It was just after 5 p.m. in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond, when a door flew open on 41st Avenue and a person dressed in their pajamas came sprinting out.
With a leash in one hand and a purse and empty ice cream dish in the other, they yanked their dog along as they charged up the hill towards a familiar sound: the Mister Softee ice cream truck.
The line was already six people deep.
But with the newly-updated Mister Softee NorCal app, reaching the ice cream truck doesn’t have to include a mad dash in your pajamas: The trucks can now be spotted from miles away with the touch of a screen.
Between 12 p.m. and 8 p.m., seven days a week, the app will reveal the live locations of all 14 ice cream trucks in the Bay Area.
“We’ve had over 50,000 downloads,” said Felix Tarnarider, the operator of the local Mister Softee trucks.
The app has only one function, but it performs it perfectly, guiding hungry customers to the nearest ice cream truck from San Francisco to San Jose, from San Jose to Martinez, reaching customers as far east as Tracy.
Mister Softee has never been more popular in the Bay Area.
“We started in NorCal almost eight years ago,” Tarnarider said. “We had just one truck.”
It was 2016, when he quit his job in tech and decided to chase his dream: bringing Mister Softee to the West Coast.
He had grown up in Brooklyn and remembered rushing out the door anytime he heard the ice cream truck nearby. When he moved to the Bay Area, he couldn’t believe they were so difficult to find.
“It was always in the back of my head that I wanted to do something about it,” he said. “And whatever I was feeling in my gut was accurate: People did want Mister Softee out here.”
He franchised a single Mister Softee truck and drove it himself.
Business was slow at first. Start-up costs were high. But he learned to efficiently plan out his routes and began to make a living.
Soon he was hiring more drivers, eventually pulling himself out of the truck and into an office to manage the entire 14-truck operation.
Today, the demand is higher than the supply.
“We’re still not getting to everyone who wants us,” he said.
Tarnarider noted that the Bay Area doesn’t have a lot of ice cream vendors offering soft serve.
“I think it’s not part of the culture here,” he said. “But the boutique ice cream shops are a part of the culture. They’re niche products, very good, and also fairly expensive.”
Despite rising ice cream costs and the increase in fuel prices, Tarnarider has managed to keep the Mister Softee prices unmoved at $4 a cone, $4.50 for a cone with sprinkles and $5 for a double cone.
“We stand out amongst the crowd,” he said.
Ice cream trucks first began operating in Ohio in the early 1920s, when Good Humor bars were being transported door to door. Prohibition boosted ice cream sales by 40% in the United States, according to AAA Magazine. There was another boom at the end of World War II, when wartime dairy rationing was lifted, propelling Good Humor to tremendous success.
But the company suffered a massive blow in the 1970s, when New York City cracked down on health inspections, and the company was caught falsifying food safety records, leading to an end of its ice cream trucks.
Mister Softee, which began in 1956, took advantage of Good Humor’s downfall and continued franchising ice cream trucks all over the country.
Today, Mister Softee has 625 trucks operating in 18 states, making it the largest franchiser of ice cream trucks in the U.S.
“You have to hustle,” Tarnarider said. “But you can make a living.”
And while ice cream consumption in the United States has dropped steadily over the last 30 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Tarnarider hasn’t felt the impact.
He’s about to put his 15th ice cream truck on the road.
And with his booming app, customers have never had an easier time finding one.
“That’s the best part of this now, the interaction with the customers,” Tarnarider said. “Our customers love us.”
