Casper’s Ice Cream is 95 years old and growing strong
Family-owned Casper’s Ice Cream is counting on its product quality, differentiated brands and nimble but measured approach to see it through another 95 years.
Casper Merrill did not invent the frozen novelty. Christian Kent Nelson — a high school teacher who lived in Iowa — is credited with that achievement, creating a stickless product dubbed the “I Scream Bar” in 1920. (In 1921, it was reborn as what everyone knows as the Eskimo Pie, when he partnered with chocolate producer Russell C. Stover to produce and market the bar).
But Casper*, who studied dairy science in college, did take the ice cream novelty to a new level of decadence just five years later, when he invented the Casco Nut Sundae — essentially an ice cream sundae on a stick. It was his attempt to squeeze more money out of the milk produced on his father’s small dairy farm in Utah. His creation laid the groundwork for what would become Casper’s Ice Cream, a Richmond, Utah-based family-run company best known for its FatBoy frozen novelty and ice cream brand.