He noticed that ordinary blenders did not deliver a consistent mix for frozen margaritas. One day Mariano Martinez was in a 7-Eleven store and he saw kids buy a Slurpee and it is what gave him the idea. He wonders whether he could freeze a margarita in a Slurpee type of machine.
The Slurpee machine did not exactly pan out. It was proprietary to 7-Eleven. He bought a used Saniserv soft-serve ice cream machine and worked with a friend, chemist John Hogan, to modify it. It took about ten days of tinkering, tinkered with Martinez’s dad’s recipe, and adapted a soft-serve ice-cream machine to make margarita “slush.”
On May 11, 1971, Martinez pulled the lever on a repurposed soft-serve ice cream dispenser and filled a glass with a coil of pale green sherbet—history’s first prefab frozen margarita. The novelty was a huge hit.
The invention was a game-changer for Mariano, the tequila industry and bars and restaurants nationwide. Martinez never applied for a margarita machine patent, and beyond driving restaurant sales, he hasn’t received anything more than public admiration (and a few bear hugs) for his invention. His original machine is now on loan to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Safe to say the frozen margarita is beloved by Texans.
History of frozen margarita machine
