Drive-thru daiquiri stands are as much a part of southern Louisiana culinary culture as crawfish boils and king cakes. Yet they didn’t just appear.
In 1980 a small store in Reston, Louisiana, called Wilmart sold frozen flavored alcoholic drinks they called Frostys. For customers, getting the drinks was woefully inefficient—what with having to park and go inside and wait in line. A Louisiana Tech college student named David Ervin was studying business when he had a “eureka moment.”
Why not offer frozen drinks at a drive-thru? In a parking lot, he took chalk and sketched out a layout for a hypothetical shop where he could serve drinks swiftly. He bought lots of strawberries and every can of Coco López cream of coconut within miles and experimented with drink recipes, all of which he called “daiquiris.” With a $20,000 start-up loan, he bought frozen drink machines, leased a lot on the outskirts of Lafayette, and ordered a prefab building. “Everybody told me I was an idiot,” he says.
Then came the legalities—since no one had done anything like this, there were no regulations on the books. The city of Lafayette sought to shut him down from the beginning. In one citation, the city said he violated the open container law prohibiting open drinks in vehicles. Amid some media fanfare, Ervin announced he had invented a sealed container: A piece of non-resealable freezer tape that covered the hole in the plastic lid where the straw went in. He unveiled the innovation to news outlets, and prevailed in court.
Drive-thru daiquiri shops attracted the attention of not just the local law enforcement, but also groups opposed to irresponsible drinking. This includes Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which was founded the same year Ervin came up with his idea. Perhaps surprisingly, even though Louisiana adopts a fairly laissez-faire approach to alcohol, it’s not an outlier when it comes to drunk driving—24 states have higher drunk driving fatality rates than Louisiana, including almost all of New England.
Ervin's original drive-thru daiquiri shop closed in the late 1980s, a victim of the oil bust in an oil-dependent city, and the site is now a strip mall. But the concept—and legal precedents—have lived on. Dozens of drive-thru daiquiri stands are still found throughout the region, and Ervin, now a food technologist, still owns one in the New Orleans suburbs.
Bon Appétit spoke with him about how he built the Daiquiri Factory from the ground up, his memories of those early days flouting the law, and ultimately, building a lasting legacy.
It all started in college when I encountered a group of girls holding Styrofoam cups filled with frozen alcoholic drinks. They told me the drinks came from Wilmart, a liquor and convenience store on the outskirts of town. I thought these must have been made in a blender, but the girls said, no, they came out of a machine. I drove down to see for myself. When I took my first sip, I was amazed—the ice crystals were incredibly smooth and silky, unlike anything from a regular blender.
I began thinking of ways to improve the experience. The walk-in service was inefficient—it was frustrating to get out of the car, go in, then stand behind customers searching for exact change or borrowing money from others. I thought selling the drinks out of a drive-thru window would speed things up and be more profitable.
I worried that a drive-thru would be illegal, so I went to city hall to find out. What I found was that no business was selling just frozen alcoholic drinks—drive-thru or otherwise. My store would be the first of its kind. I studied every relevant law, both state and city, but nothing I found suggested that a drive-thru alcoholic drink operation would be illegal.
My concept fell somewhere between a package liquor store and a bar, but it was neither. When I approached the clerk at city hall to ask about my plan, she couldn't provide a clear answer—she just laughed and called the other clerks to come out and look at me as if I were a circus freak. To find out if selling drinks to motorists through a window was legal, I would have to just try it and see what happened. If I could survive one week without getting arrested, maybe that would serve as proof that my idea was legal.
The business was basically a factory that made daiquiris, so I decided to name it the Daiquiri Factory. While not all the drinks I planned to sell were strictly daiquiris, I felt the name would work. "Daiquiri" conveyed a sense of prestige and status, and I concluded that most people had never had one or had no idea of what it actually was. My branding every frozen cocktail as a daiquiri was a first.
I leased a lot and ordered a pre-fab building. The landlord wouldn’t let me pave the drive because he was skeptical about my business’s longevity. So I used crushed oyster shells, which was disgusting, especially after a rain. When my signs were delivered, the entrance sign was misspelled as “Drive-Thur.” I didn’t have the time to correct it, so it remained as is. No one noticed the mistake for five months.
Opening day was noon on Tuesday, November 17, 1981. I was extremely nervous. I thought the next police car that drove by was going to pick me up. My initial worry quickly shifted, because during our first few hours of operation we had zero sales—absolutely none! But then night fell and the signs lit up and cars began to swarm in like moths to a light bulb.
The first customers didn’t realize it was a drive-thru, so they parked their cars, walked up, and stared at me through the window. I had to go outside and ask everyone to return to their vehicles, place their orders at the menu sign, and then drive through for service.
The Daiquiri Factory proved to be the right concept in the right city at the right time. Every drink was an imaginary 20-minute tropical vacation. The operational costs were incredibly low, the service was fast, the quality was high, and the pricing was affordable for everyone. It was an original business concept. And it turned out to be legal.