Ice cream season may just be starting, but it appears to be over for good for one of Hungary's most modern fagy factories. According to business daily napi.hu, the Finomságok Fagylaltgyártó és Kereskedelmi Kft (roughly speaking, "Yummie Things Ice Cream Factory and Trading Corp.") is being liquidated by order of the Somogy County Court, leading to the loss of at least 50 jobs at the company's state-of-the-art Kaposvár plant (top). Finomságok was founded by Swedish investors in Nagykanizsa in 1990, and in 2003 moved its headquarters to Kaposvár, where it built a new factory with a capacity of five million liters a year at a cost of more than Ft 500 million (€2 million). At the time, the company had annual revenues of more than Ft 500 million and a share of the Hungarian ice-cream market in excess of 10%, and a range of products including the "Mega Party Ice" pictured below.

Then, in 2005, the company - which mostly served chain stores - launched another Ft 400 million investment. But the following year it had started facing serious financial problems. It tried to reverse its losses by laying off employees and otherwise reducing expenses, but the efforts were apparently not enough, leaving it to melt into liquidation.

Meanwhile, the story also revealed that the Kaposvár factory was built with the aid of a Ft 250 million subsidy from the Hungarian state, meaning that even if you never bought a liter of its ice cream, you still probably paid for at a scoop or two.