Who started National Whipped Cream Day?

The day circulates on food and holiday calendars every January 5, and the cream itself has been whipped by hand since at least the 1600s. No founder or establishing record has been located, and the oldest trace of the day is a web listing archived in November 2013.

Did New York ban whipped cream for people under 21?

No. The 2021 law covers steel nitrous oxide chargers sold for whipped cream dispensers, and the state's Department of Agriculture and Markets confirmed in 2022 that retailers are not required to check identification for whipped cream sold in cans.

Is Whipped Cream Day the same as National Whipped Cream Day?

Yes. The same January 5 observance is listed under both names, and no separate whipped cream observance on another date was found.

National Whipped Cream Day

Next celebratedTuesday, January 5, 2027

There is a narrow window between cream that pours and cream that stands up, and National Whipped Cream Day is about catching it. Beat cold cream by hand and stop the moment it holds a soft peak.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEJanuary 5

OBSERVED INUnited States

CATEGORYFood

SUBCATEGORYDairy

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

Not documented

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

Nobody has ever put a name to it.

No documented founder or formal establishment record has been identified for National Whipped Cream Day. The oldest surviving evidence is a holiday-listing page captured in November 2013, which dates the listing rather than the day.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday

INTRO

A dissolved gas does the whipping now

National Whipped Cream Day belongs to a food with a very old failure mode. A 1669 English cookbook tells the cook to beat sweet thick cream with a bundle of white hard rushes, the kind used to make brushes for cloaks, and budgets about a good hour in winter and an hour and a half in summer. Then it says when to stop: whip it too long and it will become butter.

The can took the hour out of it. Nitrous oxide dissolves into the cream under pressure and turns back into bubbles the moment the valve opens. Whip air into the same cream by hand and you get roughly half the volume.

ORIGINS

Whipped Cream Day history

INTRODUCTION

Cream whips because of the fat suspended in it, and it stops being whipped cream at a boundary the international standards now write down. The Codex Alimentarius standard, adopted by an intergovernmental commission the FAO and the WHO established, calls it cream into which air or inert gas has been incorporated without reversing the fat-in-skimmed milk emulsion.

Codex adopted that cream standard in 1976 and its butter standard in 1971, where butter is described as principally an emulsion of the opposite type, water in oil. Between them the two texts fix the point where one food stops and the other starts.

CHAPTER 01

Sta-Whip and a pitch to the can makers

Aaron S. Lapin spent the early 1940s selling something else. Sta-Whip was a wartime substitute for whipping cream made mostly from light cream and vegetable fat, and for bakers and other commercial customers he offered a crude aerating gun he called a Fount-Wip.

In 1947 he told a group of doubtful can manufacturers that this was the beginning of pressure-propelled packaging. Reddi-wip went on sale the following year, first through St. Louis milkmen, and spread from there across the United States and Canada.

CHAPTER 02

What the patents actually say

Lapin filed for a design patent on the container in October 1948 and for the valve the following May. The valve application is where he explains himself. It covers foods such as whipping cream into which gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide have been mixed under pressure, and it is their expansion on release to atmospheric pressure that does the whipping.

He was working at pressures of up to 100 pounds per square inch, too high for the crimped crown cap an ordinary throwaway container would use. The sealing problems that came with it are what the patent sets out to solve.

CHAPTER 03

From the patent to the calendar

Cream in a can became ordinary, and somewhere along the way a day for it arrived on the calendars. No founder or establishing record has been identified. This one appears in none of the Chase's Calendar of Events volumes HathiTrust indexes.

What the day has instead is the food's own paper trail: a recipe, two patents and a shelf of standards.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Whipped Cream Day

SCIENCE

A network of fat globules is what holds it up.

A 2010 study in the Journal of Dairy Science describes whipping as introducing air bubbles and aggregating fat globules into a network that makes the cream hard. The same paper notes that whipped creams are unstable, and points to liquid drainage and Ostwald ripening as what changes them.

LAW

What a label may call whipped cream

The FDA's own rule says the unqualified name whipped cream should not be applied to any product other than one whipped from cream that meets the whipping-cream standards. Those standards are set by fat: a carton labelled whipping cream runs from 30 percent milkfat to just under 36, and heavy whipping cream starts at 36.

REGULATION

The propellant has a second life

New York wrote a definition of a whipped cream charger into its General Business Law in 2021, describing a steel cylinder of nitrous oxide used as a whipping agent and listing six names it goes by, including whippit, nang and johnson. Selling one to a buyer under 21 carries a civil penalty of not more than $250 for a first offence.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Digby's Closet reaches print

The London cookbook carried a recipe for cream whipped by hand, headed Cresme Fouettee.

Reddi-wip reaches St. Louis doorsteps

The first cans went out through milkmen before the product spread across the United States and Canada.

The valve patent is granted

Lapin's application names carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide as the gases that whip the cream on release.

Codex defines butter

The international butter standard fixed butter as an emulsion of the water-in-oil type.

Codex defines whipped cream

The international cream standard fixed whipped cream as aerated cream whose emulsion has not been reversed.

The oldest surviving listing

The earliest archived web listing for the day was captured in November of that year.

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Whipped Cream Day

The patent office called it fluffed cream

The design patent granted to Aaron Lapin in July 1952 is titled Dispensing container for fluffed cream.

The can was not his invention

The first seamless, lined and lithographed aerosol canister was introduced in 1946, and Lapin became one of its earliest customers.

Whipped topping appears once in FDA's rules

The phrase turns up in a single section of the agency's regulations, an additive listing that permits certain emulsifiers in dry whipped topping base.

Codex has a category for the can

It is called cream packed under pressure: fluid cream packed with a propellant gas, which becomes whipped cream when it leaves the container.

Time listed Reddi-wip beside Spam

The magazine put it among the century's 100 great things for consumers, alongside the pop-top can.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Whipped Cream Day

Whip a bowl of cream by hand

Pour cold cream into a bowl and beat it with a whisk until it just holds a soft peak. Stop there, because the next stage is butter.

CHILL

Chill everything before you start

Put the carton, the bowl and the beaters in the fridge before you begin. A dairy science study recommends whipping between 7.5 and 12.5 degrees Celsius for a good texture.

READ

Read the fat percentage on the carton

Whipping cream and heavy whipping cream sit at two different fat thresholds under US rules. Check the percentage on the label rather than the picture on the front.

ORDER

Order one you did not have to whip

Buy a hot chocolate or a slice of pie that comes with cream on top. Ask which it is, because a can of cream and a tub of topping are not the same product.

KEEP

Keep beating until it turns to butter

Set a little cream aside and take it deliberately past the soft-peak stage. It will break into solids and a thin liquid, which is the boundary the whole food is built around.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Whipped Cream Day?

1 / 8

Under US rules, how much milkfat must a carton labelled heavy whipping cream contain?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial food observance, so banks, schools and offices stay open, and the Federal Register carries no document naming it.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

16sources

12primary records

14independently dated

Primary records

Project Gutenberg1669

The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened

A 1669 London cookbook whose creme fouettee recipe is beaten with a bundle of rushes.