The appearance of soft serve ice cream has changed The shape at the time of import is gaining popularity in Japan: J-CAST trend[full text]
You can often see soft serve ice cream with a smooth surface. Soft serve ice cream in this shape is sold at convenience stores.
In fact, it is said that this shape is close to the appearance at the time when soft serve ice cream was born in Japan. We followed the secret and history of the shape of soft serve ice cream.
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The popular soft-serve ice cream is similar in shape to when it landed in Japan.
Extraction port “round type” and “star type”
The round and soft impression of the soft serve ice cream comes from the opening of the freezer that makes the soft serve ice cream. The mouth for squeezing out the cream is round. On the other hand, a typical soft serve ice cream has a star-shaped outlet.
We interviewed Nissei (Ibaraki City, Osaka Prefecture), which was the first to import soft serve ice cream to Japan along with the machine and currently boasts the top share of the soft serve ice cream freezer market in Japan. Mr. Yoshiyuki Shimada, who is in charge of managing the secretariat of the Japan Soft Cream Association in the company’s marketing department, answered.
According to the council’s official website, the first soft serve ice cream freezer was born in the United States in 1931. It was in 1951 that it landed in Japan. The aperture at this time is
“It was close to the round type that we are doing now.”
Said Mr. Shimada. When was the birth of the star shape? Although the exact year is unknown, it is said that a star-shaped spout was patented in the United States around 1952. “I don’t know when it came to Japan, but another soft serve ice cream freezer imported from the United States was star-shaped, and that probably became the mainstream.”
Shimada speculates that Nissei’s freezer spout became star-shaped in 1975, during which time the round shape was replaced by the star-shaped one.
In Japan, nearly half a century has passed since soft-serve ice cream with a star-shaped opening became common. We asked Mr. Shimada when he “returned to the basics” because the number of round shapes has increased in recent years. I guessed that the popularity of “Fresh cream specialty store MILK”, which was born in 2017, would be big.
At that time, the store’s soft-serve ice cream became a hot topic as it was Instagrammable, and it attracted a lot of attention. At this time, Nissei received a request from the same store and processed the spout into a round shape. After that, he revealed that there were more voices saying, “I want a round shape.”
