Photograph by Sarah McCosham
Somehow, I made it through 41 years without ever having Dole Whip. I know! This iconic Disney Parks dessert was first launched as Dole Pineapple Whip and was developed in the early 1980s as a refreshing, dairy-free soft serve that could withstand the Florida heat. Today, Dole Whip can be found everywhere from Costco to Target to, if you’re lucky, the neighborhood creamy whip or seasonal ice cream stand.
My kids tried Dole Whip before I did (of course they did!)—Mom McCosham knows all the best seasonal ice cream stands. We’re a vegan family and Mary has dairy allergies, so discovering Dole Whip was a big win this summer. I have a popsicle (or 5) for dessert each night and love any fruit-forward frozen treat, so when the kids came home one afternoon raving about Dole Whip, my curiosity was piqued.
However, finding this cult classic isn’t as simple as entering “Dole Whip near me” into Google. While there are certainly numerous creamy whip stands in Cincinnati, Dole Whip is a horse of a different color. Often, Dole Whip is a weekly flavor or limited-time special, so needless to say, the McCoshams have been all over the tri-state in search of this seasonal treat. We even started a Dole Whip group chat with my brother and sister-in-law, each of us dropping details on the flavor of the week at our neighborhood ice cream stand (which, sadly, rotates Dole Whip with other weekly specials, leaving us all in the lurch on off weeks!).
Photograph by Sarah McCosham
This is where Tony McCosham stepped up, as he often does, discovering a soft serve stand that offered multiple flavors of Dole Whip each week, all summer long (well done, TM). And it was only 15 minutes away from our home in Montgomery!
Whipty-Do! is a sunshine yellow and seafoam green soft serve shack located on US-22 in Maineville. This family-owned soft serve shop opened in 2009 as the passion project of husband/wife team Joe and Kristen Fields. It’s open seasonally and is best known for its Whipty-Whirls and the signature blue ice cream, the latter of which is their top seller, “the same blueberry offered inside a *certain* major Cincinnati theme park,” in fact. For our dairy-free family, though, Whipty-Do! has the most inclusive menu of any seasonal soft serve stand in the area; in addition to Dole Whip, the Chocolate-Dipped Frozen Banana and Slushies are both dairy free, too. But honestly? The Dole Whip is too delicious not to order!
Photograph by Sarah McCosham
I’ve tried Whipty-Do!’s raspberry and peach varieties, and not only is this the best Dole Whip I’ve had this summer, it’s also served, sky-high, in a Reds baseball cap, making for a double dose of nostalgia. (Non-Reds fans can have their Dole Whip served in another team’s commemorative cap, of course, but that’s one thing at Whipty-Do! I wouldn’t recommend. Go Reds!)
Whipty-Do!, 2529 US-22, Maineville
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