The Company Behind McDonald's And Dairy Queen's Ice Cream In Florida

McDonald's and Dairy Queen may be rivals when it comes to fast-food desserts, but in the Florida market, much of their soft-serve ice cream comes from the same supplier. Long before the McFlurry became an iconic staple at the drive-thru, both chains needed a reliable source for the liquid base that gets frozen into cones, shakes, and sundaes. In the Sunshine State, that source turned out to be the same family-run company for both of them: Dairy-Mix, Inc.

The company's path to becoming a regional ice cream powerhouse began modestly. Anthony Coryn purchased a small St. Petersburg mix plant called Evans Brothers Creamery in 1948, running a soft-serve stand on the side to support his family while he built the business. Dairy Queen signed on with Coryn's young company in the early 1950s to provide its soft-serve mix. Then, as Dairy-Mix expanded into a larger facility around 1958, Fred Turner — an early McDonald's hire who would go on to become the chain's CEO in the 1970s — sampled the product and struck a regional supply deal that has lasted nearly seven decades.

Today, the McDonald's and Dairy Queen locations in Dairy-Mix's home market still get their mix from the same St. Petersburg plant, alongside Wendy's, which signed on in 2013, as well as regional distributors and independent ice cream parlors. It's a rare case of one supplier quietly serving multiple fast-food rivals at once, long before any of the companies became the household names they are today.

Dairy-Mix has stayed remarkably true to its roots. The company is still family-owned and operated, now run by the second and third generations of Anthony Coryn's descendants, who took the reins beginning in 2005. From that single St. Petersburg plant, Dairy-Mix has grown into the largest ice cream mix manufacturer in Florida, distributing throughout the Southeastern United States and internationally, all while keeping production centered at the same facility the company has occupied and expanded four times since the late 1950s.

Dairy-Mix sources its raw milk from Florida dairy farming families and keeps it free of the synthetic growth hormone rBST, sweetening its mix with Florida cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup. The mix runs through high-temperature, short-time pasteurization before being packaged for shipment, and the company maintains an independently audited food safety and quality management system to back up its claims — the same rigor that, decades earlier, helped it win over both a soft-serve chain and a burger giant with its signature product.

That same attention to detail extends to operations behind the scenes. Dairy-Mix recently went solar at its St. Petersburg headquarters. It's a modern update for a company that, whatever you may think of today's Dairy Queen Blizzard flavors, has spent more than 75 years quietly supplying the mix behind the cone (or cup).