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Smurftastic: The truth about Kings Island's blue ice cream
Shauna Steigerwald
ssteigerwald@enquirer.com
It started with a Smurf.
A Smurf ride, to be exact.
In 1982, Kings Island added a new attraction, Smurf's Enchanted Voyage. As a tie-in, the amusement park debuted a new food item: Blue ice cream.
Some 34 years later, the blueberry soft serve is the park's most popular treat.
"There's blue ice cream, and everything else is below that," said Don Helbig, public relations area manager for Kings Island. "It's the runaway leader."
Why is it so beloved? Its initial following could be linked to the popularity of the Smurfs back then.
After all, the ice cream was sold right where riders finished their boat ride through scenes of the little blue characters enjoying (err, smurfing?) the seasons in Smurf Village. (Well, maybe they weren't exactly enjoying Halloween, when Gargamel was up to his usual mischief, i.e. trying to kill them.) And there were a lot of those riders: 22,754,117 during the attraction's 10-year run.
But even if the Smurfs kick started the usually colored treat's fan base, it soon became popular in its own right.
Kings Island found that out during the 1992 season. That's when the Smurf ride transitioned to Phantom Theater ... so park management figured they'd take blue ice cream off the menu. They replaced it with a red cherry ice cream.
That did not go over well. Park officials use words like "outrage" and "uproar" to describe visitors' reactions.
Needless to say, blue ice cream was back on the menu less than two months later. And it's been served in the park ever since.
"We learned our lesson," Helbig said.
Call it tradition or nostalgia. In any case, people love it. So much so that the park sells hundreds of blue ice creams every day: in a cone or in a bowl, by itself or swirled with vanilla, with or without multicolored sprinkles. (The breakdown is about half and half on the latter, Helbig said.)
"For so many guests, it's a staple item," he said. "It's just that 'core four' of what you want to do here," with the other three being the big coasters, The Beast, Banshee and Diamondback.
Before he worked at the park, Helbig was one of those guests.
"It was something I used to have to do as a pass holder," he said. "I had a 24-year run where that was my routine – I had to get it at the end of the night."
Now, when he travels to out-of-town conferences and tells people he works at Kings Island, they ask him about one of three things. When "The Brady Bunch" filmed there. The Beast. Or – you guessed it – blue ice cream.
By now, the treat has gone multi-generational. Parents who ate it as kids are sharing it with their own children; grandparents who had it with their kids are now enjoying it with their grandkids.
"When my daughter was three or four years old, I couldn't wait for her to try it," Helbig recalled.
And also, "it's a Cincinnati thing," Helbig said. Kings Island parent company Cedar Fair tried serving it at Cedar Point once. It flopped.
You can still get the frozen blue concoction, now made by Prairie Farms, at its original location. The stand is located in what's now called the Planet Snoopy area. (The former Smurf ride is still a "dark ride," aka an enclosed attraction. In fact, "Boo Blasters on Boo Hill," an interactive attraction that opened in 2010, still uses the same track as its smurftastic predecessor.)
Blue ice cream is also sold at the Ice Scream Zone in Action Zone and Coney Potato Works in Coney Mall.
Unfortunately for its devoted fans, you can't take blue ice cream home from the park. (Well, you could try, but it would be a pretty messy proposition.) Kings Island has a solution to that problem: This year, the park added blue ice cream as a bagged popcorn flavor. Or if fudge is your thing, well, there's a blue ice cream version of that, too, also new this year. Both are available in the Sweet Spot shop on the park's International Street.
And you might want to snap a selfie with the treat for social media. Helbig said it's one of the top 10 or 15 most photographed things in the park.
Where else can you go blue?
King's Island isn't the only spot where you can find blue ice cream. If you aren't headed to the park, here are a few other places to get it.
Whipty -Do!
2529 W. US St. Rt. 22-3, Maineville, 513-774-0200, www.whipty-do.com
On social media, Whipty -Do! bills itself as "home of THE blue ice cream."
Joe Fields, who owns the shop with his wife, Kristen, has a story about that. They started serving it in 2010, about a year after the shop opened. Being only about four miles from Kings Island, they had a built-in audience.
Back then, he said, Trauth Dairy made blue ice cream for Kings Island and sold excess treatage to local ice cream shops. When Trauth stopped making ice cream and Fields couldn't get his customers' beloved blue, he was met with anger, and more.
"We actually had adults cry because we didn't have it," he said.
So he sought out the supplier that sold blueberry flavor to Trauth. When he found it, he bought 500 gallons of the flavor and started mixing it with vanilla ice cream. Problem solved.
Now, Whipty -Do! serves blue ice cream just about every day it's open, late February through late October, to the tune of about 10 gallons per day. Customers even get it in milkshakes and Whipty -Whirls, into which they swirl candy, cookies and the like.
Fields also sells it in pints and quarts.
"We've had people show up with coolers to stock up," coming from as far away as Columbus or Indianapolis, he said.
The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden
This year, The Cincinnati Zoo is serving up Prairie Farms' blueberry soft serve ice cream – just like they sell at King's Island. It's available at Savannah Soft Serve, located next to the zoo's café. Though new to the zoo, it's already a hit.
"While soft serve ice cream has always been one of our best food items, we have seen that we sell more blue than we do vanilla and chocolate at our other two locations," said Jordan Miller, general manager, Service Systems Associates.
Putz's Creamy Whip
2673 Putz Drive, Westwood, 513-681-8668, www.putzscreamywhip.com
This marks the sixth season for blue ice cream at Putz's, according to manager Mindi Leach. It started out as an every-other-weekend special, but it was so popular that the shop, which is open from late March through Sept. 18 this year, had to get a new machine to keep up with demand.
Like Whipty -Do! Leach said Putz's orders the flavor in bulk, from Kings Island's original supplier, and mixes it with vanilla. Customers buy it up, by itself, in shakes or other menu items, and in pints and quarts to take home.
"We have people that drive 30 or 40 minutes to get it," she said.
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