Ice Cream Cones: One of the World’s Favorite Confections since 1904

Fun Facts About Ice Cream Cones

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  The Zalabia (waffle-like funnel cake)

  The ice cream cone was invented by Ernest Hamwi, a waffle vendor of Syrian decent, who sold Persian pastries called Zalabia (paper-thin waffles).

• At the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, Hamwi’s zalabia cart was located nearby an ice cream vendor who had run out of dishes.
• Hamwi came to the vendor’s rescue by wrapping the zalabia around the ice cream in the familiar conical fashion we see today.
• Fortunately, for Hamwi, there were roughly 150 vendors at the World’s Fair and soon people would come to the fair to try the “World’s Far Cornucopia”, later known as the Ice Cream Cone.
• Italo Marchiony patented an invention much like the ice cream cone in 1903.
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  The Modern-day Waffle Cone

  The difference between Marchiony’s cone and Hamwi’s cone is that the former is made of pastry, and the latter is made of waffle, and is what we think of as an ice cream cone today

• 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.
• It takes an average of 50 licks to polish off a single-scoop ice cream cone.
• The biggest ice cream sundae in history was made in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 1988, and weighed in at over 24 tons.
• In 2003, Portland, Oregon bought more ice cream per person than any other U.S. city.

 

Special thanks to icecream.com and summercore.com