What it means
A date shake is exactly what it sounds like: pitted dates, usually soft Medjools, blended into a vanilla milkshake until the whole thing turns the color of a paper bag and tastes like caramel with a backbone. It is thicker than a normal shake and sweeter than it needs to be, the desert’s roadside treat with a sense of occasion.
In Scottsdale the phrase has a single address attached. “Get a date shake” means stopping at Sphinx Date Co., the pantry shop that began as the Sphinx Date Ranch in 1951, the same year the town incorporated. The site’s what-to-eat guide builds the shake into its one-day eating plan, and the budget guide counts it as one of the few Scottsdale rituals that costs less than a cocktail. This page explains the drink and the fruit; the shop guide covers the shop.
Where you’ll meet it
At the Sphinx counter on a weekday, in the gift boxes half the country receives from Arizona relatives at Christmas, at date stands along Interstate 10 on the drive to Palm Springs, and in the pantry aisle at the Old Town Farmers Market, where Arizona dates sit next to the honey and salsas.
Where the word came from
The date shake is a California invention, and Arizona has never pretended otherwise. The fruit came first: the USDA’s Walter Tennyson Swingle, who believed no heat was too great and no air too dry for the date palm, brought 405 palm samples from Algeria to the Coachella Valley in 1900, mostly Deglet Noors, and a German immigrant named Bernard Johnson planted the valley’s first commercial grove near Mecca in 1903. In 1927 Swingle brought back the variety that would matter most: 11 offshoots of the Medjool, a soft, jammy Moroccan date threatened by disease at home. Half were planted in the Coachella Valley and half in the Bard Valley, the stretch of Colorado River bottomland that straddles the California-Arizona line near Yuma.
The shake followed the groves. Most accounts credit Russell Nicoll, who ran the Valerie Jean Date Shop, a roadside stand near Thermal, south of Indio. Wikipedia’s summary has him building the shack in 1919 or 1928, depending on the source, and inventing the shake around 1930 after reading that desert nomads lived on dates and goat’s milk. Up the highway, Floyd and Bess Shields had opened Shields Date Garden in Indio in 1924; in 1936 they began making their shake with patented date crystals, dried date particles sweetened with date sugar, and they still do. The drink became the unofficial beverage of Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, sold from a dozen stands along Highway 111.
Arizona adopted it the way it adopted the fruit. The Yuma area grows most of the roughly 10 percent of American dates not grown in Coachella, nearly all Medjools, and Phoenix itself had groves in the farm-town decades. The Black Sphinx, a small, soft, caramel-flavored date, originated in the Phoenix area in the early twentieth century, and the Sphinx Date Ranch took its name from it when it opened in 1951. By the time the groves gave way to subdivisions, the shop had become a retailer, and the shake had become the reason to stop.
What it is not
It is not a smoothie, and it is not health food, whatever the dates suggest. A proper date shake is ice cream or whole milk and a fistful of Medjools; the date-crystal version at Shields is the exception, not the rule.
The fine print
A few things worth knowing before you order. Medjools are the shake date because they are large, soft and high in sugar; the drier Deglet Noor, the most common date in supermarkets, makes a grainier drink. Dates are harvested in the fall, so the fresh crop hits Arizona shelves from roughly October, and that is when Sphinx’s selection is deepest and the Black Sphinx, when there is any, appears. The variety is grown in small quantities with a short season, which is why the shop guide tells you to ask rather than expect.
The Arizona industry is bigger than most visitors assume. Bard Valley growers, organized under a cooperative, supply a large share of the country’s Medjools, and Yuma County acreage has been expanding. But the state has never had a date-stand culture to match Highway 111’s, so the shake here lives at a single Scottsdale shop and a handful of roadside stops rather than on every corner. Nobody in Arizona claims to have invented it, and nobody has to: adopting a good idea from the next desert over is a long Scottsdale tradition.
If you want the agricultural backstory, the dates belong to the same chapter as the town’s cotton and citrus, the farm economy that the Five Cs summarize and that the resort decades buried. Swingle, the man who brought the Medjool, also introduced Egyptian cotton to Arizona, which became Pima cotton. The shake is the sweetest surviving piece of that work.