The Choco Taco: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your two Ninjas of Knowledge. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan run Tog and we are here with an emergency episode of Too Much Information. Yeah, I want to do the can you plug in the Jamie? Can we plug in? The sirens sound from kill Bill, the Layla Schiffer and Q way way Way Why that'll be my impression for this for this episode, it's just that obnoxious siren sound. Today. We are notatching our second ever food episode. So this goes out to all the people who were super into the Oreos episode, which is way more people than Jordan and I thought. We're saying goodbye to that lovid cornerstone of the ice cream truck, the bodega, the school cafeteria if you were lucky, the Choco taco, which Unilever announced this week it was discontinuing by the end of July. I guess last week by the time we taped this, But my grief has distorted my understanding of linear time Jordan's as a resident sweet tooth and or guy with strong opinions about all things sugar related. What's your take on the chalk Talk Well, I mean, I think, quite frankly, it's a masterpiece good. That is the correct answer. Yeah, no, exactly. Some people may say that it's basically a gimmicky version of the drumstick, which combined vanilla ice cream, a chocolate shell, peanuts, and a wafer cone decades earlier. These people are wrong. The Choco Taco perfected the ice cream cone with cones. You get the toppings and fun stuff on top of the start, but then the rest of the way down is a disappointment. Yes, it's a great metaphor for life, but not what you want in a summ retreat. With the Chaco Taco, it's a horizontal experience rather than vertical. You get it even mouthful of all the toppings and sauce the whole way through. Plus the taco like shell is good for people with sensitive teeth. So all in all, I think it's the perfect ice cream based dessert. Like so many I first experienced it at Taco Bell in the early nineties. I remember it so well, and I assumed it was part of the menu, and I was pumped when I saw it in the supermarket and realized that I could bring it home and have boxes of them for my very own It's a big day. Um. I have to admit we fell out of contact in recent years, but I will always have a soft spot for the chocolate taco and it will be greatly missed. A little secret about me Jordan's is that I love novelty shaped treats. M so that includes the all this superhero ice creams. I would always get those from the like the Horror of the of the super Misshapen Like Incredible Hulk and Spider Man, Captain America Lunchbob, so naturally, I love the Chaco taco well, from its humble roots in my beloved Philadelphia to the U S Senator who immediately tweeted at a crack pot but apparently still viable idea to save them, to their spot at the center of a vicious feud between the US Bureau of Land Management and the organizers of Burning Man. Here's everything you didn't know about Choco Tacos. Time for a little recurring segment on this show. We like to call Philadelphia Mother. The Chaco taco has its roots in the city of Brotherly Love via the Jack and Jill ice Cream Company, which was founded there in nine by a guy named Max Schwartz, who got his start selling ice cream out of a wooden box he carried on his shoulder. He went mobile in with the truck, and his son Jay, expanded the business into the Delaware Valley, eventually pushing it to Baltimore, Washington, d C. Sadly, no one named Jack or Jill was involved. The name comes from the nursery rhyme lazy but fine. I'd like to take a minute to talk about my favorite hard scrabble beginning to an ice cream related fortune. Uh. Shaneen George I believe is her name, a Lebanese immigrant who found that the Joy Cone Company, which I believe it counts for something like six of cones sold in the United States. She was a survivor of the Titanic disaster in nineteen twelve. She was a third class passenger, one of the few who made it off, and so she immediately decided to found an ice cream company, or an ice cream cone company. Oh well, you know it's funny. You asked that, Actually, I'd had it in my head that somehow, seeing how we'll get to this later, But ice cream and ice cream sales people at the turn of the century was like a major way of selling disease. Prior to ice cream cones, they would sell ice cream out of little, you know, blast dishes, which would then be sort of haphazardly washed by the ice cream vendor. And this is also pre pasteurization, so a little bit. But newspapers were filled with stories of like ice cream poisonings at fairs and stuff. So I had read this story about how this woman shanin George, saw how the fragility of life through the Titanic disaster and wanted to think, basically, have a safer way to joy. I share this beautiful treat. Yeah, enjoy ice cream. I think that's garbage. I don't think that's true. I actually I have for some reason, I had that in my mind. I think I read that in a Titanic book years ago, and it's just kind of morphed. But reading about her today, I just saw, like I think, in the late nineteen teens, early nineteen twenties, she um she started the company, she saw nothing about a spiritual awakening after the Titanic disaster. I choose to believe that I like that whatever it's And and now, the Choco taco itself was invented in three by a guy named Alan Dreyson, who is then the VP of the company. He had gotten to start as a good humor ice cream truck driver at the tender age of eighteen and ascended to the boardroom by nineteen seventy four. And if you want to feel really bad about yourself, he was just thirty two when he came up with the Choco taco. And yes, he has Inventor of Choco Taco on his LinkedIn page. This guy really loves having invented the Chaco taco, would you. I mean it's true talking to you Eater in seventeen for their pretty much ground zero for the history of the Chaco taco until we came along. Mothers Uh. Eater has the best definitive history on it. But Alan Dreyson, you can corner him in line at a pizza truck apparently, and he will tell you about how we've made the Choco taco. He said. They have sold one billion of them as of twenty seventeen. So probably a lot more by this point, roughly three for every person in the US. He issued a statement on the devise of the Chaco Taco. Great question, great great ques. We should have we should I mean, I'm sure this is probably the worst day of the last forty years to try to get in touch with this man, but we should have tried to get We should have tried to have him on the show. I don't see that he has um coherent words right now are probably beyond him. He's probably just so grief stricken. I don't see an up. I did find his linked in, which is where I found that update, but I don't see that he's made a public statement on it. Jamie, we put an ask out to the Chaco he will show up dressed all in black wearing a leather baseball hat, uh with the Choco Tuca Loko on it. There's a really priceless video of him on a Vice obsensively being interviewed by a reporter from Vice, but basically just the guy from Vice eating a Choco taco in front of the creator of the Ko Taco and not really asking many questions. But it still a fun video anyway. But yeah, this guy Alan Dreis, and this was his first novelty ice cream idea, which is just incredible. Talk about just you know, home run, your first time stepping up to the plate. First, first thought, best thought. I think it was that you know, is that one of the oblique strategies? I think you said it was? Alan Ginsburg. Oh, yeah, you're right, You're right, right right. In a separate video for either, if you are so moved, you can watch him seeing the Chaco Taco theme song, which yes, is written to the tune of lak. I don't know this theme song? Can you sing it? That count as an ad because account as an ad of the products being discontinued. No, do it? I don't know. I now, let's see if I can find it. Um, the Chaco Taco. It's literally yes, it's like it's like a tasty treat, a tasty treat for you and me, like said something like that, that's actually not bad. Yeah. Well, before we go any further. In a transparent attempt to bulk up the information in this episode, which might just be shaping up to be a just enough information episode, I'd like to take a quick look at ice cream through the ages. Early ice cream light confections have appeared in many cultures over the years. Around five hundred BC, the ancient Persians in present day Iran created a frozen dessert out of ice, honey, saffron, and fruits. It was called faluda. It was apparently a favorite of Alexander the Greats and I believe the more modern recipe incorporates thin vermicelli sized noodles ice cream noodles. Interesting, yeah huh. And then in ancient Romes, citizens sent slaves to collect snow to create their version of ice cream. Fiddling well, Rome burned, go to the go to the mountains and get me ice slave. Emperor Nero said to have loved lemon sorbet enriched with crushed raspberries and rose water. And yeah, he probably ate this while watching Rome burn and playing his fiddle. The Emperor Shang of the Tang dynasty and seven hundreds China seven d enjoyed a dessert that probably most closely resembles what we know as ice cream today. He supposedly had a total of ninety four men dispatched to gather ice to combine with a yogurt made from buffalo milk, flour and camphor. The drink was poured into metal tubes and lowered into ice pools to freeze, so it almost looked like popsicles. This was similar to the preparation of an Indian confection known as coalfie in sixteenth century India, and the record of the life of the Mogul emperor Akbar the Great, who reigned from fifteen fifty six to sixteen o five, describes creating this food with saltpeter being combined with ice from the Himalayas, saltpeter, I think being a crucial ingredient in gunpowder. I guess the common theme here with all the sort of unusual things like camper in saltpeter being added to ices, that it was very hard to have ice prior to refrigeration, so they were doing all sorts of unusual to our ears chemical reactions to try to make things stay consistently cold. There's a long standing argument that the rumor I guess that the U. S Army was putting salt would put saltpeter into the rations to knocked down the sexual drive of their soldiers. It is not true, and I don't think it even does that, but it's just it's no I mean, I just I just looked it up and it's on got a snow sentry. So I'm no. I'm no pharmacologist, but gunpowder seems like it would be an apatesiac. Don't people like snort gunpowder with like cocaine? I don't even have it. I don't even have a joke that, Oh yeah, here you go. Brown brown is a purported form of cocaine or amphetamine insufflation. So up the nose mixed with smokeless gunpowder. Wow, that's cool, all right, and back to other treats of the of the upper class. It's believed that the Venetian traveler Marco polo And produced Asian ice cream recipes to Europe after his famous trip to the Far East in the thirteenth century, same trip that supposedly brought back pasta. It quickly spread all over Europe, and Antonio Latini, Kitchen over c O for the Spanish Viceroy in Naples, published the first book of recipes for what was then known as sorbetto in si In one very famous and likely apocryphal quote, Voltaire supposedly said, ice cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal that's a great line. Katherine the Great of Russia, known for her passions of varying never mind nope, was reportedly so obsessed with the frozen treat that she had her own porson ice cream serving sets made for her. Uh oh, how could you cooled? Katherine the Great and horses folks. Okay, Then over to England, my beloved England. According to a slightly dubious legend, King Charles the First of England reportedly paid his chef five hundred pounds to keep his recipe secret and exclusively for his court nights. Was known as ice cream um. Other early recipes in England called for the inclusion of amber Greece, which is a waxy substance found in the intestine of a sperm whale. So maybe it makes sense that King Charles the First wanted to keep his ice cream recipe private. It's probably better than all these other ones. King Charles the Seconds love of ice cream is more verifiable. He built an ice house in the center of London at the start of his reign in sixteen sixty, and the first printed ice cream recipe in Europe was in the handwritten receipts of Lady Anne Fan Shui in sixteen sixty five, and her husband was Charles, the second Ambassador of Spain. The ice cream began to become really popular in high society, and by the seventeen hundreds, flavors like chocolate, pistachio, pineapple, jasmine, are to choke, candied pumpkin, pine nut, pear and chestnut appeared in many of London's fashionable ice cream parlors UH and there was an especially famous place in Berkley Square in London called the Pineapple, which had flavors like parmesan and cucumber. Unfortunately, these recipes have been lost the time parmesan ice cream like there's that place in UH on Bleaker Street that has like sweet corn ice Yeah, But because there were no ice cream cones at this time, the way that they up was to use pewter molds, which were in the shape of pretty much everything you can think of. There were roses, there were pineapples, there were lobsters. There were even ice cream molds in the shape of hand for some reason, and ice cream would be put into these molds and then colored to resemble whatever real item the mold happened to be, and then elaborately decorated. So you put ice cream in a rose shaped mold, bring it out diet red, and then decorate it with like leaves and pedals and stuff. It was this really elaborate thing. And there was even one candle shaped ice cream mold that would allow for a working wik to be in certain so you have this like there's a picture of it online. Somebody still has it and they shoved ice cream in there and demonstrated it. You see this, It looks like a real campdle stick and like a little geppetto camble holder and there's a little wick on top of the flame. It's pretty windy. Brow Farms from New Jersey introduced ham ice cream. I can almost understand two pounds two pounds of tailor ham in every two and a half gallon container. That's a guarantee that's too much ham. That's a lot of ham. That's just frozen hams uice. And on the topic of weird ways to make money, now over to America. Thomas Jefferson apparently introduced the vanilla flavor to the US market after visiting France, and George Washington loved ice cream so much that he spent a report of two hundred dollars on the frozen treat throughout the summer of seven teen ninety. In today's dollars, that's five thousand dollars. So yeah, imagine spending five thousand dollars on ice cream in the summer. Dolly Madison, the wife of US President James Madison, served ice cream at her husband's inaugural ball in eighteen thirteen. Back to Victorian England's Uh, poorer folks did not have these elaborate ice cream molds. They had to make do with what was known as a penny lick, which was served in a glass. This is really me. The penny licks were served in a glass that looked really deep, but it was actually just an optical illusion based on how the glass was cut and it only held a tiny bit. So you'd be given these these cups and just you just would see like a reflection of the ice looking like it was going all the way down, but it was just a yeah. So not only did these glasses ripped people off and disappoint people, but they were also, as I touched on earlier, a fantastic way of transmitting diseases. The ice crea vendor would rinse them out quickly with water, but rarely good enough to kill bacteria, and it was believed that time that they helped spread tuberculosis throughout England. And actually penny Licks were banned from London and speaking of band ice cream products, I'm almost done alright. At the same time, in the eighteen nineties, religious laws known as the Blue Laws led to a ban on ice cream sodas in many US states. The way around this led to the creation of the ice cream Sunday, though this is admittedly hotly contested. Various localities that have claimed to be the birthplace of the ice cream Sunday include Plainsfield, Illinois, New Orleans, Louisiana, Cleveland, Ohio, New York City, Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and Ithaca, New York. You should give us one, we should give us There are two rivers Wisconsin. I feel like, yeah either yeah, Well, we'll let you to share it, like like those popsicles with the two sticks will break it in half. You can both have it. Yeah. Um back to Oh, we're already are in the United States and out on the out on the street in the poorer districts of the United States. In the UK, ice creams were sold by the hokey pokeman. Have you ever heard of the hokey pokemon? Uh? They were traditionally Italian, though sometimes friends are in The name derived from their Italian cries of poco or oh, how cheap. That's the theory, at least. It's also a theory that their name hokey poke was drived from hocus pocus or hocum in reference to these scanny products sold on the streets alongside the ice cream. But this ice cream, usually the tricolored Neapolitan variety, was seen as a cheap and easy way for people to cool down in the swell during summer months in urban centers at the start of the twentieth century, especially in the Chicago area tenement slums. So the hokey Pokemon becomes sort of a hallmark of lower income areas, and much like the penny licks in the UK, they were looked at unfavorably as basically a way of spreading diseases. Old middle class reformers kind of looked down their noses at the dreaded hokey Pokemon and tried to have them abolished. And I said earlier, milk wasn't pasteurized in the US until the eighteen nineties, which meant that any dairy product was potentially laced with the bacteria that caused whole sorts of horrible stuff, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and bova and tuberculosis. Newspapers described ice cream poisoning epidemics in which dozens of fair goers, picnic attendees, and party guests were made sick or even died. Still, the hokey Pokemon was seen as a jolly and welcome figure in these lower income areas, crying out, hokey, pokey, sweet and cold for a penny newer old. That was his little jingle. Before you had the ice cream trucks with their turkey and the straw theme, which we'll get to in a minute. Uh. The story of the ice cream cone invention is a little murky. People have made variations of it since the late eighteen hundreds, but it really took off at the four World's Fair in St. Louis. There's multiple versions of this story, but the most popular one is that there was an ice cream vendor at the World's Fair who apparently didn't have enough bowls to keep up with the ice cream demand, so he paired up with a waffle vendor who rolled his products into cornucopias, and this allows for people to eat their ice cream as they roam the fair and taking in the latest inventions, including the X ray, the wireless telephone, which I feel like I need to triple fact check that because that seems crazy, and a hundred and forty different models of automobile, and then literally nothing else interesting occurred in the realm of ice cream science until nine three, when Alan Dreisen invented the choco taco. Jason said at the time that Mexican food is the fastest growing segment of the food industry. And now that we had already taken a massive detour into context, you didn't need I'm about to do it again. Mother. First, during the early nineteen eighties, of the hundred Mexican restaurants in the US at the time, only about a hundred and fifty or in the in the Northeast. Um, obviously you get a lot of stuff down the border San Antonio or or l A places with you know, historically Mexican immigrant populations. But as the eighties War on New York and with it the rest of the Northeast, where You'll remember Jack and Jill were based or next to anyway, developed an appetite for Mexican food. New York Magazine declaring in auguste the city is gripped by Mexican madness, which feels racist. Never before has there been such passion for Mexican food or so many places to enjoy it. And actually, in a lot of ways, Dreason was really ahead of the curve, because remember this is invented in nineteen eighty three. In nineteen eighty five, Food and Wine magazine was reporting on America's love affair with spicy foods. Six years later, salsa surpasses catchup as the nation's best selling condiments. Is that still the case? That's crazy? Probably after nine eleven Ketchup came back. It's like you get something to put on the Freedom fries. Oh in mayonnaise by a long the hell, by a long shot. You know what it is. It's the it's a old it's it's the rise of a oli would be my bet anyway. So, really, Mexican food the decade is the mid eighties to the to the mid nineties. Um tortilla sales quintuple from eighty to ninety the number of Mexican restaurants the nation rise from a little over thirteen thousand and eighty five to over twenty thousand. It's easy to forget and very funny too as well, to realize that the time, how many Americans were just genuinely ignorant of Mexican food. While researching this, I discovered there was a famous public gaff that President Gerald Ford made on a diplomatic trip when he was handed a tomali and he just bit into it without unwrapping it. Uh was this before or after the major d pulled the chair out for him and he fell to the floor, kicking the tables. He went, you know, I think we should have been Was that a dan Acroyd on s and I? I think we should be nice to Gerald Ford? Really? I mean, do you know he was a male model before he became president? Yeah, you know, considering the past ten years, forty years, thirty years, whatever. I mean, just a gentle himbo. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Jason enjoys telling a fictionalized version of how he came up with the Choker Taco, which goes as follows. I was on an expedition in Mexico and got separated from my party. It was hot, I hadn't had anything to drink, and then I saw a mirage on ice cream taco rising out of the distance. That's how I got the idea if he went down there for some kind of like Peyote journey that I just imagining the Chili episode of the Simpsons. I'm a coyote homer. Um Ah, that's my Johnny ca. I mean, I'm gonna keep the Johnny cash one in the back pocket for a while. Uh. Jack and Jill. The reality of this is more of a necessity being the mother invention kind of thing. Jack and Jill didn't have its own signature snack in any of its trucks. And it's important also to note that they are Truck Forward Truck First Company at this point, rather than retail sales or stuff like that. You're generic truck sandwiches, ice cream sandwiches, strawberry shortcakes, chocolate clairs, those are made by whomever. But branded stuff like popsicles, Klondike bars, and drumsticks you got pay extra for those. And consequently, Jack and Jill wanted their own version. Yeah, and as we mentioned earlier, Mexican food was having a moment at the time and cheat cheese uh famous foe of Jimmy Buffish. He sued to get the margarit if it'll trademark back. They were offering churros and ice cream as a dessert. So Drayson, who recognized the tacos shape as the most emblematic of Mexican food, pitched the idea and the company, okay did they hired an ad agency to come up with names, but ultimately they just went with his idea, which he said he came up with on the fly. Uh. Not to get to pulp fiction on you. But do you know what chacolate tacos are called in Europe? Oh? I do, actually because I wrote it later on, But yes, and I deleted it so I could put it here, you son of a bitch, go ahead winter tacos, which, as far as I could tell, that does not mean anything in any other language that would roughly translate to chaco or something sweet. I mean, but I'm sure that people I feel like winners, I was gonna say, I know, I know, I do. I feel like a winner when I eat a chocolate taco. Yeah. They were introduced in the late nineties, but discontinued at the dawn of the new millennium. And it was only thanks to a social media campaign in two thousand thirteen that the winter taco was ultimately brought back in two thousand fourteen in Europe. So hopefully we'll see something similar in this country. I'm sure there's some kind of insane like move on dot org. Oh yeah, change dot org. Yeah yeah, change dot org um. But all of the good ideas in the world amount to nothing without execution. And this is where gold Bond comes in. The gold Bond ice Cream Company, the Pride of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Absolutely nothing else going on there except for gold Bond ice Cream not so that's not the powder people, no, And I went. I tried to find a lot more about this company, and I can't, but that's your soul. But I was able to find out. So they were founded by, predictably, a former dairy farmer. This will come in interestingly later on. His early ice cream experiments included a chocolate dipped slice of ice cream rolled in nuts. Sounds familiar. Gold Bond had purchased the popsicle name a little over fifty years after, they were brought into the world of commercial manufacturing by a guy named Frank Eperson who's a lemonade salesman from Oakland. He trademarked that name Popsicle, and gold Bond buys that, so that's the big claim to fame. At this point, Jordan tells about Frank Eperson. Yes, according to lore, he invented the popsicle as an eleven year old when he left a container of water mixed with powdered fruit flavoring out in his backyard overnight. And he lived in northern California. It doesn't get that cold at night, but at this night he apparently did, and he came out the next morning the container of water was frozen and the stirring stick was still inside, and he gave him an idea for the popsicle. In n two, he introduced his creation at a Fireman's Ball. I love that the popsicle was publicly unveiled at a fireman's ball a hundred years ago. Wow, look at that. This This episode will double as our hundredth anniversary popsicle episode. And according to reports, at this Fireman's Ball, the popsicle was quote a sensation, and the following year he begins selling the frozen pops to the public at an amusement park in Almadia, California called Neptune Beach In. By nineteen he'd received a patent for his frozen confectionery, which he called the epsicle ice Pop, which does not roll off the tongue. He later renamed it popsicle the insistence of his children could call their the kids are all right. Uh. They were originally sold in fruity flavors and marketed as quote, a frozen drink on a stick. I love the on a stick phenomenon of foods. It's very americanly for him, Yeah, it was very American. Sadly for him, this is also very American. He sold the patent just a year after he filed it, later saying I was flat meaning flat broke, and I had to liquidate all my assets. I haven't been the same since. This is the best plot of Breaking Bad. Walter White sells his interest in the company for five thousand dollars, which goes on to become a billion dollar company, and he becomes obsessed with money and status as a result. Is right, Well, apparently this uh Frank Epperson Gentleman did not launch a murderous turf war, but he could have. But a brutal turf war did break out, so began historians have called the frozen sucker War. Google it. I didn't make that up, the frozen sucker War. Apparently there was a lawsuit because Good Humor thought that the Popsical Corporation, We're treading too close to their ice cream on a stick products. You get your fudge goals, your creamsicles, et cetera. Eventually they settled out of court, with Popsicle agreeing to pay Good Humor a license fee to manufacture what was called frozen suckers from ice and sherbet products. You get all the fruit flavors, and Good Humor reserve the right to manufacture these products from ice cream, frozen custers and the like. I just think it's it's just saying that the term popsicle is indeed trademarked. It was one of those things that I just thought was generically the next or Xerox, and I guess apparently so did the makers of the Brooklyn based now defunct brand People's pops which I remember seeing all the time. Brooklyn flea market, um, Smorgasburry and all that stuff. Uh. They dared to use the word popsicle on their website and they were slapped with a big old season's assists from Uni Lever, the folks who bought the popsicle name from Good Humor in nine and they are the people who are currently killing the Choco taco, which brings us back to the point. So at the time, gold Bond is a brand agnostic manufacturing contractor and the ice cream business they do not work for, not just Jack and Joe, but also Good Humor. Uh. And they rejigger a machine at its dedicated cone plant because the two are separate to make a waffle cone in a folded shape. Um. And having them handle manufacturing of the shell also meant that Jack and Joe could have them fill the shell at their ice cream plant, which meant they saved on logistical costs and had less breakage of the taco shells cones. Is it called it? It's a shell, right, You can't call it a cone if it's not cone shaped. Yeah, show an empty taco shell was very fragile. Drayson explained, if we had to ship those across the country, most of them wouldn't have made it. And uh, you waxed rhapsodic on this in the intro, but you know you were right on the money. Drayson said, when you eat a sugar cone, you generally eat the nuts, chocolate ice cream at the top, and then when you get to the cone, you're only eating ice cream and cone. With the Choco taco, you're getting ice cream, cone, nuts and chocolate with just about every bite in the boardroom. Sell his idea with that speech. I'm just pictured the drunk ton drep For me, it just choco, but it's a taco that famously crinkly silver wrapper is also a bit of innovation. It is made from metalized polypropylene, which Drayson called high technology, and it was the first ice cream novelty to use the packaging which kept air out better than wax paper. Ah. He does, however, concede that keeping the shells fresh has been an ongoing problem, one that they still haven't quite nailed. I always thought it looked like the Space age hydrated pizza pizzas from Back to the Future too. Yeah, So, as I mentioned earlier, Jack and Jill was in the ice cream truck business, truck forward and uh, very truck forward business. Um those wine is very very truck forward. I'm getting some some truck notes, some smoke notes on that, n but but it's very truck forward. But getting it into Taco Bell, which would have seemed the you know, obvious right from the get go, required a sort of backdoor route. Um Alan said that that's get your mind out of the gutter. No, No, I'm thinking of like an Ocean's eleventh thing where they like rebuild Taco Bell said, in like a warehouse from how we're going to get into a Taco Bell, like son of a bitch I'm in at the time, he said, talk about how to separate franchise division and a company owned store division and the franchise ease. Being independent minded people had their own trade shows, and so he knows all of these people from his truck driving and Jack and Joe connections and starts getting the choco taco at the trade shows where obviously, yeah, Jason, where obviously runaway hit. People love that, people love them. Well, it's not the look. Well, while we're here discussing both bells and ice cream trucks, what do you say we do a brief history of the ice cream truck. Shall we please we think great? The fore runner of the ice cream Man were obviously the hokey Pokemon with their push cards. But in a man by the name of Harry Burt decided to go big to live Moss if you will. A native of Youngstown, Ohio, this forward thinking confection are hit on the idea of coating ice cream and chocolate and putting it on a stick. He had a background and making lollipops, so the side he had made sense to him. Thus the Good Humor Bar was born. And then he outfitted twelve white delivery trucks with freezers so he could bring this straight to customers. And for extra pizzazz, he took bells from his son's bob Sled, presumably after asking and sticking him on the trucks, so they make a lot of noise and people, would you know, look and see what all the fuss was about. See this freezer on wheels selling great chocolate e ice creamy desserts, and there you go. He got it made. But he wanted both the trucks and their drivers to be pristine white to differentiate them from the hokey Pokemon, who again were believed to spread disease with their unhygienic glass bowls. They wanted parents to be very much ideas this was a very clean health well I mean not healthy, but hygienic products. And these drivers also kept to a pre arranged route, which was something that was fairly revolutionary at the time. You know, these people with the push cars stick to the same neighborhood, but they would kind of mix it up every now and then. These people actually had a dedicated route that they would travel, and so was born the Good Humor Man. And it was good. Every one of a certain age remembers the good Humor Man being a very welcome sight in their neighborhood. So this was in the twenties and thirties and forties. Flash forward to St. Patrick's Day. Nineteen fifty six, brothers William and James Conway started a little something called Mr Softie. They drive around West Philadelphia, which is playing a major role in this ice cream history. I should say it's the starting point for Chaco Taco and Mr Softie. But on the St. Patrick's Day, these brothers are selling cones with green soft serve ice cream in honor of the holiday. Now Soft serve has been invented some twenty years before this in the middle late thirties, pioneered by the founders of Dairy Queen and Carvel, but the Conways are believed to be the first to take soft serve mobile. And at first they just bolted down a soft serve machine to the back of a truck, but it caused some problems with the electronics in the vehicle. It would overheat, short out. It was bad. Kids dont have to wait a long time to get their soft serve coms. I just love that they had this idea and that they're like, yeah, I just both the freezer out of the truck, put a trough on it, let him feed out of that. So they had to experiment with airflow in the truck, you know, just to deal with the heat problem, using different fans and different generators, and finally by they nailed it and the company had becomes so successful that the brothers began the franchise, giving the Good Humor folks a run for their money. Today, there are more than four hundred Mr Soft defranchises employing more than seven hundred trucks across fifteen states, and they're largely unchanged from the original right down to the soft serve menu on the side. I guess for over fifty years, that menu board has only changed four times, and UM, yeah, right, it's pretty impressive, I would assume, just to reflect uh inflation in the prices, but beyond that, it's mostly the same. The biggest change to the ice cream Truck is the sounds system them used, the blast the familiar tune, which I'm sorry to say has a deeply racist background. Uh. The famous ice cream truck theme, which everyone knows I'm even gonna bother humming has. This origins in the folk song Turkey and the Straw, but it was rewritten in nineteen six with new lyrics about ice cream, which is why it has an association with ice cream parlors and ice cream trucks. You can google it if you like, but the words are steeped in slurs, stereotypes, and watermelon. I will leave it there, but everyone loves the ice cream truck. Right as you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information After these messages, the Choker Taco was a hit, and Alan used his connections to get the snack into a lot of the franchise Taco bells around the country, at which point Taco Bell wisely takes notice and calls him, because in this business, first you get the Chaco, then you get the taco, then you get the power. This is how I win. This is how I win. One thing that Taco Bell actually influenced in the Chaco's design was the quote light ice cream, which came as an ask from Big Bell in an attempt to reduce their fat and caloric content across the board. Sadly, though they stopped offering they had a falling out. They stopped offering the Chaco Taco at some point I wasn't able to find when. I wonder if it was when they became commercially available. Moving right along in the history, another crucial moment occurs in nine when Good Humor and its parent company Uni Lever by gold Bond Dreason said, it went from me selling it to my friends around the country to going into at the time, maybe twenty thirty thousand Uni lever freezers. So convenience store freezers are akin to branded coke and pepsi machines. They're often stocked by one ice cream company, which is one reason why stories usually have more than one. Unilever are the ice cream industrial complex. I think they're literally the largest ice cream manufacturer on the planet. They bought Klondike, which became the choccoa Taco parent brand, and then Briers. Then they spent some change on Ben Jerry's in two thousand one and talenty in um. The list of Chocco Taco also rans in the flavor department. I have never tasted a single one of these, but apparently they add heath bar, another toffee flavor, peanut butter, cookies and cream strawberry, and a kind of Dulce delche style caramelish marketed as fried ice cream. You ever had fried ice cream? It's a real county fair kind of thing. I don't do fried stuff for my crazy sweet tooth. I don't really do fried oreos, fright ice cream fried. It's kind of my one thing fried and cheesecake and cheesecake. Okay, okay, fuller, fuller. Portrait of your au gustatory habits. Uh this this the sea talk the chocks. Mr Chalky oh God made his first appearance in supermarkets nationwide when Good Humor Briars, who had switched manufacturing to Richmond, Virginia, um promoted it in nineteen I don't know why I mentioned that, like it was some kind of big thing, but the school there, uh Fairfax close, but yeah, I got I got a soft spot for for Richmond, home of girh that's right, among among many other punkin metal bands and uh anyway, they promoted it in nineteen nineties six as America's Coolest Taco at the Supermarket Industry Convention in Chicago, which was the first time it was made commercially available for home consumption. It is America's Coolest taco. Uh. Two thousand fourteen was other big year for Choco Taco, largely because of the drama that surrounded its Wikipedia page. I did miss this one was happening, but it's hilarious to me. There's a Twitter bot that was started in July called congress Edits, which has since been suspended, that was created to automatically collect Wikipedia edits made by Congressional staffers. So it was I guess, crawling the IP addresses of various Congressional computers in the offices and would just automatically announced whenever a correction or an edit to a Wikipedia page was made from one of those IP addresses, and it turned out that the Wikipedia entry for the Choco Tacoho became a fiery hot crucible of battle for these congressional staffers. Edited six times by either the House of Representatives or the State Department staffers during the work day, which come on Jordan's Take Us Down This Journey. The first the kid Asian that someone in the House of Representatives of the State House tried to edit the Wikipedia page for Chaco Taco curte. On November tenth, two thousand ten, a staffer edited in a reference to former Speaker Sam Rayburn that erroneously suggested that he'd given a quote to The Washington Post about the Chaco Taco. That edit was killed within hours by an editing bot that helps maintain Wikipedia's factual standards. The next edit happened four years later. In July. They tried it again. A stafford tried to sneak Speaker Rayburn's name into the chacoa Taco Wikipedia page once again, at which point it was deleted a second time with a helpful comment by a Wikipedia editor. Sam Rayburn died in sixty one. The chocolate taco was introduced in the eighties. Translation impossible stop messing with us. I just love it that. Then the people at the House of Representatives of the Speaker, I don't know where came from, gots yeah, so, seemingly in retribution, a State Department computer then changed Choco Taco to Taco two days later, and a short period of back and forth occurred, and they were just continually in the Washington Post reporting on this. They were like, they also added an expletive that we can and will not print. Um. Finally, the State Department I P address was served a sternly worded warning from Wikipedia, and our long national nightmare drew to a close. I just nope, it's just somebody's inside joke about Senator Rayburn. As far as I can tell, people have not come forward about it, and no update on that. If you or a loved one was the congressional staffer with jones for Sam Rayburn and Choco Tacos, please get in contact with the podcast. Just a year under a year later, Chaka Tacos appeared in the news again as a wedge issue in the negotiations between the Bureau of Land Management and UH. The popular Druggie Desert festival, Burning Man, a favorite of Bay Area tech walks and Susan Surandon where you dress up like a weird steampunk hot topic nightmare and you go and do drugs in the desert, and there's people who have like, don't what I explained is that doesn't I need to explain Burning Man to people. Surely everyone understands Burning Man at this point. Now, Oh, I'm I'm looking really quick to see who else really loves Burning Man. Susan Surrandon, I know posts from there like every year because they used to bread about it at people. Um. Anyway, it's a huge asshole for Nevada because it takes place down the desert and the Bureau of Land Management has to go out and you know, pick up and clean after all of these degenerates. I'm gonna get so many angry Burning Man people coming up. Well, they're cleaning up after the people who litter, who I think are are We're of your only you know, people who go to Burning Man and are respectful of the environment. I have no quarrel with you. So they're negotiating with the Burning Man Festival founders and part of their asks include Choco Tacos, Eminem's Liquorice, and Chubani Greek yogurt. These are according to documents obtained a by the Reno Gazette Journal, and the festivals officials pushed back, calling the demands excessive and out of their ability to meet. They also asked for drumsticks and popsicles, along with a lot of like steak like specific different cuts of steak um and the snack bar, which included the ice cream, was supposed to be available twenty four hours a day. I just love the fact that the Bureau of Land Management is gouging the Burning Man people. But they later sued them. This is in at the time of the Choco taco demand, they were paying about four million dollars for the permits necessary to host Burning Man. When they sue the Bureau of Land Management in they charged that the prices had increased two hundred and over the last three years. I want a full on Chinatown style film noir about the corrupt Bureau of Land Management gouging the organizers of Burning Man for millions of dollars in round the clock Choco taco access. Oh, I love that so much. Anyway, Uni lever appeared to place the blame of the discontinuation of the Choco Taco on the now classic supply chain disruption. They wrote their announcement that we've experienced an unprecedented spike in demand across our portfolio and have had to make very tough decisions to ensure availability of our full portfolio nationwide. We're very sorry for any disappointment. This was not entirely out of the blue grassroots reporting. UM had revealed shortages of the snack in the months leading up to the announcement, though as of December two, thou One Coonduke was reassuring fans on Twitter that wild Haead pulled the four packs of the chocolate taco single servings would still be available in all the usual places. I guess among the snacks that were also discontinued with a Colondike donut, What the hell is that is? It's just like a conduct bar with a hole on it. No idea, let's Jamie Coople but conduke donut? What the It's just an ice cream sandwich with Yeah, it's just a it's it's a you can't do that. You're so offending. Can't just put a hole on something and call it. It's also square shaped, which is really funny. It's just a conduct bar with the whole so it's just a conduct bar with less of it. Yeah, maybe that's why I was discontinued well, or or they were just like, shoot, we're really running out of ice cream. We got to use less ice cream in our conduct We're already got punch a hole in it. And then you know, maybe out of that we can we can use it to make chocolate tacos, and then people weren't buy well. This gets into the conspiracy theory portion of the episode. Um at least one person who's suggested that the move is more of a New Coke Classic Coke calculated marketing move. As a TV director, payment Ben said, the Choco Taco is going to come back, and they're gonna say our outrage is why it's back, just like Taco Bells Mexican pizza. I completely agree with this. I said that multiple times in the last twenty four hours. Whether we're taping this the day after I believe Hell yes announced this is this is type our fingers to the bone for you people. This is still very fresh for us, and maybe by the time this episode is released, the whole Chaco Taco scene full of chances from which this this is like a rapidly developing story. So apologies in advance. Um, but yeah, I've been saying this repeatedly. I think that you know, this is what happens when there are products that aren't selling as much as you know they would like. They threatened to take them away. There's a huge outcry and then people remember, Oh my god, Yeah, that's right. I love chocolate talk. I've thought more about chocol tacos in the last twenty four hours than I have in the last twenty four years. So I don't remember this Mexican pizza thing. Do you remember this? I don't remember the Mexican pizza thing. But we've talked about the new classic coke thing. I think the Mexican Just ahead, give us the reader's digest. I mean, yeah, the really quick version. I think we talked about it on the Sonic the Hedgehog episode, which is weird. Um, there's a conspiracy theory. I'm gonna do this really quick because it gets kind of granular that the makers of coke in the eighties used real sugar in their product, which was expensive, and they wanted to switch to corn syrup, which was less expensive and rather than risks sort of changing it and have people notice, wait a minute, this chase different. They say we're gonna make a new product and then, you know, discontinue the old one that you've known for a hundred years and loved. And then once there's this huge outcry about like, oh my god, where's our original coke flavor? There's okay, here's your original coke flavor back. But when they gave the original coke flavor back, it wasn't the same. They'd secretly made that change to the cheaper formula that people didn't know any better because they had it in their mind. Nope, this is the original. I told me it was the original, says right on the bottle coach classic. Um, so that's the really not that interesting conspiracy theory. Maybe we can get on the stuff that I don't want you to know, that the stuff they don't want you to know. Ye yeah, yeah, yeah, I got a little little cross my heart synergy going. Yeah, um, Jamie put on a call to the stuff that I want you to know. I think it's funny too to that people were immediately just saying that it was canceled. Yes, that's right. I mean it's funny how quickly. Again, this is twenty four hours after the fact. There are so much, so much misinformation out there. Thank god we are here to put you folks straight. Yes, there was a myth that took root in the immediate aftermath of the news that the Chocolate Taco was being discontinued, that it was canceled in a politically correct sense. Uh. Someone with even more free time than we have manipulated a headline from our friends at people dot com are former employers, and they changed this headline to read Klondike's Choco Taco canceled by woke mob after almost forty years. And they had a subheading on this fake headline that read a representative of the brand confirmed to People, but due to recent allegations of quote cultural appropriation, the Chaco Taco is known. However, People's pr Queen the Mighty Julie Farren, Hello Julie, we love you, confirmed to the a P that this story is false. No such headline ever appeared on People's website. Thank god. Reddit co founder Alexis Ohanian was one of the people who waited from high places. Uh. He offered to buy the rights from Uni Lever to quote keep the Chaco Taco from melting away from future generations childhoods, and Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy tweeted what I hope was a facetious vow to invoke the Defense Production Act to mandate the continued manufacture of Choco tacos and telling his followers to call their senator to response to the legislation. I have to assume he was joking, unless I mean, I want them to invoke martial law unlet the purge Chucko Taco. Unless Senator Chris Murphy was the guy editing the Wikipedia page way back and uh, way back in the day that would really bring this spaw exactly. Um, but folks, there may yet be hope. And one of the responses on Twitter, Klondike did write that we are working hard to find a way to bring Choco Taco back to ice cream trucks in the coming years years. I want it next summer. Good god, I'd eat it in the middle of December at this point. Oh yeah, that's true. I mean, if Klondike doesn't come to the census, I'm hoping that it goes the way of Dippin Dots, the Space Age flash frozen treat that filed for bankruptcy protection in only to be purchased by Oklahoma oilman Scott Fisher and his father Mark for twelve point seven million back in He was thirty two at the time. Good lord, can you imagine he's younger than us? And he bought Dipping Dots wholesale. My god. Six years after he bought it, in eighteen, Dipping Dots broke three thirty million dollars in annual revenue, which is absolutely stunning success story. So maybe he'll do it again with chocolotok And despite the best efforts of Sean Spicer, remember Sean Spicer's war against Dipping Dots, White House Press Secretary, it always two our White House Secretary. Press Secretary Sean Spicer starting in two thousand ten, was just tweeting like dippin Dots are not the ice cream of the future, just like four or five times he shared an article about the bankruptcy. I mean, what was he doing in two tens professionally? Maybe he was the guy who was also messing with the chocolate deep does this rabbit hole go? Yeah? Uh? Woodward and Bernstein of Froze and Novelty, we should freedom of We should freedom of information act this stuff. Maybe we can reach out to the Wikipedia editors be like, who exactly did this? Um? There was a truly beautiful elegy written for The Chocolate Taco by l A Times columnists Gustavo Ariano, whose author bio on the paper site explains that he is the child of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy. The day after the news broke, he wrote, a few other foods can seem so non Mexican. Is this an ice cream confection concocted by a white guy from Philadelphia, and yet it's Moi, Moi Mexican. It's core ingredients chocolate, vanilla, and a taco show, albeit one made of waffle cone, our Mexican in origin. It's affordability and ubiquity make it a treat for the masses. Tradition is important, he continued, but so is making and embracing our own traditions, letting other cultures learn from us and vice versa. Evolution, not stasis, is why Mexican food remains one of the most vibrant cuisines in the world. Nothing's more authentically Mexican than a mishmash. So I feel comfortable letting him have the last word on chocolate Taco, you know, at least until it comes back, and um, I think I think it will. What's your over under? I hope it will. Yeah, we should. We should get in touch with some Vegas oddsmakers and get the over under on Chaco Taco resurrection. Oh well, folks, you know, I hope you're able to get your hands on one or two of these guys before the inevitable descent of humanity into a grim hell escape of murderous hunter gatherers and charnel houses. Uh where was that going with that? Just just remake jingle all the way, but make it about people just trying to get their hands on chocolate tacos. That constitutes a verbal trademark. You will have to pay both of us if you pick that up, Hollywood. Thank you so much for listening, folks. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan runt Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,