Finns Are in Bad Humor as Taxman Melts Ice Cream Man

By
• JUHANA ROSSI

ESPOO, Finland—Jannica Hartikainen recently had to have a pretty difficult chat with her 5-year-old daughter, Ciara, who somehow needed to understand that the powder-blue ice-cream truck that has long roamed the neighborhood to the tune of a happy jingle was going away.

“She almost shed tears,” Ms. Hartikainen said, standing on the side of a road while waiting for the ice-cream truck with Ciara and her other child, a 3-year-old son, earlier this month. “She asked me ‘Is this really going to be the last time?’ “

After decades of delivering frozen treats, Finland’s ice cream trucks will go out of business after this summer. A new excise tax on sweets has driven prices up 60 percent. Video by WSJ’s Ellen Jervell.

The sad answer for Ciara and a nation of ice-cream lovers like her was yes, ice-cream trucks are being taken off the streets. Nestlé SA,

which along with Unilever

dominates the Finnish ice-cream market, pulled the plug on the dozens of ice-cream trucks that have operated here since 1993.

Why? It’s complicated, but a big reason is taxes aimed at people with a sweet tooth. While those who hated the sound of ice-cream trucks are applauding the silence, many of the nation’s five million people are mourning the loss of an essential rite of summer.

Finland, one of the few members of the euro zone with a AAA credit rating, entered the currency bloc’s economic crisis with sound public finances in 2009. But since then it has seen its fiscal position deteriorate. To raise new revenue, lawmakers imposed an excise tax on sugary goodies like soda, candy and ice cream in 2011, meaning shoppers pay the equivalent of about 60 cents extra per pound of ice cream they buy.

Ice-Cream Truck

In the two years the tax has been in effect, per capita consumption of ice cream has fallen below about three gallons, a decrease of 20% from its pretax level, Sakari Kotka, general manager for Nestlé’s Finland operations said. Finland traditionally ranks in the top 10 of ice-cream eaters per capita.

The tax doomed a business that was already melting due to tough conditions. Unlike ice-cream trucks in many parts of the world, Finland’s delivery agents sold most of the sweets in boxes or bulk rather than individually.

Enlarge Image

Ellen Jervell/The Wall Street Journal

Kalle Nordstrom, who drove a truck since 2009, made his final rounds earlier this month. The business has been shut down.

Finland is sparsely populated, so ice-cream trucks often had to cover vast expanses of land in order to reach a critical mass of buyers.

And, while Finns love their ice cream, selling ice cream in Finland is a lumpy business due to the Nordic country’s long winters and short summers. There is steady base demand for ice cream year around, but summer is the key season. If the sun shines, sales can be breakneck. If it rains, vendors are left with a lot of unsold ice cream in their freezers.

Mr. Kotka said trucks simply weren’t profitable anymore. Nestlé owned the ice-cream truck brand and supplied ice cream to the trucks, which were operated by independent entrepreneurs under a franchising agreement.

Ice-cream truck lovers aren’t the only ones out of luck.

Kalle Nordstrom, whose truck serviced the Hartikainens’s neighborhood on Thursdays and several like it throughout the week, is feeling the pain. Driving an ice-cream truck since 2009, he was a natural at his job, often switching his language to Swedish, Finland’s other official language, when dealing with the Swedish-speaking minority of Finns.

While making his final rounds in a Mercedes-Benz ice-cream truck, Mr. Nordstrom fell behind schedule as well-wishers expressed appreciation or received special favors. Ciara, the 5-year-old, was allowed to climb into the cabin and press the button on a compact disc player that was responsible for emitting the jingle announcing the truck’s arrival.

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Ellen Jervell/The Wall Street Journal

Luca Juppo, 9, and Erno Leppanen, 9, say ice cream from the ice-cream truck is the best there is.

Mr. Nordstrom had developed into a fan favorite in these neighborhoods.

“My boys were always disappointed if some other driver was covering for him,” Heidi Kaarresalo, a mother of two boys, said. One customer called Mr. Nordstrom during his rounds to make sure he was coming, and another had coordinated her 30-mile commute from Helsinki so that she could purchase one last time a household favorite: toffee ice cream not available anywhere else.

In recent years, delivery trucks have accounted for less than 5% of the total amount of ice cream sold in Finland.

While many will miss the trucks, there are opponents happy to see the trucks go because they just hated the chime. They argue the song was a pollutant to people who worked at home or were late-shift workers trying to sleep during the day.

“Even priests were horrified when the trucks playing the chime passed cemeteries where funeral services were in progress,” said Jouko Saari, a conductor and classical musician by profession. Mr. Saari calls the chime banal. “It is not music. It is pressure waves like electronically amplified rock.”

Disdain for it triggered letters to the editor and complaints to various authorities. Those irritated by the sound failed to win a nationwide ban or restrictions, but Mr. Saari scored a partial victory when local authorities in his home city of Lahti set curbs on the chime’s use in 2004.

The debate over the ice-cream truck sound is an epic Nordic battle, dating back to the late 1960s when Swedes started using vehicles to sell ice cream in the streets using a jingle to announce their arrival. Home freezers were becoming widespread in Sweden at the time, so ice cream could be stored at home and trucks made the process easier.

The trucks finally showed up in Finland in 1993. Over the years, the company owning the nation’s fleet of vehicles has changed hands, with Nestlé buying it in 2002.

Fans, like Tomi Lindroos in Espoo, are hopeful the ice-cream trucks will return one day. “You hear a nice tune from your balcony, and it’s always exciting when you hear that tune and you’re like ‘oh yes, ice cream,’ ” he said. “Maybe they will come back some other time.”

Others, like Krister Sanmark, have one request if they do come back: “I hope they choose a more bearable chime compared with the one they had.”

Write to Juhana Rossi at juhana.rossi@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared August 28, 2013, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Bad Humor: Taxman Melts Ice Cream Man.

Article source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323324904579041021775845030.html