BlueBrixx Ice Cream Van Set 107739

BlueBrixx's Ice Cream Van is a BlueBrixx Play set built from 255 blocks, measuring 15.1 × 6.1 × 11 cm assembled, with a detachable roof, an opening cabin and a serving window. Two figures: a vendor and a customer. All graphics are printed; no stickers. Released 2024.

Soft serve was invented by a breakdown

On a hot Memorial Day weekend in 1934, an American ice cream seller named Tom Carvel got a flat tyre on his truck near Hartsdale, New York, and pulled into a car park with a full load of melting stock.

Rather than throw it away he started selling it as it was — soft, half-melted, straight from the churn. It sold out in two days, and customers preferred it to the hard product.

Carvel worked out that he had found something and spent the next years developing a machine to make it deliberately rather than by accident, along with a low-temperature freezer to serve it from. He then stopped driving the truck and opened a fixed shop on the site of the breakdown.

Two other operations arrived at soft serve at about the same time — the story is disputed, as founding stories usually are — but the flat tyre is the version Carvel told for fifty years, and the site of it is still an ice cream shop.

And the music

The chimes are a solution to a real problem: an ice cream van's customers are indoors and do not know it is coming. A recognisable tune, audible two streets away, brings them out.

It is also the most regulated noise in the business. Britain limits vans to twelve seconds of chimes at a time, no more than once every three minutes, not within fifty metres of a school and never in sight of another trading van.

In the BlueBrixx range

Sets 107414 (Farm Truck), 107420 (Flower Booth), 107421 (Bakery), 108027 (Pizza Restaurant) and 108137 (City Bus with Station) are built to the same scale and combine into a street.

Specifications

Pieces: 255 · Figures: 2 · Series: BlueBrixx Play · Detachable roof, opening cabin, serving window · No stickers
Model dimensions: 15.1 × 6.1 × 11 cm (5.9 × 2.4 × 4.3 in)