My brother called me the other day to inform me that there were new Slurpee flavors at 7-Eleven and started rambling on about the history of the popular drink. So, naturally I thought, why not write a blog post on it?
I was sad to see that the closest 7-Eleven to Saratoga was in Massachusetts so I cannot run out and try these new flavors. For those of you who don’t know I am not from upstate New York. I am originally from Northeast Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, 7-Eleven is as common as Stewart’s or Cumberland Farms is upstate (neither of which I heard of until I moved up here). The Slurpee is similar to what Cumberland Farms calls “The Chill Zone” or an ICEE you can get at the movie theatre or mall. They are frozen flavored drinks that people indulge in all year long.
A man named Omar Knedlik owned a Dairy Queen in Kansas City in the late 1950s. One day, his soda fountain broke down. In order to accommodate his customers, he went out and bought some bottled soda and put it in his freezer.
This bit of bad luck paid off to say the least.
When someone came in an bought a soda, he popped the top (this was back when soda was in glass bottles not in cans) and the soda now had an slushy consistency. People loved it and started to request this new drink. So, using an air conditioning unit from a car he designed a machine that would create these drinks. A contest was held to name the new machine in which ICEE Machine won.
The machine was sold to a few stores but in 1967, 7-Eleven licensed the ICEE machine and put these new drinks on the map. That’s also when the drinks became known as the Slurpee. This name was suggested by Bob Stanford who was a 7-Eleven agency director. His inspiration was based on the noise you made while drinking the drink through the straw. Slurpees since then have taken over the country and beyond; they are actually most popular in Winnipeg Canada.
Here are some of my favorite random facts I found on the Slurpee FAQ page:
- Slurpees are carbonated and come in a variety of flavors created from all of your favorite sodas such as, Coco-Cola, Fanta and Mountain Dew.
- Drinking a Slurpee is a common cause of Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia, commonly known as BrainFreeze. If you have this misfortune of this experience, don’t panic; Just put your tongue to the roof of your mouth and you will be fine.
- What causes the slushy consistent of soda is the sugar.
- In the United States, air is pumped into Slurpees while in Canada it is not so the drink is does not have the same foamy texture.
- About 40% of all Slurpees are purchased in the summer months.
Even though we must live without Slurpees here in the Capital District, try and stay cool for the remainder of the summer!