An ice-cream cone, poke or cornet is a dry, conical pastry, generally made of a wafer alike in texture to a waffle, providing for ice-cream to be consumed without a trough or spoon. Different types of ice-cream cones include waffle cones, cake cones (or wafer cones), pretzel cones, and sugar cones.

In the U.S., ice-cream cones became popular in the first decade of the 20th century. On December 13, 1903, a New Yorker named Italo Marchiony was granted U.S. patent No. 746971 for a cast for forming pastry cups to hold ice-cream; he laid claim that he had been selling ice-cream in eatable pastry holders since 1896. Opposed to popular opinion, his patent wasn't for a cone and he lost the cases that he filed versus cone makers for patent violation.

According to one fable, a Syrian pastry dough maker, Ernest Hamwian, who was dealing zalabia, a crisp pastry cooked in a sizzling waffle-patterned press came to the assistance of a neighboring ice-cream seller (perhaps Arnold Fornachou or Charles Menches) who had run out of cups; Hamwi rolled a hot zalabia into a cone shape that could contain ice-cream. However, a lot of vendors sold pastries at the World's Fair, and many of them laid claim to having fabricated the ice-cream cone, mentioning an assortment of inspirations. Hamwi's chronicle is sourced from a letter he penned in 1928 to the Ice-cream Trade Journal, long after he had founded the Cornucopia Waffle Company (later the Missouri Cone Company). Across the nation, by that time, the ice-cream cone industry was making some 250 million cones annually.

The original cones were rolled manually but, in 1912, Frederick Bruckman, an inventor from Portland, Oregon, patented a device for rolling ice-cream cones. He later sold his company to Nabisco in 1928. Nabisco is still making ice-cream cones, as it has been since 1928. Independent ice-cream suppliers such as Ben & Jerry's produce their own ice-cream cones.

The thought of marketing a frozen ice-cream cone - so that the cone and the ice-cream could make up a single item, storable in a freezer - had long been an ambition of ice-cream makers, but it wasn't until 1928 when J.T. "Stubby" Parker of Fort Worth, Texas produced an ice-cream cone that could be stacked in a grocer's deep-freeze. To commercialize it, he constituted The Drumstick Company in 1931. In 1991, The Drumstick Company was bought by Nestle. In 1959, Spica, an Italian ice-cream maker stationed in Naples fabricated a process, whereby the interior of the waffle cone was isolated from the ice-cream by a layer of oil, sugar and cocoa. Spica documented the name Cornetto in 1960. Initial sales were short, but in 1976 Unilever took over Spica and started a mass-marketing drive throughout Europe. It is now among the most popular ice-creams on the globe.

Some makes produce something very synonymous to the conventional ice-cream cone, but with a flat underside, which enables it to stand upright without risk of toppling. These types of wafer cups are known as "kiddie cups", "cake cones", or "cool cups".