How SLO County woman invented Dole Whip, a favorite Disney theme park treat
Kathy Westphal spent more than 40 years creating foods eaten around the world, crafting everything from slushie drinks to calorie-rich meals designed to treat acute malnutrition in developing nations.
Yet she’s best known for her first project after graduating from UC Davis in 1982, a frozen treat that spread from Disney parks to the rest of the United States.
At just 24 years old, Westphal, who’s now semi-retired and living in Atascadero, invented Dole Whip in the company’s San Jose laboratory.
The dairy-free pineapple soft serve (other flavors such as raspberry, lime and mango came later) debuted at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in 1984 and became a universally beloved staple at the company’s California and Florida theme parks before landing in grocery stores last year.
Disney adults and children alike devoured Dole Whip at the amusement parks, giving it a cult following that inspired countless imitators before Dole began selling the fruity concoction at large.
Locally, a version of the treat is available at the SLO Froyo frozen yogurt shop on Higuera Street in San Luis Obispo.
“It was designed to be this refreshing true fruit. Not a candy flavor, just a real refreshing, juicy, sweet-tart (dessert),” Westphal said. “Vanilla ice cream is nowhere near as refreshing as something cold and fruity.”
A year prior to inventing Dole Whip, Westphal (then Kathy Smith) was a food science major making mint ice cream with UC Davis’ food tech club, the only club member of legal age to buy the necessary crème de menthe.
The ice creams were mostly for fun, but the students used the food science department’s pilot plant, and Westphal got good at making frozen desserts. Dole awarded her a scholarship during her senior year, then hired her upon graduation.
Westphal’s first project was to create a fruit-forward, just-add-water soft serve mix that didn’t require refrigeration. It was the kind of task the company might have otherwise assigned to an intern, she said.
After much trial and error, Westphal landed on the formula.
Dole employees then took 46-pound cubes of her pineapple juice concentrate to a facility that reduced it to juice crystals, then shipped those to a Chicago company to mix with sugar, binding gums and colorings.
The mixture was placed in secure pouches and shipped to Disney World, where employees combined it with water in giant buckets and poured the resulting solution into soft serve machines.
That’s still the way it’s done today, Westphal said.
Westphal went on to work for Venezia Italian Foods before spending the final 30 years of her career at Mattson, a food and beverage consulting company based on the San Francisco Peninsula.
She didn’t realize that Dole’s “Rodney Dangerfield of desserts,” an internal nickname for the lack of respect management gave it at the time, was a national phenomenon until about a decade ago. Even 15 to 20 years ago, most people she told about her creation didn’t know what it was, she said.
Today’s version of Dole Whip has more artificial ingredients but tastes mostly the same, if a bit icier and faster-melting, Westphal said.
No other dessert would do for her retirement party last summer.
“I just think its really cool that it’s kind of a thing now,” Westphal said. “Of all the things I’ve worked on, it’s surprising that that’s the one that lasted ... and it seemed to become popular later in its life.”
