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# Mr. Nice Cream: The story of our Riverside South ice cream bikes.
- URL: https://www.adamsooley.ca/mr-nice-cream-in-riverside-south/
- Published: 2026-09-30T16:02:56.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T16:17:18.000Z
- Description: For a few summers, we owned a small fleet of old-fashioned ice cream bikes in Riverside South. It started with a Kijiji ad, ten bikes, two freezers and a U-Haul trip to Cornwall.
- Author: Adam Sooley
- Tags: Life & Music

Digging through old versions of adamsooley.ca on archive.org has been turning up things I'd almost completely forgotten I wrote about and then there's Mr. Nice Cream.

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/ice_cream4_preview-1.jpeg)

For a few summers, we (a friend Jake and I) owned and operated a small fleet of old-fashioned ice cream bikes around Riverside South.

Because apparently at some point in my twenties while Jake, Justin and I were drinking one late night in the garage we looked at an ice cream bike and thought:

> We should own some of those, so we did.

## It started with Kijiji

Sometime around 2007 or 2008, my friends Jake and Justin and I found someone in Cornwall selling a bunch of old-fashioned ice cream bikes on Kijiji. Not one bike, ten and two freezers.

Obviously this seemed like an excellent idea.

We bought the whole lot, rented a U-Haul, and Jake, Justin and I headed down to Cornwall to pick everything up and bring it back to Ottawa. 

We suddenly owned ten ice cream bikes and two freezers. Now we just needed to figure out what to do with them.

## Ten was probably a few too many

We never intended to have ten bikes riding around Riverside South at the same time.

We ended up selling somewhere around six to eight of them and kept enough to operate roughly two to four bikes, depending on the year.

And that's how Mr. Nice Cream got going. 

The concept was pretty simple.

- Load an ice cream bike.
- Send someone out around the neighbourhood.
- Sell ice cream.
- Repeat.

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/IMG_2574_26-06-2010.jpg)

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/IMG_2577_preview.jpeg)

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/IMG_2581_26-06-2010_preview.jpeg)

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/IMG_2588_preview.jpeg)

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/IMG_2590_preview.jpeg)

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/IMG_2591_preview.jpeg)

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/IMG_2597_preview.jpeg)

We eventually had students working the bikes and riding different routes around Riverside South.

We ran 2-3 bikes around Riverside South having high school kids do all the work for a 25% commission on all sales. They were great salesmen and knew tricks to make the sales. Visit the soccer fields and do tricks for sales; yo-yo tricks, break dancing and what ever else to close the deal to screaming kids. 

Which means this ridiculous Kijiji purchase had somehow turned into an actual little business.

## The ice cream mafia

Of course, an ice cream business needs ice cream and ours came from IceCo, or, as we affectionately called them: The Ice Cream Mafia of Ottawa. 😆

If you wanted to sell ice cream in Eastern Ontario, it certainly seemed like IceCo controlled everything.

So we had meetings with IceCo, made agreements where we could and could not sell ice cream. After that, IceCo would deliver weekly to my house, fill the freezers and then load the bikes with all the usual neighbourhood ice cream-truck favourites.

It wasn't exactly a sophisticated supply chain, but it worked.

## Riding around Riverside South

The bikes themselves were the classic old-fashioned ice cream bikes with the freezer box on the front.

Instead of a giant ice cream truck driving around the neighbourhood, our students pedalled around Riverside South selling ice cream.

It was a pretty good summer job.

Although I suspect pedalling a freezer full of ice cream around Ottawa in July was occasionally less fun than it looked.

By 2011, we'd been doing it for a few summers and had three students operating three different routes.

We even brought Mr. Nice Cream out for the Riverside South Canada Day celebrations, with part of the proceeds going back to the community association.

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/HPIM3031_preview.jpeg)

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/HPIM3032_preview.jpeg)

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/HPIM3039_preview.jpeg)

![](https://www.adamsooley.ca/content/images/2026/09/HPIM3040_preview.jpeg)

Not bad for something that started with three guys driving a U-Haul to Cornwall.

## Eventually it was time to move on

We kept Mr. Nice Cream going until roughly 2012\. By then it had run its course for us, so we started selling off the remaining bikes. 

- Two went to a kid in Brockville.
- Another went to the Algonquin College Students' Association.

And eventually Mr. Nice Cream was no more.

- No giant corporate acquisition.
- No private equity deal.
- No hostile takeover from the Ice Cream Mafia.

We just sold the bikes.

## I had almost forgotten about this

That's the strange part about digging through the old website. Mr. Nice Cream wasn't some huge business venture, we didn't build an ice cream empire but for four or five summers, those bikes were part of our lives.

- There were trips to buy ice cream.
- Students working summer jobs.
- Bikes riding around Riverside South.
- Canada Day.
- Two giant freezers.

And somewhere along the way, quite a few neighbourhood kids eating ice cream.

Then life moved on and I mostly stopped thinking about it until I found this line in an old adamsooley.ca post from 2011 talking about Mr. Nice Cream being in another season.

And I remembered the bikes.

- The freezers.
- The deliveries from IceCo.
- The U-Haul.

And driving to Cornwall with Jake and Justin to pick up ten ice cream bikes because apparently that seemed completely reasonable at the time.

## Some of the boring stuff is worth keeping

That's becoming a bit of a theme as I restore some of these old posts. When I originally wrote about Mr. Nice Cream, it was just something we were doing, and there was no reason to think I'd care about that little update 15 years later. 

Now I'm glad it's still sitting in an archived copy on archive.org, and even happier that I've brought the story back here. Because one day you own ten ice cream bikes, and somehow nearly twenty years later you're sitting at a computer wondering, why the hell did we buy ten ice cream bikes? Still, I'd probably do it again.