As some parts of the UK continue to extend summer well into September with record temperatures, the sounds (and sights) of an ice cream van cannot be more of a welcome thing on a balmy, hazy afternoon.
For those of you thinking that surely such things no longer exist – well they do – and on the surface, not much has changed since the seventies. The mobile ice cream van as we know and love it first appeared around the beginnings of the 20th century and for kids growing up in rural towns and villagers, they were a regular daily summer sight.
The actual van itself is nearly always a stock, modern commercial van that has been converted aesthetically on the outside and with an interior able to house the standard dispensing and refrigeration equipment and to be able to sell the food product from a side-serving window.
Whitby Morrison is one of the better-known converters in the UK that caters for the ice cream industry. Having been established by Brian Whitby in 1962, the firm has earned itself a fine reputation over many years of honing its craft.
Much work goes into converting a standard commercial vehicle into a brightly coloured ice cream van, from precise fibreglass mouldings to refrigeration units and of course, custom paint spraying. Generally, the rear of a supplied van is completely cut away and replaced with the unique in-house designed fibreglass body moulding. All this happens in a rather similar way to how a Beetle provides a donor chassis for one of the many variations of Beach Buggy. As with the Buggy, a suitable van, typically a Mercedes Sprinter, Ford Transit or Chevrolet Express, provides the chassis for a custom GRP body. Even Land Rovers have been converted in the past.
This is no simple task; as with all conversions that can affect the structure of a vehicle, safety and meeting relevant Type Approval is paramount. Of course, any converted vehicle will require specialist insurance and Performance Direct Ltd’s Ice Cream Van Insurance can make insuring your ice cream van fleet a doddle.
Surprisingly though, even the innocent ice cream van has been tainted with some unsavoriness in its long history, with recent accusations of a racist song being used as a melody in American ice cream trucks (Turkey in the Straw) to the infamous Glasgow ice cream wars of the 1980s, although life in the ice cream van does seem to be a lot less volatile these days.
Whitby Morrison use their own high performance soft ice cream freezers built for them in Italy by Carpigiani. You may well be wondering what the difference is between a freezer similar to that housed in your kitchen and a soft ice cream freezer – and it’s not a case of simply changing the temperature of the freezer either; the soft ice cream freezer operates with a controlled amount of air that creates that soft, light fluffy product that we’ve all come to expect.
So next time you hear the sound of an ice cream van, pause for a second and remember that there is much work and many man-hours that goes into the image you see before your eyes.
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