Dippin' Dots

THIRTY YEARS SINCE ITS INVENTION, THIS ‘ICE CREAM OF THE FUTURE’ IS STILL HELPING US CHILL OUT. 

- Robert Klara

The trouble started eight years ago, when a Washington PR man took to Twitter with a bone to pick. “Dippin Dots is NOT the ice cream of the future,” he wrote.

The treat in question, a crowd pleaser since its 1988 introduction, had billed itself as “The Ice Cream of the Future” because of the unusual flash-freezing process necessary to create it (more on that in a second). It wasn’t clear why the publicist was ticked off, but he followed up his first angry tweet with another, and then another: “If Dippin Dots was truly the ice cream of the future they would not have run out of vanilla.”

Of course, disgruntled customers hate-Tweet all the time, and these rhetorical arrows would never have stuck were it not for the subsequent fame of their author. The PR man was Sean Spicer, who later became the press secretary for President Trump.

To this day, it’s not clear why Spicer was so pissed at Dippin’ Dots, but his tweets reveal an overlooked fact that might be more significant: The man was obviously eating Dippin’ Dots, which gives some indication of just how popular this frozen treat—ostensibly for teens and tweens—became.