David Mintz, inventor of Tofutti nondairy ice cream, dies at 89

It all began in a basement in New York’s Chinatown.

“That’s how a nice Jewish boy learned about tofu,” David Mintz told The Washington Post.

Mintz owned several kosher delicatessens in New York and had a flourishing catering business, but his observance of Jewish dietary laws would not allow him to include dairy and meat in the same dish. He was losing customers who wanted pizza or beef stroganoff - and especially ice cream for dessert.

In 1972, after hearing about tofu, a versatile vegetable protein derived from soybeans, Mintz ventured to a subterranean kitchen in Chinatown, where it was being made. He bought a gallon.

Then he went to work. For years, after closing his restaurant at 9 p.m., he experimented like a late-night mad scientist working on a secret formula.

“I would call it Tofu Time at my restaurant,” he later told Food & Drink magazine, “and we’d work into the wee hours of the morning testing all different things for tofu, adding sugar and more.”

He made tofu substitutes for sour cream and cream cheese, but the ultimate goal was to create a nondairy ice cream that would be as good as the real thing. He mixed water, sweeteners and flavors in countless combinations, sometimes working until the cooks began arriving for the morning shift. One of his experiments exploded, leaving bits of fake ice cream stuck to ceiling.

After almost a decade, Mintz finally succeeded in making a frozen dessert that had the taste and texture of ice cream, but he couldn’t think of what to call it: Soy dessert? Frozen tofu?

“Then one night at 4 a.m. it came to me: Tofutti,” he said.

By the mid-1980s, Tofutti had proved that it was more than a passing fad, and Mintz had established a food company built on ingenious uses for tofu, including Better Than Ricotta cheese, Tofutti Cuties ice cream sandwiches and Mintz’s Blintzes.

A tireless promoter who called himself “the man who licked ice cream,” Mintz died Feb. 24 at a New Jersey hospital near his home in Tenafly. He was 89.

The death was confirmed by Steven Kass, chief financial officer of Tofutti Brands. He did not know the exact cause, except that it was not related to covid-19. He said Mr. Mintz had been in the office less than two weeks before his death.

While he was still a caterer and deli owner, Mintz was convinced that he had discovered the next big thing in tofu.

“I’ve got tofu fever,” he said in 1980, before he had perfected the recipe for Tofutti. “It’s a food of the future. It’s a miracle food.”

At first he was thinking of broadening the offerings of his catering service, while maintaining the dietary restrictions of Orthodox Judaism. When he served his tofu cheesecake, some of his customers spat it out, convinced that it contained dairy products.

“Have you lost your religion?” they asked Mintz, who was Orthodox himself.

He was supported in his quest by Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the powerful Brooklyn-based leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. When Mr. Mintz told Schneerson, known as the Rebbe, about an opportunity to open a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Schneerson said he should trust his faith and focus instead on his dream of creating foods from tofu.