99 cone

It's summer! Yesterday, I had a 99 cone - lovely ice-cream and flaky chocolate. Lovely.

I started to wonder, though, why is it called a 99? But, sadly, it seems, nobody really knows. The term was used as early as 1936 in a Cadbury's ad which said "Try a 99 ice cream with Cadbury's Dairy Milk Flake chocolate".

There are some wild theories, such as:

• There's an idea that the flake chocolate bar is exactly 99mm long, but everything back then was measured in imperial measures.
• Askeys, a cone-making company, made a cone stamped with "99"
• An Edinburgh ice cream maker called Arcari claim to have invented the treat in the 1920s and named it after the address of their shop at 99 Portobello High St.
• The initials of ice cream - IC - is one way to write 99 in Roman numerals... but the usual way is to write it as XCIX

Lots more interesting suggestions on Wikipedia and BBC.