DQ Dip Cones are Only 75 Cents Thru April 24; Plus a Brief History of America’s Ice Cream Darling

It’s starting to look and feel a lot like summer down here. That means it won’t be long before the temperature starts shooting into the 100s and Sen. Ted Cruz flees to Antarctica. We can dream anyway.

One of the few upsides to dealing with thick humidity is how it provides a perfect excuse to eat ice-cold treats like soft-serve ice cream. The fast-food chain Dairy Queen is kicking off the impending shadow of summer with a special price on one of its most popular desserts.

Dairy Queen announced that they’re rolling back the price of its small, soft-serve ice cream cones to 75 cents per cone for all of its available flavors. The price rollback is in honor of its 75th anniversary (get it?) in Texas.

The special 75-cent price will remain on menus across the state until April 24, according to the chain’s official website.

Have you heard? We’ve been in Texas for 75 years! 🥳 To celebrate, we’re offering what started it all—our perfect Cones—for just 75¢ (thru 4/24). 😮 Do you like yours dipped or regular?#DQTexas #Anniversary pic.twitter.com/WsliaYRfIX

— Texas Dairy Queen (@DairyQueenTX) April 4, 2022

DQ’s curly ice cream cones are one of its signature items along with the frozen Blizzard, a whipped, thick milkshake served upside down to customers to show how it defies the will of the universe by ignoring gravity.

The DQ ice cream cones come in three flavors: plain vanilla for all of us basic bastards and bitches, chocolate-dipped vanilla and the new fruity blast flavor announced last week on the Twitter page for DQ’s Texas chain.

The 75th anniversary doesn’t apply to the entire Dairy Queen enterprise. It commemorates the day that Dairy Queen opened its first Texas location in College Station. The owner of Smitty’s Grill near Texas A&M University, Omar Smith, installed a soft-serve ice cream machine in his cafe and it became a big hit. Two years later, the Dairy Queen chain offered Smith a chance to turn his entire operation into a Dairy Queen restaurant. He opened five Dairy Queen locations by 1950, according to the Smith Dairy Queens LTD. franchise.

Dairy Queen may be as synonymous with Texas as barbecue, high school football and fictional psychopaths who carve up their victims with chainsaws, but the chain as a whole started up north in Illinois. According a  book by by Anne Cooper Funderburg, Chocolate, Strawberry and Vanilla: A History of American Ice Cream, Sherb Noble and J.F. McCullough developed the first recipe for soft-serve ice cream in 1938 and tested the product with an “all you can eat” ice cream event at a shop in Kankakee, Illinois.

They opened the very first DQ in America in 1940 on North Chicago Street in Joliet, Illinois. The menu only offered ice cream items in pints, quarts and sundaes as well as cones that cost a nickel for a triple-decker serving. The first year was a success, allowing for a second location in Moline, Illinois. Today, Dairy Queen has more than 7,000 locations in America, Canada and more than 20 other countries.

Warren Buffet bought Dairy Queen in 1997 for $585 million in cash and stock. Back in 2018 he had lunch with another billionaire, Mark Cuban, at a Dairy Queen. Cuban got chicken strips; Buffet got a chocolate sundae with extra chocolate and a smoothie chaser. Cuban picked up the tab.