Today's #IceCreamInsight is about everybody's favorite novelty...the CHOCO TACO.
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Today's #IceCreamInsight is about everybody's favorite novelty...the CHOCO TACO.
In the late 1980s, my dad and a colleague from Good Humor/Breyer's had a meeting with a guy from Philadelphia who worked for Jack & Jill Ice Cream Co. This other guy came up with the idea of an ice cream taco & my dad, Harold, a refrigeration engineer & his colleague Ben Benjamin, who was an ice cream scientist with his own little lab, went about figuring out how to make it. 1/
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After a year or so of work, they had a production line. A machine folded a sugar cone into a taco shape, filled it with vanilla ice cream & dipped it in chocolate.
They wanted nuts on top. But they didn't have a machine to do that, so for the first year or so, a worker on the line had to hand-dip every Choco Taco in nuts. 2/
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Eventually, dad designed a machine to be able to handle this, which is good...because the amount of person-time required for each Choco Taco before that was excessive and they were thinking of shutting down production.
A few years later, they applied for a patent. It's my favorite patent. Just look at the illustration. 3/
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The Choco Taco went on to be a big hit and was sold in Taco Bells for years.
A few years ago, the company shut down production. It was pretty big news, and I don't know why they stopped making them. You can now find $12 bespoke non-official Choco Tacos at high-end ice cream shops.
Dad is now in his 80s and not in good cognitive health anymore, but I think he's leaving the world a little richer for being the co-inventer of the Choco Taco. /end
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@brianvastag glorious! I remember the day they stopped making it. It was a great treat to follow up a 7-layer burrito.