A Cold Treat to Beat the Heat:

As author Chen Rou-jin, whose work focused on life in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, wrote, industrial ice-making was a Western invention and early ice creams were therefore “foreign” products. Taiwanese people got their first taste of ice cream during the Japanese colonial era when the Japanese imported ice-making equipment, began manufacturing ice, and introduced ice-cream-making technology to the island.

Ice cream quickly became not just a way to beat the summer heat, but also a year-round treat.

Today’s subject is Taiwanese-style ice cream. In contrast to the European and American classics chocolate and vanilla, the flavors on offer at Taiwanese ice-cream shops incorporate local ingredients: taro, runner beans, pineapple, longans, peanuts and plums. Not to mention, calling traditional Taiwanese ice cream “ice cream” is a bit of a misnomer: it doesn’t usually contain dairy products, instead using starch as a thickener and flavor enhancer. Innovative Taiwanese ice-cream makers have also ventured into bolder flavors. Products like pork-floss, pork-knuckle, sesame-oil-chicken, basil and bitter-melon-flavored ice creams may sound crazy, but actually deliver a pleasant surprise on the palate. Let’s explore two venerable Taiwanese-style ice cream shops in Taipei: Yongfu Ice Cream and Snow King Ice Cream!

Babu carts and brass ice-cream scoops were part of everyday life in 1950s–70s Taiwan. (right: MOFA file photo)

The rectangular servings of traditional babu ice cream are a great way to beat the heat. (MOFA file photo)

One of Yongfu Ice Cream’s treasures: a wall display containing old ice-cream scoops and bowls.

Yongfu Ice Cream:Nostalgia-rich babu

An old-town destination

Established in Taipei’s Wanhua District in 1945, Yongfu Ice Cream has been an unwavering presence in its community for the last 80 years. Like It Formosa, a tour group that introduces foreigners to Taiwan’s culture and history, even includes the shop on its walking tour of the old parts of Taipei, bringing groups of foreign visitors at 11:30 every morning to experience Taiwanese babu. Will they order taro- or plum-preserve-flavored ice cream? Huang Suzhen, the shop’s second-generation owner, says it depends on what their guide recommends.

Wu Donglin, Yongfu’s third-generation heir, needs several early morning trips on his motorcycle to deliver each day’s nine tubs of freshly made ice cream to the shop. There are already customers waiting outside when the doors open at 10 a.m., and the scooping doesn’t stop until closing time. “Has Uncle Taro been in today?” asks Huang. “Uncle Taro comes by on a Youbike in the morning to get two three-scoop servings, and again in the afternoon if he remembers.” He and other seniors have been enjoying the shop’s ice cream since its founder, Wu Yongfu, manned the counter. In their later years, a scoop of Yongfu ice cream transports them back to joyful childhood days.

Yongfu Ice Cream’s Huang Suzhen (right) and Wu Donglin (left), the second- and third-generation owners, stand in front of their original location, where they are keeping the family tradition alive.

A “tricolor”—as mentioned on the vertical sign—is a scoop each of taro, runner-bean and vanilla ice cream. (courtesy of Yongfu Ice Cream) 

The tricolor

Yongfu’s specialty is the old-fashioned “tricolor ice cream,” a scoop each of taro, runner bean and “egg yolk,” which is actually vanilla. Back when Wu Yongfu was learning how to make ice cream from a Japanese chef, he didn’t know what banira (vanilla) was. He chose to call the flavor “egg yolk” since the ice cream made with it was yellow. The shop also serves peanut, plum, strawberry, passionfruit, lemon and longan ice creams, each of which has passionate fans.

Wu Donglin, who handles the shop’s ice cream production, tells us, “Grandpa just used the ingredients that were then available to make his ice creams, and he was very fussy about them.” The shop has survived through three generations because the Wu family still abides by his principles. Wu Donglin explains that their taro is shipped directly from where it is grown in Tai­chung’s Dajia District. Their lemons are squeezed fresh in Pingtung and the juice then delivered to Taipei. Their runner-bean ice cream includes whole beans. They also re-fry peanuts to bring out their flavor and themselves dry the longan they use. The shop’s production processes are labor intensive: each ingredient gets careful attention to bring out its best.

The old brass ice-cream scoop and contemporaneous age-cracked ice-cream bowl displayed on the wall are family treasures. Huang Suzhen pulls out a photo from 1967 of a vending cart with a sign reading “Tricolor ice cream: 3 scoops NT$1.” Nowadays, three scoops run NT$55, providing the store with a small margin on its large volume of sales. Huang tells us that owing to the family patriarch’s difficult childhood circumstances, his only hope for his babu was that it would provide people with an affordable small taste of joy. 

Taro is the most classic of Yongfu’s nine traditional flavors, which also include runner bean, vanilla, peanut, lemon, strawberry, passionfruit, plum and longan.

Ice cream experts

Sleeping in the same bed as his grandfather as a child, Wu Donglin heard many bedtime stories about ice cream. He says that in the old days ice cream was all handmade and it took more than half a day to make each tub. The process required an outer bucket made of wood and an inner canister of steel, with ice and rock salt layered in between to maintain the temperature. The ingredients went into the canister. You had to continually scrape the rapidly freezing ingredients off the canister’s wall with a wooden paddle, which would thicken the mixture and slowly transform it into ice cream. The later introduction of machines into ice-cream making greatly sped up the process.

A 1911 report stated that there were 500 ice-cream merchants in the old Mengjia and Dadaocheng districts (present-day Wanhua and southwestern Datong). Wu explains that by that time ice cream was already being machine made in a central factory. Vendors would buy it wholesale at the factory and then resell it in their own shops.

Patriarch Wu Yongfu started the business from a pushcart. Huang Suzhen says that while in those days ice cream sellers occupied all four corners of the intersection of Guiyang Street and Kunming Street, it was her father-in-law’s ice cream that always sold out first. When he packed up for the day, another vendor would immediately take over the spot. They all thought he had the best location, but what he really had was the best flavors.

Wu Donglin remembers his grandfather asking him if he wanted to take over the business. Though only four years old at the time, he immediately said yes. Donglin helped out at the shop all through high school and university, and his father gradually turned parts of the ice-cream making over to him. Born in 1984, Donglin weathered the SARS and Covid-19 slumps, and has now taken on the business’s future. Though many people have approached him about partnerships, his focus is on maintaining the quality of his family’s ice cream and protecting the brand, and he spends nearly every waking hour thinking about how to keep it on a sound footing well into the future.

In business for the last 80 years, Yongfu is a bona fide Wanhua destination that even turns up on the itineraries of foreign tour groups!

Snow King Ice Cream: Far-out flavors

Snow King Ice Cream first opened in 1947 and is now located across the street from Zhongshan Hall in Taipei’s Ximending neighborhood. In business for 78 years and counting, the shop has always been known for its variety of flavors. Hanging on the wall is the earliest article about the shop that third-­generation owner Kao Ching-feng has been able to track down. “Look at this,” he says. “This newspaper article shows that we were already serving pork-floss, preserved-plum, ginger, and sesame-oil-chicken ice creams in 1978!” Kao Jih-hsing, Ching-feng’s grand­father and Snow King’s founder, developed more than 400 flavors for the shop, which continues to serve 73 of them. Outside of seasonal offerings, Snow King offers 50–60 varieties every day.

The list of the currently popular flavors hanging on another wall includes taro, watermelon, and runner bean. Kao says that customers’ tastes vary with their nationalities. “Those from Hong Kong tend to like bitter melon and dong quai (Angelica sinensis). Westerners are unlikely to be familiar with dong quai and instead pick things they recognize, like ginger and cinnamon. People from China go for punchier flavors, like chili pepper, sesame oil chicken, and pork knuckles.”

Kao Jih-hsing developed his pork-floss ice cream as a low-sugar option for a friend with diabetes, and it remains one of the shop’s classic flavors to this day. He was also committed to flavoring with natural ingredients, so customers will find chicken and ginger shreds in the sesame-oil-chicken ice cream, and pig skin in the pork-knuckles ice cream. The watermelon ice cream contains watermelon flesh and seeds, and the bitter-melon ice cream uses real bitter melon that starts out tasting bitter before turning sweet. The seasonal lychee ice cream tastes just like fresh lychee; the chili pepper ice cream is truly spicy; and the kaoliang ice cream is so potent that Kao Ching-feng’s mother warns customers: “Are you sure you want it? It’s 58% alcohol! It’ll make you fail a breathalyzer test!”

Having taken over Snow King Ice Cream from his grandfather, Kao Ching-feng is diligently shepherding the shop towards its 100th anniversary.

Local is global

Another article on the wall talks about the arrival in Taiwan of the American Baskin Robbins ice cream chain in 1983 and its disruption of the domestic ice-cream market. How did Snow King respond to that? Kao pauses and then says, “‘Local is global.’ That’s not a quote from my grandpa; it’s something I heard some big business guru say. But I think that was what my grandpa was doing. He turned local ingredients into local flavors. If you wanted to taste something special, you had to come to Snow King because you couldn’t get it anywhere else. I think my grandpa was putting ‘localization’ into practice.”

Snow King Ice Cream is renowned for its unique flavors.

Snow King’s old sign piqued customers’ curiosity by listing ice-cream flavors like sesame-oil chicken, pork floss and pork knuckle. (courtesy of Kao Ching-feng)

Marching toward 100 years

What gives Snow King its old-fashioned character? Besides the many ice-cream flavors, Kao says that the shop’s furnishings are also important, explaining that his grandpa designed them based on Japanese ramen shops. Other key elements include the old ice cream tubs in the freezer and the giant scoop that’s still used every day. There’s also the way his mother and younger sister treat customers like family. “If ice cream were all we had to offer, the shop would be missing something. It’s all of these elements together that create the Snow King experience.”

Since taking over the business, Ching-feng has experimented with collaborations with companies in other fields as a means to increase Snow King’s visibility and reinvigorate the brand. A venture with Porsche that provides seasonal ice creams in the carmaker’s Taipei showroom is now in its fourth year. Snow King has also developed a five-spice ice cream for a project with the National Theater and Concert Hall and an egg-yolk-pastry ice cream for a traditional shop in historic Lukang, Changhua County. Kao has worked hard to systematize and standardize Snow King’s processes, and otherwise bring it into the modern era. These days, it even has an official website, a Facebook page, and a Line account, and accepts many forms of payment.

“My grandfather poured his heart into this shop. Now that it’s mine, I’m doing everything I can to keep it afloat a little longer. Snow King opened in 1947 and it’s now 2025. If I run it for another 20-some years, it will be a century-old business!” Kao is also a marathon runner and has applied that ethos to Snow King. He’s adjusted his pace and is on track—100 years is just ahead! 

Snow King’s watermelon ice cream, a signature flavor, includes the fruit’s flesh and seeds.

Kao is using partnerships to increase Snow King’s visibility and reinvigorate the brand. The photo shows Snow King ice-cream cups from the Porsche Centre Taipei. (courtesy of Kao Ching-feng)

The 73 flavors created by Snow King’s founder, the newspaper cuttings on the wall, the ramen-shop-inspired furnishings, and the friendly service are all part of Snow King’s inimitable vibe.