american ice cream
soft serve ails
One of my jobs, at the dosa restaurant, is largely automated. I stand behind the front desk crowded and made cold by machines of all sorts, taking orders. I don’t really need to have the skills myself. Counting cash, taking tips, all of that is automated by the point-of-sale. Instead, my job, if I am to be really good at it, is that I distribute the intelligence of the machines. It’s kind of what LLMs are predicted to do across industries—code, writing—a sort of talking, chatting encyclopedia, where all of us sit at the fount of knowledge, pulling from it, running over it with our own individual style, and putting it out in the world. Anyway, my setup is pictured below.
Most of these machines are pretty straightforward to use. There are smaller, domestic versions in many homes. The hot storage was new to me. It looks like a refrigerator, but it’s dry inside, and stores items that might need to stay room temperature and away from moisture. For example, podi, which, if frozen, loses its nutty flavor. The cold, dry storage keeps items cold and dry, unlike the fridge, which is humid. I’ve learned that the sink has to be behind me because of NYC Health Code § 81.21, which mandates that all spaces where food is handled are in some distance of water. Hygiene rules, that sort of thing. The microwave is an industrial one: You can’t open it by pulling at the handle, and instead have to press an “open” button for the door to swing outwards, probably to prevent accidents and make sure people are opening the microwave because they want to.
Then, there is the point-of-sale system. Ours is a familiar device. It’s sold by market leader Square (co-founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey). This is the machine where you tap-to-pay, and also the machine that’s been at the helm of some controversy because of its “tip” screen that displays 20%, 25%, 30%, which has created its own guilt-ridden, morally complex tipping culture (yes, we can see if you choose not to tip us). Square is so easy-to-use that I’ve seen a thirteen-year-old play around with it and suddenly felt useless. Technology is flattening the difference between generations and will ruin our civilization. The U.S. is leading this charge with its easy-to-use software. This little girl can accept payments, I can accept payments, a sufficiently smart ape can accept payments if they learn how to press the right colors, what is the point of any of it.
I take some mild relief in the fact that there are still dozens of old, lumbering machines in the kitchen. One looms behind me: the ice cream machine, an angry and complicated-looking device with several levers, a very small LED screen, and an entire sticker running down its front telling you exactly what will go wrong. And for most of the issues you might deal with—the power switch tripping off, no display when turning on the machine—the sticker tells you to “handle it yourself.” Don’t call them! They won’t pick up!
It’s an amusing, curmudgeonly sticker for a machine that brings so much joy. Soft serve has gripped New York over the last few years (the Panna Caffe industrial complex). It’s so all-American. I always think about this long bike ride I took a few years ago in Vermont in the fall, outside of Burlington, where every few miles between lucidly neon and orange trees I would stop to have sweet, candied maple soft serve. I learned that one farm hand-cranked their ice cream, an American practice that was invented by a woman named Nancy Johnson in 1843.
A far cry from our ice cream machine, which is from VEVOR, a mid-range industrial kitchen company headquartered in Shanghai. It has warehouses in different countries, including across the U.S., but all of its parts come from China, mostly white-label Chinese manufacturers. China wins here because of its famed ability to cluster its various parts manufacturers in small, dense spaces, which makes building these machines both cheaper and more efficient. These manufacturers are also behind the more high-end ice cream machines on the market, but VEVOR undercuts its competitors by buying directly from warehouses, removing the need for middle-men like importers and distributors. VEVOR also doesn’t have a fancy brand. Which means they save on marketing, but they also don’t need to really care what customers think, so customer service is probably pretty thin.
I’ve always thought of the device as a cheap, stingy little thing. I have hoped that I’ll never have to operate it. Still, as December spilled into January, I took a walk past the empty cafe, and I thought about the coming summer, and the threat of the VEVOR, that angry little machine. I don’t always get to see the machines standing alone so bare and empty, because there are always people around, but most who work in the industrial kitchen are on visas. They work here to pay off school, or to make ends meet after their day jobs, or are in a mad scramble with three months left on an OPT visa to find work. Lots go home or leave the state to visit family during these weeks. I’ve always felt that I’m probably the happiest and most relaxed of the lot, because I have ways to make money during the week that don’t involve manual labor, and because I’m a citizen. But I’m not sure I’m always the happiest when I have to handle complicated machines. Why couldn’t it be an American device, I found myself asking.
Well, here’s why.
In 1926, Charles Taylor invented the first automatic batch ice cream freezer. It revolutionized ice cream. To make ice cream, one needs to churn a frozen mixture of milk, cream, and sugar. The churning device, usually a paddle, needs to be constantly moved in order to prevent large ice crystals from forming and to incorporate air. This prevents bubbles from forming and keeps ice cream smooth. Taylor automated this motion, and suddenly, ice cream was everywhere! Roadsides! Drugstore fountains! Or so the photos say, because none of my descendants were in the U.S. at that time, and wouldn’t arrive for another fifty years.
The Taylor Company became so big that, in 2018, Middleby Corporation acquired it for $1 billion. These device today cost $14,000 each. The VEVOR, on the other hand, costs something like $581. The company services lots of fast food restaurants including—famously—McDonald’s, where the machines are incredibly fragile. They fall apart all the time. Anyone who’s tried to order a soft serve at a McDonald’s knows this. As of Saturday, January 17, a little over 10% of its machines worldwide are broken.
This is not because the machines are bad. The machines are actually top-of-the-line. It is a wild tale of spies, espionage, and machinery, as Andy Greenberg brilliantly reports for Wired.
The machines are extremely complex devices. Each has two hoppers and two barrels that can produce milkshakes and soft serve simultaneously, up to ten ice cream cones a minute. The VEVOR, for comparison, does one cone at a time. Maybe one cone every twenty seconds. Taylor devices also don’t really have to be cleaned like the VEVOR does, which involves an arduous process of running water through the pipes. Taylor undergoes a nightly pasteurization process, which is very delicate. It’s also often why the machines end up failing.
The real controversy is that Taylor hides how to fix these devices behind a “secret code.” The devices break often, and only Taylor employees can bypass the code. Once they fix device, the local McDonald’s must pay Taylor maintenance people. On top of that, McDonald’s required their employees to use this specific fragile device. This has led to long rumors that Taylor purposely sells fragile devices that obscure how to maintain them to make money. And that McDonald’s is part of this leading to rumors that McDonald’s itself was taking a cut! In 2021, a reported 25% of Taylor’s $25 million revenue comes from maintenance.
I don’t know what you do in this situation as a young restaurant. Spend $14,000 on something that constantly breaks? Avoid buying an ice cream machine altogether?
I’d say go with VEVOR. I take a walk past this cafe often, it’s become more and more busy as people return to the U.S. Lately, I’ve just been impressed with these devices that find a way to make do in rain or shine, supply chain be demanded. I guess when summer comes I’ll just deal with the VEVOR and crank out some ice cream.
— I liked Sarah’s piece on the snuff film political economy and Renee Good.