Wall’s ice cream

In 1919, Sausage maker Thomas Wall purchased Friars Place House in Acton, London and its ground for a factory making sausages.  He concerned about the cost of having to run his factory during the summer-off season, diversified into ice cream.

In 1922, ice cream manufacturing began at the factory to make use of the spare capacity in the summer.

Ice cream was sold from tricycles, and the phrase ‘Stop me and buy one’ became very familiar to ice cream consumers. Following of Wall’s invention of the tricycles the mass production of ice cream made it the first frozen food to enter working-class diet.

Wall’s became part of Unilever in 1929. Wall’s began to supply refrigerators on hire to cinemas and sweet shops, by 1939, they supplied 15,000 shops and had a turnover or about £1.5 m.

For home consumption, the firm operated 8,500 tricycles on the streets and had 136 depots all over the country to supply them.

Wall’s then became the largest ice-cream manufacturer in the world, as it still is today, after company’s expansion into markets in Western Europe and North America.
Wall’s ice cream