Customers stand in line to order from Zesto on 11th and South streets on a recent Saturday in Lincoln. On the hottest day of July 1948 in Norfolk, a second-page ad in the local newspaper presented readers with a flavorful way to cool off. The recently opened Baldridge Zesto Shoppe touted its “new and different .
.. high quality dairy product” that contained 6% butterfat but was “not ice cream.
” The product would soon be widely known by a more recognizable name: soft serve. The Norfolk Zesto was one of the first few dozen links in a chain of ice cream joints that once stretched from California to Florida and threatened Dairy Queen’s dominion. The upstart brand’s sweet spot came between the coasts in places like Nebraska.
Over a five-year span, at least 11 shops cropped up in the state, including a location in South Omaha that would become part of College World Series lore. But Zesto’s heyday lasted just a few years. Amid an increasingly crowded fast-food marketplace, its parent company, an Illinois ice cream machine manufacturer, ditched the retail business in the mid-1950s and left franchisees out in the cold.
Today, more than 30 surviving locations across the Midwest and the South make up a loose network of restaurants that bear the Zesto name but operate mostly independently of one another. Tess Lipskey (from left), Cassandra, Victor Jr. and Victor Fountain of Waverly sit at a picnic table to eat their post-dinner ice cream treats at Zesto in Lincoln.
Now, two .