The Slurpee was invented as a commercial product more or less by accident by a Dairy Queen franchisee Omar Knedlik in Kansas City in the late 1950s.
Born in 1915 and having grown up relatively poor, after WWII Knedlik used his pay from his time serving in the war to open a small ice cream shop.
After rinsing and repeating with various business ventures (some successful, some not), by the late 1950s, he’d scraped enough money together to purchase a Dairy Queen franchise.The commonly told story, corroborated by none other then Knedlik’s son, Phil, in an interview after his father’s death in 1989, is that, struggling with a malfunctioning soda fountain, Knedlik began storing bottled soda in his freezer, which cooled, but did not entirely freeze, the beverages into a delicious slush. However, according to none other than the company website itself, Knedlik simply didn’t have a soda fountain (not even a broken one) in the early days of running his Dairy Queen franchise, so made due with putting the bottled soda in the freezer.
Whoever is correct, Knedlik putting the bottled beverages in the freezer turned out to be an accidental stroke of genius. The sometimes slushy result quickly became a customer favorite, in turn spurring him to start advertising his drinks as “The Coldest Drinks In Town.”
At this point, you might be wondering why the soda didn’t always just freeze all the way through. Recall that back in the 1950s, most soda was sold in glass bottles that had very smooth interior surfaces, and the soda itself had few extraneous particles.
For any ice crystal to form at temperatures found in a typical freezer, it has to have something to grab onto (technically, a nucleation site). However, in the hermetically sealed glass bottles of soda, unmoving in Knedlik’s freezer, this wouldn’t necessarily happen.When the soda was removed, however, two factors potentially worked on it to begin to create slush. First, if the soda was supercooled (below the solution’s freezing point, but not frozen), just by moving it, this created additional interactions that could sometimes reveal previously unrealized nucleation sites, causing localized freezing.
Second, even if the liquid wasn’t “supercooled,” but was at close to the freezing point of the solution, when the carbonated bottle of soda was opened, the dissolved CO2 under pressure suddenly returns to atmospheric pressure, so outgasses. Beyond potential further jostling of the liquid, this outgassing results in a slight drop in the temperature of the…
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