For the world’s best-engineered ice cream, go to the Union Court dining area at Boston University. What you’ll find is a vending machine that can make 96 varieties of ice cream to order from 12 flavors, two base mixes–premium and low carb–and three dry-ingredient mix-ins.
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The sophisticated internals are invisible to consumers, who use a touch pad and 15-inch flat-panel display to select flavors. What happens next is an ice cream geek’s dream: “We pump the base mix, aerate it, flavor it, flash freeze it, scrape it up off of a freezing surface, form it into a scoop and into the consumer’s cup in 45 seconds,” Baxter explains.

The company chose Linux because it’s an open system that has proved reliable in industrial environments, and there are no licensing fees, Baxter says. MooBella’s LAMP software stack–Linux, Apache, MySQL database, and PHP–is wireless and Internet-capable, allowing remote monitoring of sales, ice cream supply, and machine diagnostics.