Casper's Ice Cream's Headquarters, along with its two plants, are located in Richmond, Utah.
Casper Merrill did not invent the frozen novelty. Christian Kent Nelson — a high school teacher who lived in Iowa — is credited with that achievement, creating a stickless product dubbed the “I Scream Bar” in 1920. (In 1921, it was reborn as what everyone knows as the Eskimo Pie, when he partnered with chocolate producer Russell C. Stover to produce and market the bar).
But Casper*, who studied dairy science in college [at Utah Agricultural College, now Utah State University], did take the ice cream novelty to a new level of decadence just five years later, when he invented the Casco Nut Sundae — essentially an ice cream sundae on a stick. It was his attempt to squeeze more money out of the milk produced on his father’s small dairy farm in Utah. His creation laid the groundwork for what would become Casper’s Ice Cream, a Richmond, Utah-based family-run company best known for its FatBoy frozen novelty and ice cream brand.
“He made those first ice creams using ice blocks and a brine solution,” says Paul Merrill, CEO of the company and one of Casper’s grandchildren. “Then he’d have to hurry and put those personal sundaes on sticks that he made into a milk can, load them onto a wagon and go sell them at local Fourth of July celebrations, county fairs and the different gatherings in the community out in Northern Utah and Southern Idaho.”
His grandfather was quite the inventor as well, Merrill adds, making all of this own equipment. That equipment included the company’s first batch freezers.
Eventually, Casper learned how to make continuous freezers, which allowed him to produce ice cream even faster, he noted. In the 1940s and 1950s, people outside the company were actually asking him to make freezers for them.
“He never really bought any commercial equipment,” Merrill says. “The second generation started to do that — my father.”