Mister Softee (Hong Kong)

A Mister Softee ice cream truck parked at the Star Ferry pier, Central. The trucks at the Central and Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry piers are more or less stationed. The somewhat faded menu of Mister Softee.

Mister Softee is an ice cream vendor in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, Mister Softee (Chinese: 富豪雪糕), owned by the Ng Enterprises Ltd., consists of a number of ice cream trucks. The red-white-blue outlook of the trucks, and the Blue Danube played by them, are part of the collective memory of many Hong Kongers.

The first truck, which had been imported from England, began to operate in 1970. Today the company has 14 ice cream vans running on Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories. The headquarters of the company is located in Fo Tan.

As the Hong Kong Government has stopped the issue of new hawking licenses since 1978, and the existing licenses cannot be transferred to other vehicles, the old trucks are still running on the roads of Hong Kong. Each van, as required by the law, comprises a soft ice cream making machine, a basin, and two refrigerators.

The trucks sell only four products:

• soft ice cream (vanilla is the only flavour, though the cone is made of chocolate)
• nutty drumstick
• Large Cups (Chinese: 蓮花杯 "lotus cups")
• Jumbo Orange (Chinese: 珍寶橙冰), a kind of sherbet).

The red-white-blue vans also began to be seen in Shanghai in 1994, and number to 18 as in August 2005.