Ice Cream Sticks

I bet we don’t even give them a second thought as we slurp on the quickly melting Chocolate Paddle-Pop dribbling down our fingers while luxuriating at the beach in the sunshine.

But Australia was once a major producer and exporter of the humble ice cream stick.

I’m aware of two plants, Beddisons at Nangwarry near Mt Gambier in South Australia which processed radiata pine. It was purchased by Carter-Holt-Harvey, but the ice cream stick plant was eventually closed about 25 years ago (I think).

There was another company called Stickmakers at Gladstone in Queensland which was established in the 1930s.

In 1995 the QLD plant made six million ice-cream sticks a day – seven million on a good day – five days a week – three shifts a day. It all adds up to 1.5 billion sticks a year. I think they also made flat dixie cone sticks.

Stickmakers employed about 65 people in its $10 million factory and converted an annual volume of 17,000 tonnes of plantation hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii) into sticks. The logs were first peeled into a thin veneer and the ice cream stick then punched, tumbled till smooth and then coated with a thin layer of wax.

Importantly, the stick needed to be taste free, the ice cream must adhere to its smooth surface and obviously it mustn’t have splinters, and, finally, the stick must have the strength not to break.

Stickmakers at one point was also eyeing off the export chopstick market.

But in 2013 the company went the same way has the humble redhead match made by Bryant and May. Production has moved offshore, and timber sourced from exotic places like Scandinavia and France with the sticks often made in China.

Photo: Beddisons plant at Nangwarry SA where ice cream sticks were punched from Radiata Pine. Source: National Archives

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