Recently, after a particularly invigorating car wash, I had a yen for a slushie. Maybe the warm weather inspired me. Perhaps the proud sign of a nearby QuickTrip convenience store activated an unconscious desire. Never mind, I got a slushie. In Quicktrip, it’s called frizzoni, a curious, semi-Italian aspiration that has nothing to do with the product being distributed. For my palate, the slush was no good: too wet, not frozen enough, like it was already half thawed because it had been left in a vehicle cup holder too long.
This got me wondering: why are slimes so different from each other? The idea then froze into a more non-existent brain freeze, as I realized I couldn’t even guess what could separate a Freezzoni from a Slurry, let alone an Ice from a Slush. What the hell anyway? I had no idea, and barely any intuition.
Now I am enlightened. If you’ve ever been fascinated by one slushie and been disappointed with another, it’s probably because you’re keying in qualities you didn’t know about: carbonation, detail, density, flavor intensity. But Big Slushie doesn’t really care if you understand these differences, because Big Slushie doesn’t care about your needs. It exists to help convenience stores, food chains and event providers maximize profit margins for impulse purchases, while preparing those purchases for you, in the form of nostalgic memories of childhood joy. This is a hard truth, and you may regret the loss of your innocence in the pursuit of it.
“We don’t really talk about them slushiesIt’s the first thing I learned from Ice Company marketing manager Tyler Parker. Sure, ordinary people like you and me can talk about them, roughly, of a class of icy, flavored beavers. In context, those that are easily drunk through a straw. (If you’re spooning flavored frozen water, or licking it from a cup, that’s “ice”. slushie In fact, there isn’t a superordinate category, not one if you’re in the frozen-beverage business anyway.
Parker’s company, whose bright blue and red logos you’ve certainly seen at fairs, movie theaters, and Target cafes, makes something called “frozen carbonated drinks,” or FCBs. Its Icee, he would proudly say, OG FCB. In 1958, a Kansas Dairy Queen operator named Omar Nedlick accidentally invented the FCB when his soda fountain broke down. Instead they had to serve bottles from the freezer, which caused the cola to foam when it burst open. People loved them, so Knedlik hooked up an automobile air conditioner to a dispenser and turned Boch into a business. He wanted to call the product Skoldasis (as in, “cold as ice,” not “scold-a-shape,” which sounds like a 1980s fitness gimmick), but a friend wisely suggested it instead. Suggested “ice”. With partners, Knedlik perfected the machine and began selling it. Among his customers was the convenience-store chain 7-Eleven, which developed its own brand name for an FCB product, Slurpee. That’s right, a Slurpee is a product similar to an Icee, but sold under a private-label trademark. Same for a product you might have called “Arctic Blast”—just another Icee-Slurpee, a sibling in the family.
The carbonation in Icees, Slurpees, and other FCBs imparts an airy texture and a muted jolt, but also—when combined with yucca extract, a foaming agent—a surprisingly smooth texture and rich mouthfeel. Indeed, the fizz can be so completely obscured in the froth that you probably didn’t even know these drinks were carbonated. The bubbles also cause the delivered product to expand, which is why your Slurpee or your Ice or your arctic blast inflates a bit after pouring up and out of the domed lid sometimes to annoy your parents. .
Parker Compares FCBs Like Icees With Frozen United NationsCarbonated beverages, or FUBs. With some frozen-beverage providers I found these names pronounced as initialisms (affy u b), but Parker just says “fub”, as if underlining his meager standing through the acoustics. When Parker calls the drink a slushie, he is implying that it is not a premium, carbonated type of frozen drink, just a FUB. Slush Puppy is a FUB; So is Dairy Queen’s Misty (formerly Mister Misty; kids don’t get any respect these days), and Sonic Drive-In Fruity Slush. A FUB Sure Can Be Nice, But It Really Isn’t special, Anyone with some flavor, some ice, and a blender can make FUB. But an FCB, which requires its own equipment, supplies and careful management.
To ensure the continuity of their branded FCBs, the Parker team provides its customers with a complete service including machines, flavor concentrates, equipment maintenance, and marketing and sales support. But Icee’s lavish designs expand on frozen-beverage supremacy. In 2006, the company purchased a classic FUB Slush Puppy, then replaced it with fruit juice, and began selling the drink in schools as the “Juice 100”. When you order a Frozen Coke at Burger King, it’s an Icee FCB. Even for those Mountain Dew slurp-alikes at Taco Bell. Big Slushie is real.
Or at least, that’s what the Icee company would like me to believe. Isabel Atherton, Director of Marketing at Sunny Sky Products, tells a different story. His company manufactures concentrates for frozen drinks and sells them B2B. (Retailers choose which beverage-making equipment to buy and how to service it.) Sometimes Sunny Sky’s flavors are combined with major food brands such as Gerritos and Jolly Rancher to allow slushie lines with wider consumer recognition. Licensed from. For example, gas stations might try to sell you a Reese’s Freeze, thanks to Sunny Sky’s unholy interventions. Atherton says its flavor can be found at Racetrack, Circle K, Wawa, QuickTrip, and many other convenience-store chains (“C-stores,” as insiders call them).
To maximize accessibility, Sunny Sky designs its products to work in either carbonated or uncarbonated machinery. “Most C-stores already have the equipment,” Atherton told me. “What we try to do is talk to manufacturers and test our products in their equipment.” In a machine, crystals can grow larger, reducing the taste of Jolly Rancher. Another one that produces smaller crystals can make drinks sweeter.
In other words, where Icee focuses on an end-to-end solution, Sunny Sky meets cost-conscious c-store operators where they are. A FUB machine is inexpensive to buy and operate. An FCB machine is more expensive but is self-contained, reducing operating complexity and increasing uptime. A drink’s “overrun”—the extent to which it expands in a carbonated-serve machine—also has a direct impact on margins. More carbon dioxide means a more sparkling drink that uses less syrup and yields more benefits. Icee and Slurpee may be powerful brand names, but Atherton dismisses their importance to frozen-beverage consumers. “‘Icy’ is like saying ‘Kleenex,'” she said. It’s a Common Word—Just Another Name for slushie,
He may have a point. It wasn’t until I began researching this story that I noticed the Freezzoni brand name of Quiktrip, even though it was fitted to the front of the machine that dispensed my drinks. Ask for the burden of unquenchable souls, Do you want to get a Slurpee?, and they won’t necessarily assume you mean stop at 7-Eleven. The buyer of a frozen drink may not know the difference between FCB and FUB, and may not have any hope either way. “People don’t know the technical piece of it,” Parker acknowledged, and Atherton, as well as every other frozen-beverage-industry insider I’ve spoken to, agreed.
In place of knowledge about slime, or even concrete preferences, we have only our nostalgia. When I asked Parker to explain how his business works—what does the ice company actually sell?—he’s kind of left-class. “We exist to give people the best excuse to have a baby,” he said. “It’s a ‘baby in the cup’ – an escape, an experience, something that’s going to give them that spark of joy.” I mean, it’s a filthy mistake, FCB—but, you know, I get it. When I was a kid, my dad’s office sat across the street from 7-Eleven. We would sometimes walk to pick up a Slurpee, and when I search my brain to explain why I remember the memory, Summary The product shines at its center: light and spacious, full of possibility.
In the same way, a Slurpee from an IC at a Speedway gas station (owned by 7-Eleven) or an AMC theater serves as a bookmark for a special semantic memory. But the backroom machines of the slushy space also sabotage our memories, slowing them down together in a vat of cherry-red illusion. For example, a Slush Puppy or DQ Misty is looser and more fluid than an Ice or Slurpee. A sonic slush is iceier, which explains why it’s so easy to get all the color out of that drink and end up with a cup of crushed, unflavored ice. Even Taco Bell’s FCB, which Parker refers to as “his” (as in, a product of the Ice Company), is not as fluffy as Burger King. Quicktrip’s Frizzoni—which began my journey to the land of the mud—spreads very little, making the resulting drink heavy and wet. In Canada, yucca extract is not approved for food use, so the Slurpee you buy in Winnipeg or Saskatoon will be thinner than the one you find in Texas or Wisconsin.
These matters are somewhat secretive within the industry. A machine salesman I spoke with estimated that C-stores carefully test and tune the properties of their machines, such as syrup concentration and overrun, to produce the best margins at the lowest cost in their particular markets. TO: “In Tennessee, they really like it. Light and fluffy,” she told me. When I pressed a Quicktrip rep about the lack of foam in my Freezzoni, he stopped responding to my inquiries. Similar questions frightened the equipment seller; He was afraid to run after his marketing department, and didn’t want to be quoted by name. At some convenience stores, he told me, slushies are heavy and wet by design. “They have set their drink profile,” he said ominously, like a dark ice enchantment.
Any consumer item can be a mystery. Who really knows what’s in a soda, or a hamburger, or a toothpaste? Branding covers those questions, so an arbitrary choice may come across as a preference. But we think it’s easy to differentiate between the categories: A cola is not a sports drink; Coffee is not tea. Slushies violate this expectation. Imagine going to a cafe and saying, “Give me a cup of the hot stuff,” and then accepting whatever they put in you as if it were the specific object of your desire. This is exactly what buying a slushie is like.
Like Parker, Atherton described the purchase of the slushie as a feeling in itself, “like going out for ice cream.” According to John Pahick, who distributes Taylor Company’s frozen-beverage machines for the Midwest Equipment Company, even regional “preferences”, such as Tennessee foam, have less to do with people’s palates than their life history. – May give – a kind of dull ideology. You like what you know. And given the emotional, nostalgic nature of the mud, memory and habit rule.
When it comes to mud, our brains freeze. To us, they’re special treats that signify a special time—a hot summer day, a movie screening, a trip to the fair. Naturally, businesses that sell slush view them differently, as high-margin impulse buys are altered to maximize the inflow of capital. Your frozen drink is a mere add-on to your admission ticket or taco-supreme order or tank of gas, and is exploited by your (fainted) frozen-beverage preferences to produce compliant purchases. The true customers of Big Slushie are not you, the abuser, but the C-store who will tempt you to abuse.
I think we’re all just quacks in the machine of capitalism, but it’s still a tragedy to have those gears turning frozen drinks. Maybe I shouldn’t have started looking for Slurpees and Freezonis and the like. I had long held the belief that more knowledge makes one’s joy more intense. But knowing a mud itself numbs the soul.
