ice cream truck equivalent of a hybrid vehicle, which separates the engine from the ice cream machine mechanics, to be powered by a stand-alone battery, meaning no idling when the ice cream truck stops.

And the company has now set its sights even higher.

The day I visit the factory is a momentous one: Whitby Morrison has just taken delivery of the first all-electric chassis from Mercedes, which will allow them to produce an entirely electric truck, where electricity powers the vehicle and ice cream machinery. This is a slow and expensive process, and has been difficult to achieve for prosaic reasons concerning permitted weight of vehicles and heavy batteries—but it’s still a step toward solving another problem and future-proofing the ice cream truck for the next generation. We’re a long way from the short-lived green soft serve of the Conway brothers, but the future for ice cream needs to be green.

While a new Whitby Morrison truck will currently set you back up to $218,000, there is no shortage of demand, and there’s a waiting list for those desperate to get into the industry or upgrade their current truck. What is clear, however, is that far fewer of these trucks are on the street: The Ice Cream Alliance estimates that between 2,500 and 5,000 trucks are currently operating in the UK, but that only a fraction of them are actually out and about. It seems likely that many of these trucks have permanent pitches or are used at private events, rather than the classic mobile vending of previous years.

In other words, we may be hearing fewer chimes, but wedding planners sure aren’t.

Dotty has an old-school, understated elegance. You’ll find her at a summer wedding, bedecked in bunting and flowers: Guests dressed to impress mingle around her, lean on the ledge of her serving hatch, and watch the bride and groom pose with ice cream cones. She’s a visual shorthand for the (hopefully) uncomplicated, old-fashioned happiness being celebrated. Dotty is a vintage Bedford van, painted a simple, unadorned clotted cream, and she is Adele Ashmore’s pride and joy. If owners look like their dogs, Ashmore has the same vintage elegance as her van.

Adele is unusual in the ice cream truck world—both as a woman and as a newcomer to an industry so often built on legacy. When she left her career in HR, she was looking for something different. In Dotty, she found a classic van that needed some love, and saw an opportunity. “I wanted something special—not just another ice cream van, but a curated experience,” she says. “Weddings and private events allow me to work closely with people to offer something personal, elegant, and memorable. It’s less about volume and more about quality and atmosphere.”

Tapping into nostalgia and vintage vibes may be relatively new in the world of ice cream trucks, but it’s also an obvious and successful attempt to overcome the trip hazards of the modern ice cream truck world. Trucks channel the excitement that goes hand-in-hand with big events. And in turn, event work dispenses with so many of the variables that have plagued the icey men for years: booked far in advance, with a fixed fee and fixed hours, come rain or shine. Chimes are charming, rather than by-law infractions. There are no turf wars, no whinging about emissions or childhood obesity. It just makes sense.

Today, the truck itself is as iconic as the ice cream it serves. Despite its boxy aesthetic, there’s something aspirational about it. While filming the Harry Potter movies, Rupert Grint, who played Ron, bought a 1974 Bedford Mr. Whippy van, fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming an ice cream man. (He learned the van’s appeal the hard way: A bunch of local kids tried to buy 99s from him while he was performing a U-turn in a pub carpark. Now he stocks the van and gives ice cream and lollies away for free.)

And the celebrated ice cream truck has attracted an even younger generation of sellers: the TikTok generation. This influx of newcomers does things differently as well, unconstrained by the tradition and form of the multi-generational vendors.

JJ’s Ices, which chronicles its ice cream journey with short videos, has over 1.2 million followers on TikTok. Rather than streamlining its selections, as many traditional trucks are doing, it’s expanding: Alongside cones, JJ’s offers a host of sundaes, hot desserts (brownies, waffles, and cakes), and “cold trays.” These cold trays are based on soft serve, but they’re the inverse of the simple and predictable 99 cones. These trays use biscuit crumbs, crushed chocolate bars, sprinkles, sherberts, pick ‘n’ mix sweets, and multiple flavored sauces. They’re a technicolor, maximalist mess, a child’s fever dream. The videos of them being made are mesmerizing: I count nine different sauces used in one tray, and feel viscerally soothed by the end of the video.

And there’s money to be made if you can convince your followers you’re doing something new. De La Creams posted a recent TikTok featuring its latest ice cream cone, which contains seven squiggles of soft serve, three flakes, and a whole handful of other bits and bobs. Sure, it retails at a whopping $13.50 (a regular 99 would set you back around $4). But the price creates virality, which in turn brings the crowds.

Ice cream from a van is ephemeral. There’s only a matter of seconds before a Mr. Whippy becomes a Mr. Drippy. It forces you to live in the moment. When thinking about the dominance and appeal of soft serve, Ed Whitby, Bryan Whitby’s grandson and the third Whitby generation (along with his two brothers) to manage Whitby Morrison, sees soft serve as an experience. “You can’t have a 99 ice cream at home,” he says. “It’s not just the taste of the product; it’s going to the van. Nothing can replicate that.” Mike Conway Jr.—who, along with his cousin, now heads up Mister Softee as the third generation of the company—agrees: “If you go to a food store, you can basically get any hard ice cream you want, any frozen bar you want, but you’re not bringing home soft serve.”

Whitby Morrison recently became the official sponsor of the football team Crewe Alexandra. While filming for the launch of the team’s away kit on a beachfront cliff, they brought along one of their client vans, and every single member of the Crewe team wanted a 99—because that’s the ice cream van experience. “Where else am I going to get this?” they told Ed Whitby.

While it may be more common now to see an ice cream truck at an event or on TikTok, we still crave those summer days when jaunty chimes call us out to the street. The odds can feel stacked against the old-school icey men, with legislation that limits their movement, environmental and nutritional campaigners who demand more and more restrictions, rising pitch rents, the price of vans, the difference, even, in the way children play outside. But they’re still there, still clinging on. Why?

“It’s not something anyone can do,” Ian Smith tells me, echoing John Harkins’s words. Smith has enjoyed nearly 45 years in the industry; a few months ago, he was named Champion of Champions mobile seller at the Ice Cream Alliance’s awards, making him the best ice cream van man in the UK of the last 15 years. Smith runs eight trucks: four vintage and four new Whitby Morrison rigs. Three of the vintage trucks are named after his granddaughters, Rosie, Violet, and Daisy.

In fact, Smith’s whole family all sell ice cream: “all my uncles, aunties, cousins, nephews, everyone used to work on the vans growing up.” Smith’s father, who has been driving his ice cream truck since 1962, officially retired some time ago, but he couldn’t keep away; he still goes out in the truck, selling ice cream several days a week. He’s 76 years old. For all its long hours and detractors, once you’ve had a glimpse of the ice cream life, it’s hard to go back. His daughters now work on the trucks as well, and even his granddaughter has started to help out. This family element feels like a through-line in the industry: Whether it’s sellers like Harkins and Smith, or the manufacturers like the Conway cousins and Whitby brothers. Ice cream dynasties are commonplace. Perhaps it’s just Stockholm syndrome, but it doesn’t feel that way. Pride shines out of everyone I speak to.

Smith considers the appeal of the ice cream truck life a simple one. “Everybody who comes to an ice cream van walks away with a smile,” he says. “You’re giving the customer something that makes them happy. There’s not many jobs you can do where you get that.”

John Harkins feels the same: “Ice cream is a happy product,” he says simply. Adele Ashmore, owner of Dotty, has a similar answer, “I love being part of people’s happiest days—the smiles, the excitement, the nostalgia . . . it never gets old.” The ability to bring pleasure to people is more enduring than the vicissitudes the industry has faced.

As I meet these people who have devoted their lives to ice cream in different ways, I can’t resist asking the same question: Do you still enjoy ice cream? The answer is unanimously affirmative: They all profess an enduring love of the stuff. They all have an ice cream once a week, they tell me, and could never get bored of it.

But Ian Smith goes further. When I ask him if he still enjoys an ice cream, he replies: “Of course I do, I have at least three or four a day. Just a plain cone with soft serve, nothing on it. No flake, no sauce, no bits. Neat. Just enjoy the ice cream, that’s my opinion. Just enjoy the ice cream.”

Butter: A Celebration, is published by Headline. Her first book, A Half Baked Idea: How grief, love, and cake took me from the courtroom to Le Cordon Bleu won the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book Award and is published by Fig Tree, Penguin. She was this year’s winner of the Guild of Food Writers’ Award for cookery writing.