Why Ice Cream Shop Workers Are Throwing Soft Serve at Each Other's Heads

Hint: It's all for TikTok.

If you’ve opened TikTok within the past week, your For You feed has probably been a strange combination of people who are testing their ankle tendons by trying to walk like Barbie, videos of twentysomethings who have been traumatized by the new aging filter, and clips from ice cream shops that inevitably end with some unsuspecting worker taking a scoop to the face.

You can explore that #BarbieFeetChallenge on your own, but the so-called "Ice Cream Challenge" is appears to be just an entertaining way for ice cream shop employees to either amuse themselves or their customers. (And we’ll be honest: We laugh every time we scroll past one of these videos.) The setup — and a lot of these are undoubtedly staged just for TikTok — is that a customer places their order, but is handed the wrong cone, bowl, or scoop. When the customer points out that they asked for a different flavor, the worker takes it back from them, grabs the errant scoop… and throws it directly at their coworker.

In one now-classic example, a customer at Illinois’ Route 66 Creamery is given a perfectly swirled cup of vanilla soft-serve, but says that it was “supposed to be chocolate.” The Creamery worker says “I’m so sorry about that,” before immediately hitting an unsuspecting colleague with a well-thrown scoop of vanilla.

Dozens of other ice cream shops have taken part in the trend, including Candied Ice Cream Parlour in Falkirk, Scotland, who went with a rare double-throw; Mickey’s in Willoughby, Ohio, who added a slow-mo replay to their video; Frisbie’s in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, who let two different employees get thoroughly scooped; and the Fountain of Sunshine soda truck from Pampa, Texas, where they may have gotten it backwards.

The trend has gone so viral that it’s even stretched past ice cream shops into minor league baseball concession stands, Canadian costume shops, and, uh, dentist’s offices.

Related: Chaos Cooking Is Taking Over TikTok for All the Right Reasons

In one twist, Erick Vargas Bromberg, the Executive Chef at New York Citys’ Charlie Palmer Steakhouse, shrugs and launches a full-on New York strip at his sous chef. It's not quite the "ice cream challenge" but, hey, A for effort.

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