‘A fluke’: How hokey pokey ice cream got its start
Who would believe that an off-hand taste experiment by a teenager 60 years ago would become a Kiwiana staple?
Certainly not hokey pokey ice cream inventor Brian Simon.
“It’s just a fluke,” the 88-year-old Southlander says.
The ice cream legend says he remembers quite clearly the first time he tried the flavour in his dad’s Newjoy factory in Dunedin in 1953.
Max Simon had employed a couple of young Dutch men who worked a second job at the Cadbury factory down the road.
When Simon junior heard they were producing Crunchies, he asked if they could bring him some broken bits.
He sprinkled them over his vanilla ice cream, and it worked. His dad gave it to some of the drivers to see if they could sell it, and the flavour took off.
It was after wartime sugar rations, and Simon reckons the sweetness is what made it so popular.
Soon, Newjoy was buying “heaps” of hokey pokey from Cadbury.
The hokey pokey came in 11-pound (about 5kg) bags, but they had to layer the bags because the sharp bits would poke through.
Simon rubbishes claims someone at Tip Top came up with the idea in the 40s, saying the sugar rationing would have made it “impossible”.
He didn’t plan on making many more flavours, he says.
“I wasn’t going to be an ice cream man when I was a kid. I was going to be a farmer. And I did for a while, but it was too slow for me. What do you do on a farm when it’s raining?”
Simon is sharing his memories with The Southland Times at South Alive, where a display celebrating his invention has been installed for Southland Heritage Month.
He pauses the conversation to give some advice to someone trying to roll ice cream: “Don’t soften it in hot water, it can go icy. Just let it melt naturally.
“We put more hokey pokey in ours,” he adds, commenting on today’s ice cream.
And without missing a beat he returns to his story, telling us about the Manda ice cream factory he started on Rockdale Rd in Invercargill.
The Simon family are originally from Invercargill.
Jobless after World War I, Max Simon was living in his sisters’ boarding house at Appleby Hotel, and started making ice cream in the garage. This grew to become Phantazzi Ice Cream and later Newjoy, based in Dunedin, where he also custom-built some of New Zealand’s refrigerated trucks to transport ice cream and frozen products for other businesses to Christchurch and back.
Simon wanted to come “home” after his stint in farming, so in 1963 he and wife Jeanette founded Manda, which became well known.
They sold the business in the late 70s and Simon went into cold storage. When his son wanted to try his hand at the family trade, they founded Deep South Ice Cream.
The company became the the only manufacturer besides Tip Top with two plants when it opened an export accredited factory in Christchurch in 1999.
Simon served as president of the NZ Ice Cream Manufacturers' Association from 1986 to 1988, and for the number of awards Deep South won, he was considered one of the best ice cream makers of his time.
After “retiring”, he worked as an adviser for Dairyworx, only retiring properly about six years ago.
But he still enjoys ice cream with his lunch every day – often Deep South. “I’ve got to keep an eye on things.” Simon will be honoured alongside his father as part of the South Invercargill Heritage Trail, with a panel to be erected at Appleby Park.