The ice cream truck's surprising history

Summary

Olivia Potts | Longreads | August 2025 | 5,401 words (19 minutes) When John Harkins was 5 years old, his parents were called into school by a concerned teacher: “We’ve got a bit of an issue with John,” she told them. His class, she explained, had been learning about colors. “All the other kids were saying brown,” she said. “John’s telling us it’s cola.” The pink, he told them, was “strawberry.” And most worrying of all, he was sure the blue was “raspberry.” John’s parents were able to assuage the teacher’s worries; the Harkins ran an ice cream truck (known as a van in their native UK), and little John spent a lot of time riding on it, near a lurid, triple-barrel slushy machine, churning out three flavors (or colors) of the icy stuff—cola, strawberry, and raspberry. Ice cream is in Harkins’s blood. His childhood was spent “going to get stock, painting wheels, and flattening boxes.” Years spent perched on stacked boxes of waffle cones, short legs dangling, breathing in the particular sweet-metallic tang of the ice cream pumps had their effect. Today, aged 42 and still living in Renfrewshire, Scotland, he owns his own ice cream truck business—Bay’s Ices—and has twice won Best Mobile Seller at the Ice Cream Awards. (Run by the Ice Cream Alliance, the Ice Cream Awards have celebrated the best of the best ice cream trucks since 2005.) John loves his job, but it’s not an easy life. “When you run ice cream vans, it takes over everything,” he says. “The job is dictated by the weather; it’s not a job that anyone can decide they’re going to do set hours at.” Like farmers, ice cream men have to make hay while the sun shines. Perhaps that’s why so many ice cream vendors are part of dynasties—it’s much harder for a newcomer to prioritize the ice cream over a family wedding or a school sports day. In a smaller way, ice cream is in my blood, too. I grew up in South Shields, a weather-beaten seafront town in Northeastern England, which tends toward the gray, save for a handful of da...