The history of the slushy straw is really two histories crashing into each other: a 5,000 year old story about sucking liquid through a tube, and a much shorter story about a Kansas man whose soda fountain broke. The wide, thick-walled, spoon-tipped straw you get with a frozen drink didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was engineered, reluctantly, because normal straws kept failing at one specific job.
Here’s how the drinking straw evolved from a river reed into the sturdiest piece of plastic at the convenience store counter, and why the spoon on the end is the most underrated design decision in beverage history.
Straws Existed Thousands of Years Before Slushies
The oldest known drinking straws come from ancient Sumer, roughly 5,000 years ago, where beer was brewed in large communal vessels with sediment and grain husks floating on top. Drinkers used long reeds to reach the clean liquid underneath, which makes the very first straw a filtration tool rather than a convenience item.
Archaeologists have recovered long metal tubes from the Maikop kurgan burial site in the Caucasus, dated to around 3500 BC, including gold and silver examples with small bull figurines mounted partway down the shaft. Researchers now widely interpret those tubes as ceremonial drinking straws for shared beer vessels. That’s a fairly luxurious start for an object we now hand out in packs of 500.
By the 1800s in America, the standard straw was natural rye grass, cut into segments. It worked for about ninety seconds before it went soggy and started making the drink taste like a hayloft.
Marvin Stone and the First Manufactured Drinking Straw
In 1888, a Washington D.C. paper cigarette holder manufacturer named Marvin Stone patented the paper drinking straw after getting tired of rye grass ruining his mint juleps. His first prototypes were strips of paper wound around a pencil and glued at the seam, later coated in paraffin wax so bourbon wouldn’t dissolve them mid-sip.
Stone’s design settled two specifications that still matter: a length of about 8.5 inches and a bore just wide enough to block a lemon seed. Within a few decades his factory was producing more straws than cigarette holders, and by the 1920s machine winding had made the paper straw a standard fixture at every soda counter in the country.
The Bendy Straw and the Idea of a Straw With a Job
The next real leap came in 1937, when Joseph Friedman watched his young daughter struggle to reach a milkshake at a San Francisco soda fountain. He dropped a screw into a paper straw, wrapped dental floss around the outside to press corrugations into the tube, and created a hinge that held its angle. He patented it in 1937 and eventually founded the Flex-Straw Company.
His first big customers weren’t diners. Hospitals bought the bendy straw in bulk through the 1940s and 1950s because patients lying flat could finally drink without sitting up or spilling. That matters to our story for one reason: it proved a straw could be redesigned around a specific physical problem instead of just being a generic tube.
Omar Knedlik, a Broken Soda Fountain, and the Frozen Drink
Frozen carbonated beverages arrive in the late 1950s in Coffeyville, Kansas. Dairy Queen franchise owner Omar Knedlik had a soda fountain that kept failing, so he stuck bottles of soda in the freezer to keep them cold. Customers loved the semi-frozen slush that came out, and the inventor spent years adapting an automobile air conditioning unit into a machine that could freeze and aerate carbonated syrup on demand.
For a closer look at this topic, see our guide: Are Slushy Straws Better Straight or Crooked?.
He patented the machine in 1960 and called the product the ICEE. In 1965, 7-Eleven licensed the technology, and marketing director Bob Stanford named it the Slurpee after the sound people made drinking one. The Slurpee was invented as a licensing deal, essentially, and the drink went national fast.
Then everyone discovered the same problem at the same time: a standard soda straw is a terrible tool for eating ice.
The Engineering Problem That Created the Slushy Straw
A frozen carbonated beverage sits somewhere between 27 and 29 degrees Fahrenheit and is roughly half suspended ice crystals by volume. That’s a slurry, not a liquid, and a slurry behaves badly in a narrow tube. Pull hard on a 6mm soda straw full of slush and one of three things happens: it clogs, it collapses, or you give up and pry the lid off.
The slushy straw fixed all three failure points with blunt physical changes:
- A wider bore. Frozen drink straws typically run 8mm to 10mm in diameter, compared to about 6mm for a standard soda straw, so ice chunks pass instead of jamming.
- Thicker walls. More material per straw means the tube resists buckling under the higher suction pressure a thick drink demands.
- A spoon or paddle tip. The scoop end lets you break up the frozen block near the bottom, stir syrup back through the ice, and eat the last third that no amount of suction will move.
- A flat, angled cut on some models. The chisel edge helps punch through a domed lid and chop into compacted slush.
That last point is the part most people miss. The spoon isn’t a novelty; it’s an admission that a slushy is partly a food. We broke the whole thing down in why a slushy straw has a spoon on the end if you want the full mechanical argument.
How the Spoon Straw Went Mainstream
Spoon straws spread through the 1970s and 1980s alongside frozen drink dispensers. 7-Eleven made Slurpee straws a recognizable object in their own right, with the flat spoon end and, for a stretch, novelty toppers and character-molded tips that turned the straw into a collectible. ICEE machines pushed the same format into movie theaters, ballparks and school cafeterias.
Fast food chains adopted variations for thick milkshakes, where the wide bore matters more than the spoon. Snow cone and shave ice vendors went the other direction and used the spoon almost exclusively, since their product is closer to loose ice than to a drink. Read the counter at any convenience store and you can usually tell what’s on tap by which straws are stocked.
Plastic Bans and the Modern Slushy Straw
The straw’s environmental reckoning arrived quickly. Seattle banned single-use plastic straws in July 2018, California restricted automatic straw distribution at full-service restaurants the same year, and the European Union’s Single-Use Plastics Directive banned plastic straws across member states starting in July 2021. You can read the EU’s own summary of the rules on the European Commission single-use plastics page.
Straws were never the largest share of ocean plastic by weight, but they rank high in coastal cleanup counts and break into small fragments that are difficult to recover, as NOAA’s Marine Debris Program documents. Their visibility made them an easy first target.
The trouble is that a slushy straw is the hardest straw to replace. Paper versions soften faster in a 28 degree slurry, and a paper spoon tip folds the moment you scoop. The current workarounds are:
- Heavier-gauge paper with a reinforced tip, which buys you about 20 to 30 minutes before failure.
- PLA and other bioplastics, which hold shape well in cold but need industrial composting to actually break down.
- Reusable stainless or hard plastic spoon straws, now sold widely for home use with brush cleaners.
- Lid-integrated designs that skip the straw entirely and let you drink and spoon from a single opening.
A Short Timeline of the Slushy Straw
- c. 3000 BC: Sumerians drink beer through reeds; metal ceremonial tubes appear at Maikop.
- 1888: Marvin Stone patents the wound paper drinking straw.
- 1937: Joseph Friedman patents the bendy straw.
- Late 1950s: Omar Knedlik develops the first frozen carbonated beverage machine in Kansas.
- 1965 to 1966: 7-Eleven licenses ICEE technology and launches the Slurpee.
- 1970s: Wide-bore spoon straws become standard for frozen drinks.
- 2018 to 2021: Municipal, state and EU plastic straw bans force redesign.
We are, frankly, obsessed with this stuff. If you want more of the same energy, the Slushy Bros podcast covers frozen drink minutiae at length, and He got it in on the first try is our tribute to the single greatest straw-related achievement available to a person.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why was the bendy straw invented?
Joseph Friedman invented the bendy straw in 1937 so his young daughter could reach a milkshake sitting on a tall soda fountain counter. He formed corrugations in a paper straw using a screw and dental floss, creating a flexible hinge, and hospitals became the first major buyers because bedridden patients could drink without sitting upright.
When and why was the straw invented?
Drinking straws date back roughly 5,000 years to ancient Sumer, where reeds let people drink beer from below the layer of grain sediment floating on top. The modern manufactured version arrived in 1888, when Marvin Stone patented a paraffin-coated paper straw because rye grass straws went soggy and flavored the drink.
Why are slushie straws shaped like that?
Slushy straws are wide (8mm to 10mm), thick-walled and spoon-tipped because a frozen drink is about half suspended ice crystals and clogs a normal straw. The extra diameter lets ice pass, the thicker wall resists collapsing under hard suction, and the spoon end stirs the syrup back through and scoops the last portion.
When were slushies first invented?
The first frozen carbonated beverage machine was developed in the late 1950s by Omar Knedlik in Coffeyville, Kansas, and patented in 1960 as the ICEE. 7-Eleven licensed the technology in 1965 and launched it as the Slurpee, though people had been eating flavored shaved ice for centuries before that.
Want a Slushy Worth the Straw?
We spend an unreasonable amount of time on frozen drinks, which you can verify on our about page. Start with 25 weird slushy flavor combos that somehow work, then pick a cup and a spoon straw and go ruin your teeth responsibly.
