Fun Facts

It takes 12 lbs. of milk to make just one gallon of ice cream.

The U.S. enjoys an average of 48 pints of ice cream per person, per year, more than any other country.

80 percent of the world's Vanilla Bean used for ice cream is grown in Madagascar.

Legend has it that the Roman emperor Nero used to send his slaves scurrying to the mountains to collect snow and ice to make flavored ices, the precursors to ice cream, in the first century.

Immigrants at Ellis Island were served vanilla ice cream as part of their Welcome to America meal.

One of the major ingredients in ice cream is air. Without it, the stuff would be as hard as a rock.















Among the most unusual flavors of ice cream ever manufactured are avocado, garlic, azuki bean, jalapeno, and pumpkin. Perhaps the weirdest of all: dill pickle ice cream, which was marketed to expectant mothers. Sales were disappointing.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan declared July as National Ice Cream Month, citing the food's "nutritious and wholesome" qualities. He decreed that patriotic Americans should mark the month with "appropriate ceremonies and activities."

Ice cream novelties such as ice cream on sticks and ice cream bars were introduced in the 1920s. Seems like kid stuff, but today, adults consume nearly one-half of all such treats.

While popular lore claims that the ice cream cone was invented at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, a New York City ice cream vendor actually seems to have created the cone in 1896 to stop customers from stealing his serving glasses. He patented the idea in 1903 and it took off in popularity at the World's Fair the next year.

Ice cream became a sensation at the White House in 1812, when First Lady Dolly Madison served it at the second inaugural ball.

Vanilla is the number one flavor in the U.S. with sales equaling almost 30% of total ice cream sales.