Claim A says Dippin' Dots began as a farm-feed experiment. Claim B says Dippin' Dots was invented by a candy-store clerk. Claim A is true, and Claim B is completely made up.
The story starts with Curt Jones, a microbiologist at Alltech, a Kentucky biotech company. In the late 1980s he was working with yogurt cultures added to animal feed, not dessert.
Jones found he could form tiny pellets by dipping the mixture into liquid nitrogen at 320 degrees below zero. The ice cream idea followed, and it was a complete accident.
In 1988, Jones and his wife Kay opened a shop in Lexington with no restaurant experience. Early test batches were so cold that, in Jones's words, "they welded our tongues to our jaws." The storefront closed about nine months later.
A family member then suggested a Nashville theme park, and the slogan "ice cream of the future" arrived in 1991. Jones won a patent in 1992, but a jury later found he had sold to more than 800 customers over a year before applying, and the patent was thrown out. The brand went bankrupt in 2011, then sold for $222 million in 2022.
As for Claim B, no candy-store clerk was involved. A microbiologist working on animal feed came up with the pellets.
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