Nutty Buddy
A sugar cone filled with vanilla ice cream, sealed in chocolate and studded thick with peanuts. Sold from ice cream trucks, corner-store freezers, and grocery multipacks. The peanut layer crackled when you bit into it; everyone had a story about where it came from, and nobody's story was quite right.
The nut-on-cone idea started in 1931, when I.C. Parker of Pangburn Ice Cream & Candy Co. in Fort Worth, Texas, trademarked the Drumstick — described in the newspapers of the day as "a chocolate nut sundae in cone form." Nearly two decades later, "Nutty Buddy" appeared in the record — first in the trade magazine Ice Cream Field in October 1950, then formally trademarked in 1958 by the Maryland Baking Company, which claimed first use as far back as October 1949. The product's real origin wasn't a single invention but a franchise: Sweetheart Cup Company, which made the machines that produced the cones, licensed regional dairies to make their own Nutty Buddys, each one local. In New England, that meant Seymour Ice Cream Company of Dorchester, Massachusetts — a regional name so closely tied to the cone that generations of kids remembered it as the inventor. The story was comforting. The trademark records suggest otherwise.
Seymour shut down in the 1980s, but the cone persisted. Other dairies kept making Nutty Buddys — Purity Dairies in Nashville, among others — and the treat never truly left the market. For 90s kids, it was the ice-cream-truck order and the freezer staple whose real origin stayed obscured by the better story everyone preferred to believe.
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