With a cart attached to a small motorcycle, the ice cream man is quite a ubiquitous sight all over the island.

Such ice cream vendors are usually elderly Singaporeans, most of whom are affectionately referred to as "ice cream uncles".

For one ice cream uncle, however, it isn't just him who is invested in the ice cream business -- it's his entire family.

Uncle Tan's ice cream

In a Facebook post on Apr. 14, Facebook user Koh ShuJun shared her brief encounter with an elderly man who goes by "Uncle Tan."

According to Koh's post, Tan has been selling and making his own ice cream for the past 60 years.

According to the post, he offers fives flavours of ice cream -- Chocolate, mango, durian, attap seed and coconut. Koh quotes him saying:

"The durian ice cream is authentic MSW (Mao Shan Wang). I have big atap seed, not small pieces."

Tan can be found in Hougang at the HDB blocks near CHIJ Our Lady Of Nativity.

This is her Facebook post:

Second-generation ice cream sellers

We knew we had to find out more about this awesome uncle, so we got in touch with the administrators behind Uncle Tan's Facebook page, called "Ice-Cream Man".

As it turns out, according to one of his sons, Boy Tan, Uncle Tan, who is 75, started out making his own ice cream, until the government clamped down on unlicensed sellers in the 1980s.

After that, he found a local factory and got them to adapt existing traditional flavours of ice cream and improving them for resale — placing larger chunks of attap seed into the attap seed flavour ice cream, for instance.

The attap seed flavoured ice cream served up by Uncle Tan is now his signature flavour.

One of Uncle Tan's sons, Boy's brother, followed in his footsteps and expanded their father's effort into the business now known as "Ice-Cream Man", but passed away in 2008 from an illness — leaving behind his wife, Liew Siew Yin, and two young sons.

According to Boy, Liew then decided to leave her full-time job and take over her husband's ice cream business, bearing in mind the flexibility in schedule it accorded her.

At that time, he said, Liew's children were still young, so selling ice cream would give her more time to look after her family.

And from the looks of things, it seems like a good decision she made — Liew has since gone on to venture into doing larger-scale events such as weddings, birthdays and baby showers.

When she is not doing events, Liew can be found selling ice cream, "Ice Cream Uncle" style, in Bedok.

The third generation

All three generations are involved in the family ice cream business.

Apart from Uncle Tan and Liew, who work the ice cream circuit full-time, Boy, as well as Liew's 14-year-old son Damian, both help out occasionally.

Over the years, ice cream has become an integral part of Damian's life.

According to a report in Shin Min Daily News, he not only grew up eating ice cream that his family brought home, but for him, it has also become a fond childhood memory.

He has aspirations to open an ice cream factory in the future and carry on his family legacy.

Top photo collage from Ice-Cream Man Facebook.