America must reassert its global ice cream truck leadership.
Winning the Cold War.
This is a true story about ice cream, vehicle electrification, and military power. The events in this story actually happened. Please excuse any slight over-dramatization.
In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, the nation girded for nuclear attack from Russia. Fidel Castro had taken over in Cuba and the Russians were moving in. Nikita Khrushchev pounded his fist at the U.N. and brandished his shoe. And talk of a ‘missile gap’ made it seem a Soviet first strike was possible.
Then the Pentagon rolled out a secret weapon: ice cream trucks.
With electric power from the latest on-board generators, these trucks were the most capable vehicles on America’s roads. They could provide emergency lighting, refrigeration, water, and backup power, including power for Conelrad, the country’s first emergency broadcast network.
The Pentagon enlisted hundreds of these trucks as the backbone of America’s civil defense.
And thankfully, it worked. The Russians stood down and the Cold War ended.
But the story doesn’t end there. Today the Russians are at it again, and state-of-the-art ice cream truck technology is again proving decisive on the battlefield (in Ukraine). The Chinese are in the race too, leading the world in EVs, drones and batteries, and producing fully electrified, autonomous ice cream trucks.
Can the U.S. get back in this arms race? Or will our historical global superiority simply melt away?
Here’s how we got here, and what we need to do to win today.
The birth of American soft power.
America has dominated ice cream technology for almost two centuries. In 1843, Nancy Johnson patented the first ice cream maker, applying leverage to a process that previously required an ice house and a personal chef. Her design used ice and salt in an outer container to freeze a creamy mixture in an inner container, churned with a hand-cranked paddle.
The next major breakthrough was putting ice cream on trucks, in the 1920s. Good Humor became the national leader, by adding a wooden stick to their bars.
Rapid wartime innovation.
World War Two was won by hard power – and hard ice cream – but laid the groundwork for decades of American soft power and soft serve dominance.
Ice cream played a decisive role in the war, helping boost troop morale. The Army and Navy realized immediately that ice cream was a great motivator, and scaled distribution massively. They even deployed ice cream barges in the Pacific to make sure all the troops had a reliable supply.
But the big development – which would set up America’s postwar ice cream leadership – was the use of portable generators to provide auxiliary power on B17 and B24 bombers and armored vehicles like Sherman tanks, and the massive scaling of generator production capacity.
Portable gas-powered generators had been around for a while at this point, invented in 1913 by American Charles Kettering for his mother, who lived on a farm (where life was tough with no electricity… see my piece on this ‘When Microgrids Ruled America‘). But during and after the war they became ubiquitous.
The Mister Softee power play.
What happened when the war ended was no less momentous than The Marshall Plan or Manhattan Project.
Demand for ice cream skyrocketed; especially soft serve, which was invented in the 1930s by the entrepreneurs behind Dairy Queen, Carvel, and The Taylor Company.
Soft serve machines were miraculous, consisting of a chilled barrel to continuously freeze the dairy mix, air injection to aerate it, and on-demand extrusion to dispense it. But they required lots of power to run, especially for the compressors to circulate the refrigerant. This limited soft serve to places with grid connections, like restaurants.
Enter the Conway brothers, William and James – who happened to also be Navy veterans. While working on soft serve machines for the Sweden Freezer Company in the early fifties, they came up with a big vision. Why not design a truck with an on-board generator to power the machines and bring soft serve to the world?
They quit their jobs and did just that, calling their business Mister Softee, and franchising it nationwide in 1956. It was an immediate, gigantic hit.
By 1961, Mister Softee had over two thousand trucks in thirty-seven states. Not to mention lots of competitors, like Dairy Dan, and partnerships with national brands like Pepsi and Ford Motor Co… and of course, the Pentagon.
This was the pinnacle of 20th century innovation: in technology, branding, business models, and military readiness. Here’s an excellent company history if you want to learn more: Philadelphia Magazine’s The World’s a Twisted Place. Thank God We’ll Always Have Mister Softee.
The slow decline of combat effectiveness.
Generator-powered ice cream trucks secured America’s prosperity and global status in the 1960s. But over the next few decades, they started looking and feeling more like Soviet surplus.
The magic wore off for other reasons, too. The jingles bothered people. There were accidents where the trucks killed kids. Local gangs co-opted the trucks to deliver drugs. National ice cream brands started refusing to sell to the trucks, preferring convenience stores and supermarkets instead.
Most important, the economics simply stopped working (New York Times: ‘Melting Profits Threaten The Ice Cream Man’). And the generators were a huge part of why.
Fueling and maintaining generators is expensive. They’re inefficient, burning fuel all the time whether you’re using the power or not. They generate lots of unpleasant waste heat, noise and fumes, so recruiting employees is hard and getting upscale high paying private gigs (weddings, parties) is even harder. And then there’s the fire risk… see this video of an ice cream truck fire in Manhattan.
In the 1990s, most food trucks started mounting their generators on the back, rather than inside. This simplified inspections and maintenance… but also made the generators’ vulnerabilities much more obvious.
The Pentagon re-engages (and generators are out).
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The years in between saw several major ice cream innovations, including ‘Halo Top’ light ice cream, CBD-infused ice cream, and the development of ice cream ghost kitchens (aka virtual storefronts) by DoorDash and UberEats.
But the biggest breakthrough was the next-generation combat-ready ice cream truck, powered by lithium-ion batteries instead of generators. The cost of these batteries is dropping by the day, and they eliminate all the downsides of generators.
A startup called Joule Case, based in Boise, Idaho, began selling these systems in 2020, to civilian companies like Scream Truck and Lightbox. They could replace even the biggest generators, providing as much as 36 kilowatts of clean, quiet power (peaking to 72) and 96 kilowatt hours of storage (enough to run a high end three-phase, 208-volt soft serve machine). And they could also support on-board HVAC and other quasi-military hardware like espresso machines (which can draw up to six kilowatts peak when the espresso hat drops).
Almost immediately, the Pentagon stepped in, announcing a deal with Joule Case.
Why? It turns out that in late 2023, Russian VT-40 drones with thermal cameras began targeting and destroying Ukrainian front-line vehicles at night based on the heat signature of their diesel generators. So the Ukrainians were desperate for an ice-cream-truck-grade battery system to replace these generators.
By 2023, Joule Case announced the DOD as a major client. In 2024, they participated in the DoD’s T-Rex 24-2 rapid prototyping camp, developing a ‘hardened’ product code-named METEOR (Modular Energy for Tactical Expeditionary Operations Resource). And in 2025, METEOR was spun off into a separate company, Sentient Industries, with a Joule Case executive as CEO.
What’s next?
Assuming these new ice cream truck capabilities can hold off the Russians in Ukraine, the bigger question is China, which keeps increasing its lead in EVs, batteries, drones, power electronics, and their related supply chains.
America’s industrial heavyweights have been sweet-talking fully electrified ice cream trucks for years, but have yet to deliver. Here’s Ford’s CEO Jim Farley in 2021:
Meanwhile, China is already deploying fully-electric, generator-free, autonomous ‘dessert vans’ in major cities (see the TikTok). In fact, fully one quarter of all new trucks sold in China (ice cream or otherwise) are now electric powered.
And then there’s this new Chinese soft-serve robot (see the TikTok):
If you’ve read this far, you know this isn’t just about ice cream. We need to get serious about vehicle electrification in general, about re-industrializing and re-building our domestic supply chains. We need federal support for this effort, which will directly translate into future economic and military strength.
We’ve done it before, with generators and Mister Softee.
And we can do it again, with batteries, EVs and everything else electric.
Endnotes.
Some ice cream was harmed in the making of this article. Last year we hosted an ice cream party with a neighborhood ice cream truck. I wanted to try running it off of our electric car charger so we could skip the generator. I bought an adapter and we plugged it in but the ice cream was ruined… the compressors couldn’t draw enough power so it was too runny. We ended up instead using our 240 volt clothes dryer circuit with an extension cord, which worked fine.
I procrastinated on this article forever. I wanted to write a piece about how generators suck and can be replaced with batteries, using ice cream trucks as an example. But all the angles I tried were boring. I kept stumbling on the military angle and dismissing it, until I realized that that’s the story! I’m posting this on December 30th because I swore I’d finish the article this year. I’ve been working on it so long that my dad, who’s been gone over a year now, got to hear major parts of it (which he loved, as an engineer and big ice cream fan).
I now understand my earliest childhood memory. Finding obscure info now takes seconds with AI. My very first childhood memory is going to an ice cream truck while on vacation on Cape Cod in the late sixties. It had delicious chocolate covered bars with rich chocolate and vanilla inside. But it also had a cherry-colored flavor I really liked. These were most likely the earliest Good Humor ‘Whammy Bars’ (or some local copycat version). I remember it being hard to choose between the chocolate and strawberry; now I understand why!