The ice cream cone was an accident.
At the Worldâs Fair in 1903, an ice cream vendor ran out of bowls, so a waffle maker rolled his pastries into the cone shape to help! Vendors soon used this as a way for people to eat ice cream easily while they enjoyed the fair.
One of the first known manufacturers of ice cream cones was Stephen Sullivan. He began serving ice cream cones, which were at the time still called cornucopias, at the Modern Woodmen of America Frisco Log Rolling, which was held in Sullivan, Missouri.
The earliest cones were rolled by hand, from hot and thin wafers, but in 1912, Frederick Bruckman, an inventor from Portland, Oregon, patented a machine for rolling ice cream cones. He sold his company to Nabisco in 1928, which is still producing ice cream cones as of 2017. Independent ice-cream providers such as Ben & Jerry’s make their own cones.
The Joy Ice Cream Cone Company, located in Hermitage, PA, was founded in 1918 and began to mass-produce baked ice cream cones to sell to restaurants, as well as the everyday consumer. The company produces over 2 billion ice cream cones (sugar, cake, and waffle cones) a year. It is said that the company is the largest ice cream cone maker in the world as of 2009.