The Man Behind The Brand – Road Food
by Doug Gelbert
published by Cruden Bay Books at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 by Cruden Bay Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Open a copy of the Information Please Almanac and turn to the chapter on famous people. 4000 names and you won't know hardly any. But what about names everyone knows? Pillsbury, Kraft, Maytag, Hertz, Kellogg, Gerber. Nowhere to be found. How many names are more famous than Howard Johnson? Milton Bradley? Oscar Mayer? But who were these folks? Let’s take a look at the men behind the names where we pull off the road to eat...
Baskin
& Robbins
Colonel Sanders
Howard
Johnson's
Marriott
McDonalds
Nathan's
Stuckey's
And the man behind the brand is...
Burton
Baskin & Irvine Robbins
Irvine
Robbins grew up on his father’s dairy farm outside Tacoma,
Washington. He helped process and sell the milk, ice cream and other
products. When it came time to count up the profits each month Irvine
saw that the real profits were not coming in selling to groceries and
drugstores but from sales made from the family’s little store in a
Tacoma alley known as “Court C.”
With the end of World War
II Robbins remembered his lessons from the farm and set up his own
ice cream shop. Robbins, then 27, opened the Snowbird ice cream store
in Glendale, California. Down the road in Pasadena his brother-in-law
Burton Baskin started another store in 1946. The goal was to make $75
a week and have some fun.
The early years forged the business
philosophy that would weld into Baskin-Robbins when the two became
partners shortly thereafter: sell nothing but ice cream and offer a
vast array of fun-to-choose flavors. Baskin-Robbins sold nothing but
ice cream and sold it only in their shops. And they sold it even in
the winter.
Soon there were eight stores and sales were
booming but the partners had no money. They decided to sell the
stores to the managers; the company would supply the ice cream and
merchandising ideas. The formula worked. Baskin and Robbins collected
the payments and concentrated on the ice cream.
Baskin and
Robbins inaugurated a rotating stable of 31 flavors, one for each day
of the month. They had hundreds of exotic flavors to choose from. The
names were as appealing as the flavors. When the Dodgers arrived in
Los Angeles from Brooklyn in 1958 they were welcomed by baseball-nut
ice cream: raspberries (for “razzing” the umpires) and cashews
(for peanuts in the bleachers) mixed into vanilla (the all-time
winning flavor). Lunar cheesecake ice cream commemorated the first
moon landing in 1969.
All flavors were subject to a test
panel. Not all flavors survived the scrutiny. Goody Goody Gumdrop - a
seemingly ideal Baskin-Robbins fun combination of gum drops and ice
cream - was withdrawn because of its tiny tooth-threatening frozen
gumdrops. Ketchup ice cream and lox and bagels were allowed to
quietly melt in the lab.
In 1967 Baskin and Robbins sold their
company for $20,000,000. Burton Baskin died suddenly only six months
later but Robbins carried on with the business. When Baskin-Robbins’s
31 Flavors celebrated its 31st birthday in 1976 the 1600 stores had a
flavorful roster of over 500 flavors to choose from.