It was just after 5 p.m. in San Francisco's Outer Richmond when a door burst open on forty first Avenue and an individual in pajamas ran out.
With a leash in a single hand and a handbag and an empty ice cream cone in the opposite, they pulled their dog behind them and ran up the hill toward a well-known sound: Mister Softee's ice cream truck.
The line was already six people long.
But with the newly updated Mister Softee NorCal AppTo get to the ice cream truck, you don't necessarily need to run around in your pajamas: with a touch of the screen, the trucks can now be recognized from miles away.
Between noon and eight p.m., seven days every week, the app shows the live locations of all 14 ice cream trucks within the Bay Area.
“We had over 50,000 downloads,” said Felix Tarnarider, the operator of the local Mister Softee trucks.
The app has just one function, however it does it perfectly: It guides hungry customers to the closest ice cream truck from San Francisco to San Jose, from San Jose to Martinez, and even reaches customers as far east as Tracy.
Mister Softee has never been more popular within the Bay Area.
“We started in Northern California almost eight years ago,” Tarnarider said. “We only had one truck.”
It was 2016 when he quit his job in technology and decided to pursue his dream: bringing Mister Softee to the West Coast.
He had grown up in Brooklyn and remembered running out the door each time he heard the ice cream truck nearby. When he moved to the Bay Area, he couldn't consider they were so hard to search out.
“It was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something about it,” he said. “And whatever I felt in my gut was right: People wanted Mister Softee out here.”
He purchased a license for a single Mister Softee truck and drove it himself.
Business was slow at first. Start-up costs were high. But he learned to plan his routes efficiently and started to earn a living.
He soon hired more drivers and eventually left the truck business himself to administer the whole operation with 14 trucks from an office.
Today, demand is bigger than supply.
“We still don’t reach everyone who wants us,” he said.
Tarnarider noted that there aren't many ice cream vendors within the Bay Area that provide soft serve ice cream.
“I don't think that's part of the culture here,” he said. “But the ice cream parlors are part of the culture. They are niche products, very good and also quite expensive.”
Despite rising ice cream costs and increased fuel prices, Tarnarider has managed to maintain Mister Softee prices unchanged at $4 per cone, $4.50 for a cone with sprinkles and $5 for a double cone.
“We stand out from the crowd,” he said.
In the early Nineteen Twenties, ice cream trucks first began operating in Ohio, transporting Good Humor bars door to door. According to AAA MagazineAnother boom occurred at the top of World War II, when wartime milk rationing was lifted, which made Good Humor enormously successful.
But within the Nineteen Seventies, the corporate suffered a serious blow when town of New York implemented stricter health inspections and the corporate was caught falsifying food safety records, resulting in the top of its ice cream trucks.
Founded in 1956, Mister Softee capitalized on the decline of Good Humor and continued to franchise ice cream trucks across the country.
Today, Mister Softee operates 625 ice cream trucks in 18 states, making it the biggest ice cream truck franchisor within the United States.
And while ice cream consumption within the United States has steadily declined over the past 30 years, According to the US Department of AgricultureTarnarider didn't feel the results.
He is about to bring his fifteenth ice cream truck on the road.
And because of its successful app, it's never been easier for patrons to search out one.
“That's the best part now, the interaction with customers,” Tarnarider said. “Our customers love us.”
Originally published:
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