Battalion page designer Olivia Adam spoke with Austin Meek, Chief Cookie Monster of Pokey O’s Waco, about his partnership with Uber Ice Cream on Friday.
THE BATTALION: Could you tell me a little bit more about Pokey O’s?
MEEK: Pokey O’s Cookies and Ice Cream is actually a store that’s in Dallas. It was started about a decade ago. It’s right by SMU. And Julia, my wife who graduated from Baylor, worked at Pokey O’s when she was in high school. Now they’ve been open for about a decade and they are well loved and well known in the Dallas area, but don’t have a footprint anywhere else. We approached them in the fall of 2014 knowing that we were going to get married in January, and we asked them if they would let us take their concept and make it mobile. So they gave us their good graces. We’re not a franchise of Pokey O’s. We’re just a partner of theirs, but they let us take their intellectual property and gave it their blessing. We started the Pokey O’s truck in Waco on April 11, so we’ve been open just a little more than three months.
THE BATTALION: How did you and Julia come up with that idea?
MEEK: The idea just came from the fact that she was living out in LA the whole time we were dating. I was living in Austin. Both of those cities have very vibrant mobile communities, and we were just looking at the landscape here and what were underserved markets. And I remember when I was living in College Station. I think there were maybe two food trucks. In Waco, there are only two food trucks. There are a couple trailers but the scene is in the basic stage of its development. We just saw a great opportunity to come to Waco, and Julia gets to be back in her old college town. With something like the Pokey O’s truck — our whole goal is to make it a more fun extension of the library. So it’s where you might think “Oh you know, I’m not doing anything right now. I’ll go pull up social media to see where the truck is parked, and I’ll go hang out for a little while.” And you can go to the ice cream truck with 10 or 15 of your friends who just decide to pop in. It’s like the library, but without any homework.
THE BATTALION: Uber Ice Cream is coming to College Station from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. How does someone order Uber Ice Cream?
MEEK: You would pull up your Uber app as if you were wanting to get a ride home from Northgate or wherever else it might be and on the bottom where it has the different options — Black Car, UberX, et cetera — there is going to appear on [the] Uber app a little button that says ‘ICE CREAM.’ People will select the ICECREAM option and then an ice cream driver — which will either be us or the other drivers who are popping around — will immediately go to their location. For our truck, you have to have a minimum of five orders. Our ice cream sandwiches sell for four dollars a piece. So your uber account will automatically be billed 20 dollars, and then we will arrive at your location within minutes and make you five custom-made ice cream sandwiches right on the spot.
THE BATTALION: Being located in Waco, how did you end up partnering with Uber in College Station?
MEEK: We are based in Waco. We are just an ice cream truck — we don’t have a storefront or anything like that. One of the Uber representatives had seen us on Instagram, and I’m not sure if they were aware that I had attended A&M or not. I graduated in 2012. They reached out to us and told us about this cool event and asked if we would be willing to drive the truck there. So it’s a little bit of a trek — a three hour drive round trip — but it’s a great opportunity for me to get back to my college town and get to see how much it’s changed since I graduated in 2012.
THE BATTALION: What are you looking forward to most about Uber Ice Cream tomorrow?
MEEK: For us it’s the exposure. We’re, of course, excited about associating ourselves with an awesome, progressive brand like Uber. But mostly we are looking forward to sharing the cookies and ice cream love with the people in College Station. I went to A&M for four years, graduated in 2012, and if there was something like this when I was in college, I’d be 20 pounds fatter than I already am and would have had a lot of sugar rushes throughout my four years there. But it’s a really fun concept that I think people are turned on by the simplicity. You chose your cookies, you choose your ice cream and then we make a sandwich for you right on the truck. We’re excited to get more people to know about Pokey O’s, and for us if it goes well, it’s definitely something that we could see wanting to expand our footprint into College Station and bring the Pokey O’s brand there in the future potentially.