Stoelting Ice Cream Machines: Inventor of Soft Serve

  If there’s one food that could seriously claim to be universally loved, it would surely have to be ice cream. Different flavors, different styles and different ways of incorporating it into a dish – whatever your tastes, there is an ice cream for everyone. One of the most popular styles of ice cream is soft serve. For many people, the first thing that pops into their head when they hear the word ice cream – in fact, for a lot of them, the first time they even tried ice cream – is soft serve. Despite its popularity, however, a maybe surprising number of people don’t actually know that much about where soft serve ice cream comes from. As it turns out, though, in the story of soft serve ice cream, there are some unsung heroes who, based on the amount of dairy-based happiness they have brought into the world, could do with a bit more recognition. And among those unsung heroes is the top-of-its-field food service equipment manufacturer Stoelting.

The Stoelting Brothers

  Stoelting started out at the beginning of the 20^th century when, in 1905, Otto and Adolf Stoelting set up shop along with two partners to sell hardware and make sheet metal for tanks used by farmers and cheese makers. Otto and Adolf soon took the next step in forming the Stoelting Brothers Company in 1907, joined by their brother Gustav. The Stoelting Brothers Company was known for its ethic of hard work and determination, and in 1920, the brothers refocused their company’s efforts exclusively toward manufacturing cheesemaking equipment. That decision turned out to be a stroke of business genius, as the Stoelting brothers’ specific focus on the dairy industry led to their being contracted in 1939 to engineer and build the first soft ice cream dispenser for a company named the Home Made Ice Cream Company. That company would go on to become Dairy Queen, and the cornerstone of their success and future ubiquity was the work done by the Stoelting Brothers Company to make that first soft serve machine. Their work with the company that would end up becoming Dairy Queen proved to be a major success for Stoelting, but they didn’t rest on their laurels. Soon after their soft serve machine hit the market, in 1942, Stoelting started to explore additional and complementary avenues and areas of the market by designing and manufacturing conveyorized milk can washers to be used by cheesemakers. This decision allowed Stoelting to maintain their roots and connection with the dairy industry while forging ahead into new territory – the arena of industrial cleaning equipment. However, they never lost sight of the invention that first gave them the opportunity to put their stamp on the market – their ice cream machines.

The Stoelting Company Today

Today, Stoelting manufacture a whole range of ice cream, frozen yogurt, milkshake, frozen custard and gelato machines and dispensers. Their products boast a wide variety of specialist features and qualities, such as gravity or pressure feeds, air or water cooling, Wi-Fi enabled control and widely varied capacity to suit the needs of the user. They are also heavily adaptable, with a wide range of accessories available to fine tune the machine. These include remote condensers, floor or display cases, dispensers for frozen beverages or whipped cream, and freezers designed specifically for soft serve ice cream. That variability – and, of course, the quality of the manufacturing and design – has been essential in helping to secure Stoelting’s position at the forefront of the soft serve ice cream production industry. Their products are highly sought-after throughout the U.S., and inarguably set the industry standard for frozen dessert dispensaries. Fittingly, they are highly sought after, and Stoelting parts are only available to purchase from distributors who meet the Stoelting company’s standards and measure up to their ethos of quality, vision and hard work.

Conclusion

The world of ice cream, generally, and soft serve, in particular, is full of people dedicated to quality, who are passionate about their work, and who are constantly coming up with new ways to make and serve ice cream. Stoelting is perfectly at home in that company, as that their work in the field of ice cream machines, soft serve and frozen dessert dispensary, has been ground breaking and top-of-the-line since they started. Of course, in the food service equipment industry, it is essential to work at the highest standards at all times, but even in that context, Stoelting is the indisputable leader. The next time you enjoy an ice cream, it might be a good opportunity to have a think about the hard work and the imagination of the people whose ingenuity and drive made it possible. As it turns out, a pretty high number of them had the last name of Stoelting.