A slab of ice cream between soft biscuits, in a paper wrapper, is the whole of National Ice Cream Sandwich Day. Pick one up on the way somewhere and finish it before you arrive, letting the biscuits go soft against your fingers.
No founder, sponsoring organisation or establishment record for National Ice Cream Sandwich Day was located in the indexes searched here. A third-party holiday listing for the day was already online when the Internet Archive captured it in May 2012, which dates the listing rather than the day.
The crisp brown wafer used to make ice cream cones cannot be used in an ice cream sandwich. A United States patent granted in 1998 gives one reason flatly: it would absorb moisture from the ice cream and become soft and mushy.
National Ice Cream Sandwich Day belongs to a frozen dessert whose biscuit does exactly that. The same patent describes the ordinary chocolate cookies as ones that "become soft and moist and tend to stick to the fingers of a person holding and eating the ice cream sandwich."
The oldest recipe for it in the archives searched was printed in London, not New York.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Ice Cream Sandwich Day ran on August 2 without a tracked deal. Browse past offers from previous years.
In May 1900 a London chef named Charles Herman Senn signed off the preface to a small book about ices. Recipe 115 in it is headed "Denises Glaces (Ice Cream Sandwiches)": cover plain wafers with a layer of the ice once it is frozen firm enough to spread, cap each one with a second wafer, then pack them in a charged ice pail with paper between the layers.
Senn was writing for the culinary profession, and the trade was supplying it. In the advertising pages of the same book, the biscuit firm Peek, Frean & Co. of Drummond Road, London, invites attention to wafers "two of which may be used to form an ICE CREAM SANDWICH, as per instructions on page 69."
The story in general circulation runs the other way, and it is about a New York street. The line it turns on, that the sandwich "might have made thousands of dollars for its inventor," survives in two American household magazines whose volumes span 1900 and 1901, and nothing earlier that a full-text search here could reach.
The words were loose in American print before either of those. The only match for "ice cream sandwich" in the California Digital Newspaper Collection before 1900 is a personals column in the Pacific Grove Review of 26 October 1895.
Russell H. Proper of Manhattan applied for a patent on an "Ice-Cream-Sandwich Machine" in April 1920, and it was granted in August 1921. It is not a factory. It is a hand utensil you plunge into a tub, carrying one biscuit impaled on prongs, while two cutters slice a film of cream free from the mass.
One stated object of the patent has nothing to do with speed: a device that "will not be likely to get out of order or be criticized on sanitary grounds."
More than thirty years before he died in 2010, Richard LaMotta was running a small ice cream parlour called the Sweet Tooth in Englewood, New Jersey. He put a four-ounce slab of vanilla between two chocolate chip cookies and studded it with chocolate morsels, then tinkered in his basement, working out how to keep the cookies crunchy after freezing.
By the autumn of 1981 thousands of Chipwiches a day were coming off an assembly line in Lodi, New Jersey. An army of pushcart vendors hawked them on the streets of New York.
"National Ice Cream Sandwich Day" turns up in three volumes of HathiTrust's full-text index, the earliest two published in 2007, and in no Chase's Calendar volume that same index holds.
TIMELINE
GOOD TO KNOW
A 1998 patent records that wafers can encounter temperatures of 120 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit while being shipped to the plants that turn them into ice cream sandwiches.
The California Digital Newspaper Collection returns 53,213 matches for ice cream across the 1890s. The phrase ice cream sandwich turns up 123 times between 1890 and 1905, and a single Hanford daily accounts for 100 of them.
Alongside the wafers it sold for making a sandwich, Peek, Frean and Co. advertised Tivoli Wafers, Venice Wafers, Sugar Wafers and pink and white Rolled Ice Wafers.
The figure comes from Richard LaMotta's obituary, which also records that Nestle bought the brand in 2007 and stopped production.
GOOD TO KNOW
the rectangular standard, a slab of vanilla between two chocolate cookies
a slider, quoted in the Kelso Chronicle of 11 August 1916
a slice cut from a block and wrapped in bread, sweet corn and durian among the flavours
Perrier had 50 percent public recognition in New York after one year and $3 million in advertising. Chipwich after only two months had 62 percent public recognition without any advertising.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Twenty-four percent of Americans pick a sandwich among frozen novelties.
The International Dairy Foods Association's April 2026 consumer survey found that 24% of Americans reach for a sandwich among frozen novelties, against 40% for cones. United States ice cream makers turned out 1.23 billion gallons in 2025, and the sandwich is one of the shapes that volume comes in.
A patent filed in 1996 describes production machinery that injects soft ice cream between two spaced apart cookies and then indexes the cookies to wipe the nozzle clean. It notes that many wafer and cookie materials are simply too weak to survive that handling.
The dairy trade reports that July is the busiest month for United States ice cream production, with nearly three fifths of the year's output made then. This day sits at the front of the month that follows.
GET INVOLVED
EDITOR'S PICK
BUILD
TRY
READ
TAKE
Test your knowledge
No. It is an unofficial observance, and the Federal Register carries no document naming it, so offices, banks and schools stay open.
COLOPHON
Celebrate National Ice Cream Cone Day in the sweetest way - indulge your taste buds with delicious ice cream cones and toppings!
Get ready to indulge in sweet, creamy goodness on National Ice Cream Sundae Day! From classic flavors to creative toppings, the options are endless.
Indulge in a delicious treat on National Ice Cream Pie Day - make your own or try one of our favorite recipes for the perfect summer dessert!
