The Time I Hung Out With Tom Carvel, Talking Soft-Serve

Wonder what he'd have thought of his cameo in Seinfeld's new movie

I was watching Jerry Seinfeld’s silly and fun movie Unfrosted, and at one point his character introduces the legends of TV-age invention who he’s hired to help develop what would become Pop-Tarts. The team includes Chef Boyardee, Jack LaLanne, a Univac computer, and…Tom Carvel.

Who I spent a day with in 1986 at Carvel’s Yonkers, N.Y., headquarters.

I grew up in Binghamton, N.Y., with a Carvel store a half mile away and Carvel commercials constantly on TV. Seinfeld’s movie doesn’t even remotely try for historical accuracy, but one thing it gets so very wrong is Tom Carvel’s voice. The actor playing him is Adrian Martinez, and he only has a few lines, but he whiffs on Carvel’s distinctive, mumbly, chatty delivery. In the story I wrote for USA Today, I described Carvel’s sound as a cross between Brando’s Godfather and the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz.

Now, a guy who built a chain of middling ice cream shops (by today’s standards) and whose name in the 2020s is most widely associated with Fudgie the Whale and Cookie Puss ice cream cakes might not seem like an important historical figure. But he kinda is.

First of all, he’s the one who made soft-serve ice cream a thing – created and built the category, as we’d say in our consulting work.

Carvel, a Greek immigrant, had been an auto mechanic in New York, then worked on refrigeration units for the U.S. Army, which led to him driving an ice cream truck in Westchester County, N.Y. The story goes that in the early 1930s, his truck got a flat tire on a hot day. Instead of wasting the ice cream in the back, he pulled into a parking lot and started selling it as it became soft. His newfound customers loved it, and he had an epiphany that soft ice cream could be a good business.

Carvel probably didn’t invent the first soft-serve machine, but he invented and patented the first practical, lower-temperature machine that could be installed in a storefront. He opened his initial shop in Hartsdale, N.Y., in 1934. By the time I interviewed him, Carvel had 865 stores in 17 states and six countries, bringing in $300 million in annual sales. Tom Carvel still owned 90% of the company.

What I guess I didn’t expect when meeting Carvel was that he was so self-regarding and a name-dropper. I did the story because Carvel was then 80 and looking to sell his company. He’d already spurned an attractive offer from Twistee Treat because they didn’t play by his rules. “I might still do business with them, but in our own way, on our own time,” he told me. I added in my story: “That’s how it is around Tom Carvel: only two ways of doing things – his way and the wrong way.” This is the guy who put out commercials that looked like home movies and featured toddlers or cakes with names like Dumpy the Pumpkin. Who’d have guessed?

He also made some boastful claims I couldn’t corroborate. He said that Ray Kroc copied the structure of his stores for the first McDonald’s, which opened in 1940. In my story, I wrote: “From a lower drawer, he pulls out a picture of one of the first Carvel stores and another, dated years later, of an early McDonald’s franchise. Except for the golden arches, they’re nearly twins. Carvel claims it’s no accident.”

Tom Carvel was also one of the first CEOs to do his own TV ads. It started, he told me, in the 1950s, when he felt that radio announcers never got the tone right when reading the advertising copy he sent them. So one time, at a radio station live, he took the mic and ad-libbed an ad. From then on, he voiced every ad, usually un-rehearsed. Fast-forward to the 1980s, and Carvel claimed to me that he advised Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca on how to do his car commercials.

Oh, and at the musty, industrial-looking Carvel headquarters, hallways were lined with photos of Tom Carvel posing alongside celebrities like Howard Cosell, Danny Thomas and Bert parks. “When I get down, I call Bob Hope and have a few laughs,” he said with a straight face.

About three years after our encounter, Tom Carvel sold the company to Investcorp for $80 million. Tom Carvel died about a year after that, in October 1990. In 2001, Roark Capital Group bought a controlling interest. Carvel’s website now lists 340 locations in the U.S. – less than half of its peak under its founder.

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This is the original story I wrote for USA Today, appearing on July 21, 1986. It’s not available online.