Chocolate syrup, cold milk and ice cream meet in a metal cup on National Chocolate Milkshake Day. Order one at a counter where they still spin it on a machine, or make a thicker one at home.
No founder, establishing act or first observance is documented for National Chocolate Milkshake Day. The phrase appears in no volume of Chase's Calendar of Events indexed by HathiTrust, and the earliest appearances located there sit in a periodical of activity programs for American retirement communities.
Two states define a milk shake by pointing at a federal rule that is not there. Maryland builds its freezer-made milk shake from the ingredients set out in Part 135.120 of the federal food code, and New York does the same, naming the edition it means: the Code of Federal Regulations as revised on April 1, 2010. That is the rulebook behind the drink National Chocolate Milkshake Day is named for.
There is no Part 135.120. The Food and Drug Administration removed the ice milk standard by a final rule that took effect on September 14, 1995. It is missing from the 2010 edition New York cites, and from the code as it stands now.
The drink is older than the paperwork written for it. It came off a drugstore counter, on a machine built in Wisconsin to whip a powder that had been patented as baby food.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Chocolate Milkshake Day ran on September 12. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
GOOD TO KNOW
New York's Agriculture and Markets Law defines melloream as a product built on vegetable fats or oils that looks and tastes close enough to cream to be hard to tell apart. The state's dairy regulations apply the word to a drink, and say the name of that food is 'melloream shake'.
Federal rules name milk shake blenders among the examples of machines a 14- or 15-year-old may operate in a kitchen, next to dishwashers, toasters, dumbwaiters and popcorn poppers. Other blenders and mixers stay prohibited to that age group.
A dairy shake, under New York's rules, must not be produced by freezing while stirring. A freezer-made milk shake must be, and may only be sold or served out of a dispensing freezer rather than hard frozen.
Stephen Poplawski filed several more mixer patents through the 1920s, then began work on a version for home kitchens. When he sold the business to the John Oster Manufacturing Company on January 28, 1946, the machine was given the name Osterizer.
The Wisconsin Historical Society's record for the Horlick complex says the powder travelled on polar expeditions and turned up in American and British soldiers' ration kits in the Spanish-American War and both world wars. At its peak the Racine plant employed over 1,000 workers.
Racine, Wisconsin, made the powder before it made the machines. William and James Horlick, brothers who had emigrated from England, established a milk food business there in 1877. In 1883 William patented the powder the Wisconsin Historical Society calls the world's first malted milk.
The patent was not written for a soda fountain. It describes a food for infants and invalids, made by soaking barley malt and ground wheat in fresh cow's milk, then pressing and evaporating the liquid to a dry granulated mass.
Mixing that powder into a drink by hand was slow work. In 1919 the Arnold Electric Company hired Stephen Poplawski, a Racine inventor, to develop an automatic malted milk mixer for use in restaurants. He filed a patent for it in 1922.
Arnold became a leading maker of the machines. In 1926 the Hamilton Beach Manufacturing Company of Racine bought the firm and took Poplawski onto its staff.
The same year Poplawski filed, a Walgreens employee named Ivar Coulson added scoops of vanilla ice cream to the basic malted milk recipe. The company's own history dates the change to 1922 and puts the price at twenty cents. Its 125th anniversary page calls the result the Double Rich Chocolate Malted Milk.
That is the drink the rules were eventually written around. The United States Department of Labor spelled out the machine it meant in 2010: the type generally found in snack bars and lunch counters when the rule was written, with a stainless steel mixing cup and a single spindle carrying an aeration disk or disks at the bottom.
States then went to work on what the words could mean. Pennsylvania adopted its shake section on March 25, 1970, setting out a freezer-made milk shake, a lowfat version of it, and a plain shake allowed to fall below the milkfat floor.
The day itself left no such trail. No founder, establishing act or first observance has been documented for National Chocolate Milkshake Day, and the phrase appears in no volume of Chase's Calendar of Events indexed by HathiTrust.
TIMELINE
for the first mixer of my design having an agitating element mounted in a base and adapted to be drivingly connected with the agitator in the cup when the cup was placed in a recess in the top of the base
Dairy regulations actually vary from state to state on what can officially be called a 'milkshake.' We like to keep it simple and refer to them strictly as 'shakes.'
BY THE NUMBERS
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Below the minimum it is legal, just not a milk shake.
Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania each say a shake that does not meet their milk shake requirements may not be advertised, sold or served as a milk shake. A shake below the milkfat minimum is still allowed under those rules; it simply cannot carry the name.
Virginia's text names the jumbo shake, the thick shake and the T.V. shake by those trade names. It then sweeps in any coined or trade name containing the word shake.
Virginia's shake section carries an amendment with an effective date of February 13, 2025. The Pennsylvania Code site publishes its text as current through July 4, 2026.
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No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing found, so offices, banks and schools keep normal hours.
COLOPHON
National Chocolate Milk Day gives a cold glass more fuss than it has ever needed. Stir your own from cocoa and milk, and drink it standing at the fridge with the door open.
Vanilla is what a milkshake tastes like before anyone adds anything, and National Vanilla Milkshake Day is happy to leave it there. Make one with good ice cream and cold milk, and drink it before it thins out.
Satisfy your sweet tooth this National Coffee Milkshake Day with our delicious coffee milkshakes - the perfect treat for any time of day!
