And the man behind the brand is...
William Stuckey
Like so many others William Stuckey was desperately searching for a way to make a living during the Depression. In 1931 the 21-year old Stuckey borrowed $35 from his grandmother - her life savings - to peddle pecans.
Stuckey walked from house to house in his native Georgia buying nuts.
If he used up his $35 too early in the day he waited until the banks closed and wrote checks he knew he couldn’t cover. On these days he stayed out selling pecans until he could be at the bank the following morning to cover checks.
Diligently he built his pecan business this way. In 1936 he sold $150,000 worth of pecans. He opened his first candy store in Eastman, a small town in central Georgia, in 1938. Wife Ethel was the candy cook.
When World War II ended Stuckey was one of the first to recognize that Americans would become increasingly mobile. He began building distinctive pecan shops, with blue roofs and red and yellow signs, along the country’s new highways. In addition to enjoying a pecan roll weary motorists could fill up at Stuckey’s pumps as well.
In eight years Stuckey had 29 pecan shops, building his business on extensive billboard advertising. He awarded franchises to friends and employees. “A lot of people in town own interests in the stores,” he boasted at one point. “They all profited by it. There are more Cadillacs in Eastman, Georgia than in any town this size in the South, I reckon.”
Stuckey sold his business, now with 160 stores, to Pet, Inc. in 1964. He stayed with Pet as a vice-president and continued operating the highway stops until 1970 when he retired. Stuckey’s chain had grown to nearly 300 stores by then. Stuckey, a former Georgia state legislator, continued enjoying pecans until his death in 1977.
Showing posts with label Fast Food Brands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fast Food Brands. Show all posts
February 12, 2007
Nathan's
And the man behind the brand is...
Nathan Handwerker
In 1916 a small rebellion was stirring at Coney Island, New York's fashionable seaside playground. It seems a couple of singing waiters by the name of Durante and Cantor did not like the idea of paying the inflated price of 10¢ for their frankfurters. They urged the young roll-slicer behind the counter to open his own stand and sell hot dogs for a nickel.
Nathan Handwerker was a Polish immigrant who had arrived penniless in New York only four years earlier when Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor implored him to start his own hot dog business. He was working part-time as a delivery boy for the Max's Busy Bee eatery making $4.50 a week. On Sunday afternoons he moonlighted at Coney Island dishing out Charles Feltman's famed 10-cent franks. He decided to take the advice of his show-business friends.
Handwerker took his life savings of $300 and with his new bride, Ida, opened a small open-front stand on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues. He laced his hot dogs with Ida's secret spice recipe. The nickel franks caught on immediately with the thousands of resort visitors.
Handwerker displayed a natural flair for merchandising. In 1917 competitors spread rumors that Nathan couldn't be selling quality all-beef hot dogs for only a nickel. He fought the accusations by hiring a group of college students to stand around his counter wearing white professional jackets with stethoscopes dangling from their pockets. Word spread that doctors from Coney Island Hospital were taking their meals at Nathan's hot dog stand. The crisis passed.
Customers could always find pretty girls behind Nathan's counters.
Clara Bowtinelli, a gregarious redheaded teenager, served up franks for a short time until one of her customers whisked her away to Hollywood. She would resurface as Clara Bow, one of the most glamorous of all silent film stars.
In 1921 Handwerker finally christened his nameless stand "Nathan's Hot Dogs" after hearing Sophie Tucker perform the hit song "Nathan, Nathan, Why You Waitin'?" Handwerker built Nathan's Famous into the largest hot dog stand in the world, acquiring surrounding property as it grew and expanded.
In 1923 the New York subway reached out to Coney Island and thousands of people streamed off trains from the massive Stillwell terminal and headed for Nathan's across the street. Nathan's became a New York institution. President Rockefeller entertained at Hyde Park with Nathan's "red hots". Nelson Rockefeller told Handwerker during a campaign stop that, "No one can hope to be elected to public office in New York without having his picture taken eating a hot dog at Nathan's."
Nathan's had three restaurants when the company went public in 1968.
The chain of fast food restaurants was quickly expanding when Handwerker semi-retired in 1972. He died two years later at the age of 83 as history's most famous purveyor of hot dogs.
Nathan Handwerker
In 1916 a small rebellion was stirring at Coney Island, New York's fashionable seaside playground. It seems a couple of singing waiters by the name of Durante and Cantor did not like the idea of paying the inflated price of 10¢ for their frankfurters. They urged the young roll-slicer behind the counter to open his own stand and sell hot dogs for a nickel.
Nathan Handwerker was a Polish immigrant who had arrived penniless in New York only four years earlier when Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor implored him to start his own hot dog business. He was working part-time as a delivery boy for the Max's Busy Bee eatery making $4.50 a week. On Sunday afternoons he moonlighted at Coney Island dishing out Charles Feltman's famed 10-cent franks. He decided to take the advice of his show-business friends.
Handwerker took his life savings of $300 and with his new bride, Ida, opened a small open-front stand on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues. He laced his hot dogs with Ida's secret spice recipe. The nickel franks caught on immediately with the thousands of resort visitors.
Handwerker displayed a natural flair for merchandising. In 1917 competitors spread rumors that Nathan couldn't be selling quality all-beef hot dogs for only a nickel. He fought the accusations by hiring a group of college students to stand around his counter wearing white professional jackets with stethoscopes dangling from their pockets. Word spread that doctors from Coney Island Hospital were taking their meals at Nathan's hot dog stand. The crisis passed.
Customers could always find pretty girls behind Nathan's counters.
Clara Bowtinelli, a gregarious redheaded teenager, served up franks for a short time until one of her customers whisked her away to Hollywood. She would resurface as Clara Bow, one of the most glamorous of all silent film stars.
In 1921 Handwerker finally christened his nameless stand "Nathan's Hot Dogs" after hearing Sophie Tucker perform the hit song "Nathan, Nathan, Why You Waitin'?" Handwerker built Nathan's Famous into the largest hot dog stand in the world, acquiring surrounding property as it grew and expanded.
In 1923 the New York subway reached out to Coney Island and thousands of people streamed off trains from the massive Stillwell terminal and headed for Nathan's across the street. Nathan's became a New York institution. President Rockefeller entertained at Hyde Park with Nathan's "red hots". Nelson Rockefeller told Handwerker during a campaign stop that, "No one can hope to be elected to public office in New York without having his picture taken eating a hot dog at Nathan's."
Nathan's had three restaurants when the company went public in 1968.
The chain of fast food restaurants was quickly expanding when Handwerker semi-retired in 1972. He died two years later at the age of 83 as history's most famous purveyor of hot dogs.
McDonalds
And the men behind the brand are...
Maurice McDonald and Richard McDonald
By 1954 Ray Kroc was 52 years old. He had finally erased years of debt and struggle by selling Multimixers for milk shakes. He had even achieved a modest prosperity, buying a home in Arlington Heights, Illinois, one of Chicago's poshest suburbs.
One day Kroc received an order for eight Multimixers from a hamburger stand in San Bernadino, California. What was this? Each Multimixer had a capacity for six milkshakes. Kroc wanted to see for himself an operation that needed to make 48 milkshakes at one time.
The McDonald’s hamburger stand was run by Maurice "Mac" McDonald and his brother Richard. They had come to California from New Hampshire in 1928 to work in movies, a calling particularly ill-suited to their dour personalities.
The McDonalds wound up managing a movie theater in Glendora instead.
They sold the theater in 1940 to open a hamburger stand in Pasadena.
For eight years the McDonalds worked out their ideas for a self-service food operation, mostly to eliminate the groups of teenagers that hung around the restaurant. On December 12, 1948 they were ready to test their ideas at a new location in San Bernadino.
San Bernadino, 55 miles east of Los Angeles, was the terminus for famed
Route 66. The town was in the center of post-war prosperity and the exploding automobile mentality. C-rations from World War II had also inoculated less discerning American diners with a homogenized diet.
The McDonald brothers devised an ideal food service operation for the new times. They sliced the menu to only four items: a hamburger with condiments already added that they sold for 15¢, crisp french fries warmed with innovative infrared heat lamps, soft drinks and a 12-ounce milk shake.
Everything the McDonalds did emphasized value, efficiency and speed.
There were no plates, no dishes, no condiments. The brothers were frugal and obsessed with cleanliness. Every part of their restaurant sparkled.
When Ray Kroc arrived with his Multimixers he was astounded:
"They had people standing in line clamoring for hamburgers.
I figured that if every McDonald hamburger place had eight Multimixers,
I would get rich."
Kroc was not the first to be impressed by the McDonalds' operation.
The brothers had cautiously sold six franchises in California but had no interest in growing larger. "More stores, more problems," they told Kroc. They pointed to a nearby hill where Mac, a bachelor, and Dick lived. Their houses and three Cadillacs, one for Dick's wife, were all the McDonalds needed.
The brothers were conservative and suspicious of quick money. Only months before Kroc arrived in 1954 they had turned down another big chain offer.
Neither was interested in Kroc's talk of nationwide franchises. Kroc persisted. Finally he left San Bernadino with a 99-year contract to represent McDonalds exclusively.
The arrangement would not last nearly that long. The taciturn brothers increasingly imposed restrictions on the franchises that Kroc found totally unacceptable. In 1960 he offered $500,000 for everything - trademarks,
the Golden Arches, the name. Dick and Mac countered with $2,700,000 - a figure they had arrived at that would yield each of them a million dollars after taxes.
Kroc was flabbergasted. The only financing he could obtain would eventually cost him $14,000,000 to buy out the McDonalds, which, of course, was still a bargain. The brothers had one more surprise as the final papers were signed - they intended to keep their cherished San Bernadino store.
Kroc did not want to lose the money-churning flagship store but wasn't about to blow the deal over it. Rather he built a gleaming new restaurant directly across the street. It was an exact replica of the brothers' restaurant which they had to re-name "Big M." Soon Mac and Dick McDonald were out of business.
The brothers travelled and returned to Bedford, New Hampshire where they lived out their lives in obscurity as their name became the most famous cultural icon in America.
Maurice McDonald and Richard McDonald
By 1954 Ray Kroc was 52 years old. He had finally erased years of debt and struggle by selling Multimixers for milk shakes. He had even achieved a modest prosperity, buying a home in Arlington Heights, Illinois, one of Chicago's poshest suburbs.
One day Kroc received an order for eight Multimixers from a hamburger stand in San Bernadino, California. What was this? Each Multimixer had a capacity for six milkshakes. Kroc wanted to see for himself an operation that needed to make 48 milkshakes at one time.
The McDonald’s hamburger stand was run by Maurice "Mac" McDonald and his brother Richard. They had come to California from New Hampshire in 1928 to work in movies, a calling particularly ill-suited to their dour personalities.
The McDonalds wound up managing a movie theater in Glendora instead.
They sold the theater in 1940 to open a hamburger stand in Pasadena.
For eight years the McDonalds worked out their ideas for a self-service food operation, mostly to eliminate the groups of teenagers that hung around the restaurant. On December 12, 1948 they were ready to test their ideas at a new location in San Bernadino.
San Bernadino, 55 miles east of Los Angeles, was the terminus for famed
Route 66. The town was in the center of post-war prosperity and the exploding automobile mentality. C-rations from World War II had also inoculated less discerning American diners with a homogenized diet.
The McDonald brothers devised an ideal food service operation for the new times. They sliced the menu to only four items: a hamburger with condiments already added that they sold for 15¢, crisp french fries warmed with innovative infrared heat lamps, soft drinks and a 12-ounce milk shake.
Everything the McDonalds did emphasized value, efficiency and speed.
There were no plates, no dishes, no condiments. The brothers were frugal and obsessed with cleanliness. Every part of their restaurant sparkled.
When Ray Kroc arrived with his Multimixers he was astounded:
"They had people standing in line clamoring for hamburgers.
I figured that if every McDonald hamburger place had eight Multimixers,
I would get rich."
Kroc was not the first to be impressed by the McDonalds' operation.
The brothers had cautiously sold six franchises in California but had no interest in growing larger. "More stores, more problems," they told Kroc. They pointed to a nearby hill where Mac, a bachelor, and Dick lived. Their houses and three Cadillacs, one for Dick's wife, were all the McDonalds needed.
The brothers were conservative and suspicious of quick money. Only months before Kroc arrived in 1954 they had turned down another big chain offer.
Neither was interested in Kroc's talk of nationwide franchises. Kroc persisted. Finally he left San Bernadino with a 99-year contract to represent McDonalds exclusively.
The arrangement would not last nearly that long. The taciturn brothers increasingly imposed restrictions on the franchises that Kroc found totally unacceptable. In 1960 he offered $500,000 for everything - trademarks,
the Golden Arches, the name. Dick and Mac countered with $2,700,000 - a figure they had arrived at that would yield each of them a million dollars after taxes.
Kroc was flabbergasted. The only financing he could obtain would eventually cost him $14,000,000 to buy out the McDonalds, which, of course, was still a bargain. The brothers had one more surprise as the final papers were signed - they intended to keep their cherished San Bernadino store.
Kroc did not want to lose the money-churning flagship store but wasn't about to blow the deal over it. Rather he built a gleaming new restaurant directly across the street. It was an exact replica of the brothers' restaurant which they had to re-name "Big M." Soon Mac and Dick McDonald were out of business.
The brothers travelled and returned to Bedford, New Hampshire where they lived out their lives in obscurity as their name became the most famous cultural icon in America.
Howard Johnson's
And the man behind the brand is...
Howard Johnson
“I’ve spent my life developing scores of flavors,” Howard Johnson once lamented, “and yet most people still say, ‘I’ll take vanilla.’”
Howard Dearing Johnson was born in 1897, the son of a tobacco merchant.
He entered the retail business shortly after from France and World War I.
His father died and he inherited the cigar-store business, then heavily in debt. Johnson continued to sell cigars until 1924 when he liquidated the business and bought a run-down drugstore near the railroad station in his hometown of Wollaston, Massachusetts. He went from owing $10,000 to owing nearly $30,000.
The small patent medicine store featured a soda fountain, a candy and tobacco counter and a newspaper stand. Johnson resurrected the business with the newspapers, organizing a staff of 75 boys delivering the news. Within a few years his newspapers had made his business prosperous. But it was ice cream that was his first love. He had only three flavors - vanilla, chocolate and strawberry - and he thought a wider variety of flavors and a better quality ice cream were the keys to success.
Johnson bought an ice cream recipe from an elderly German pushcart vendor whose wares appealed to him. He paid $300 for the peddler’s secrets: doubling the butterfat content of his ice cream and to use only natural flavorings.
To expand his product line Johnson used an old-fashioned freezer in the basement, hand-cranking the ice cream.
He was right. The customers began queuing up for his 28 flavors of ice cream. By 1928 Johnson was pulling in nearly a quarter million dollars a year from ice cream sold in his shop and at several nearby beach stands. He added frankfurters and other easily prepared foods and gravitated towards restaurants in 1929. Within seven years Johnson had peppered 25 restaurants along Massachusetts highways.
He then persuaded a yacht captain on Cape Cod to build a restaurant, call it Howard Johnson’s, paint it blue with a bright orange roof, and sell products Johnson would supply. Johnson also trained the new owner. The venture made money from the start. Howard Johnson had pioneered the art of restaurant franchising.
Johnson next developed the concept of convenience food. He maintained control over the food served in his franchises by preparing the food and processing it in centrally located company-operated plants where it was shipped to restaurants for final preparation and cooking. Johnson insisted that the food be plain, simple, wholesome American fare.
To make sure that the ice cream and food sold in the restaurants that bore his name remained at high quality Johnson spent two days a week on inspection tours. He arrived unannounced and unrecognized, on the lookout for everything from dirty restrooms to sassy waitresses.
The ubiquitous orange-roofed restaurants beget motor lodges designed for the vacationing post-World War II family. The first Howard Johnson’s motel franchise opened in Savannah, Georgia in 1954, five years before Johnson turned the company over to his son. Even in retirement Johnson continued to scout for new restaurant and motel sites.
The entire time Johnson was building a $200,000,000-a-year business he never lost his taste for the ice cream that made him famous. It was his favorite dish. He kept at least 10 flavors in the freezers of his Manhattan penthouse. Every day of his life Howard Johnson enjoyed at least one ice cream cone.
Howard Johnson
“I’ve spent my life developing scores of flavors,” Howard Johnson once lamented, “and yet most people still say, ‘I’ll take vanilla.’”
Howard Dearing Johnson was born in 1897, the son of a tobacco merchant.
He entered the retail business shortly after from France and World War I.
His father died and he inherited the cigar-store business, then heavily in debt. Johnson continued to sell cigars until 1924 when he liquidated the business and bought a run-down drugstore near the railroad station in his hometown of Wollaston, Massachusetts. He went from owing $10,000 to owing nearly $30,000.
The small patent medicine store featured a soda fountain, a candy and tobacco counter and a newspaper stand. Johnson resurrected the business with the newspapers, organizing a staff of 75 boys delivering the news. Within a few years his newspapers had made his business prosperous. But it was ice cream that was his first love. He had only three flavors - vanilla, chocolate and strawberry - and he thought a wider variety of flavors and a better quality ice cream were the keys to success.
Johnson bought an ice cream recipe from an elderly German pushcart vendor whose wares appealed to him. He paid $300 for the peddler’s secrets: doubling the butterfat content of his ice cream and to use only natural flavorings.
To expand his product line Johnson used an old-fashioned freezer in the basement, hand-cranking the ice cream.
He was right. The customers began queuing up for his 28 flavors of ice cream. By 1928 Johnson was pulling in nearly a quarter million dollars a year from ice cream sold in his shop and at several nearby beach stands. He added frankfurters and other easily prepared foods and gravitated towards restaurants in 1929. Within seven years Johnson had peppered 25 restaurants along Massachusetts highways.
He then persuaded a yacht captain on Cape Cod to build a restaurant, call it Howard Johnson’s, paint it blue with a bright orange roof, and sell products Johnson would supply. Johnson also trained the new owner. The venture made money from the start. Howard Johnson had pioneered the art of restaurant franchising.
Johnson next developed the concept of convenience food. He maintained control over the food served in his franchises by preparing the food and processing it in centrally located company-operated plants where it was shipped to restaurants for final preparation and cooking. Johnson insisted that the food be plain, simple, wholesome American fare.
To make sure that the ice cream and food sold in the restaurants that bore his name remained at high quality Johnson spent two days a week on inspection tours. He arrived unannounced and unrecognized, on the lookout for everything from dirty restrooms to sassy waitresses.
The ubiquitous orange-roofed restaurants beget motor lodges designed for the vacationing post-World War II family. The first Howard Johnson’s motel franchise opened in Savannah, Georgia in 1954, five years before Johnson turned the company over to his son. Even in retirement Johnson continued to scout for new restaurant and motel sites.
The entire time Johnson was building a $200,000,000-a-year business he never lost his taste for the ice cream that made him famous. It was his favorite dish. He kept at least 10 flavors in the freezers of his Manhattan penthouse. Every day of his life Howard Johnson enjoyed at least one ice cream cone.
Colonel Sanders
And the man behind the brand is...
Harlan Sanders
For half of his working life Harland Sanders made his way as a street car conductor, railroad fireman and insurance salesman, to name just a few of the jobs he tried. In 1930, at the age of 40, Sanders started cooking chicken in a small restaurant in the rear of a service station he operated in Corbin, Kentucky.
Here he perfected his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, seasonings he claimed stood on everybody’s shelf, to flavor his chicken. The ingredients are still used in Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken today and are still a secret,
even from franchisees. In 1935 Kentucky Governor Ruby Lafoon named Sanders an honorary Colonel for his contribution to the state’s cuisine.
For a quarter-century Sanders prospered. Then in the mid-1950s a new interstate highway was planned that would bypass Corbin and his restaurant. Sanders was now 66 years old, an age when many business owners would retire and watch cars speed past his old restaurant.
But the Colonel auctioned off his operations and hit the road to display his patented pressure cooker and sell his fried chicken cooking process. He signed up only five restaurants in the first two years. Still he persevered. In two more years he had sold 200 franchises. Over the next decade Colonel Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken would become famous the world over.
In Japan the Colonel, with his white hair, white goatee, black string tie and double-breasted suit, is the most recognizable of all Americans. A life-size statue stands outside of everyone of the Colonel’s restaurants in Japan. The Colonel traveled more than 250,000 miles a year promoting his chicken.
In 1964 Sanders sold his interest in Kentucky Fried Chicken for $2,000,000 but remained active promoting his chicken and starring in folksy commercials until his death in 1980 at the age of 90. In honor of his achievements his body lay in state in the rotunda of the State Capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky. His chicken was being sold in more than 8000 outlets in 60 countries.
Harlan Sanders
For half of his working life Harland Sanders made his way as a street car conductor, railroad fireman and insurance salesman, to name just a few of the jobs he tried. In 1930, at the age of 40, Sanders started cooking chicken in a small restaurant in the rear of a service station he operated in Corbin, Kentucky.
Here he perfected his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, seasonings he claimed stood on everybody’s shelf, to flavor his chicken. The ingredients are still used in Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken today and are still a secret,
even from franchisees. In 1935 Kentucky Governor Ruby Lafoon named Sanders an honorary Colonel for his contribution to the state’s cuisine.
For a quarter-century Sanders prospered. Then in the mid-1950s a new interstate highway was planned that would bypass Corbin and his restaurant. Sanders was now 66 years old, an age when many business owners would retire and watch cars speed past his old restaurant.
But the Colonel auctioned off his operations and hit the road to display his patented pressure cooker and sell his fried chicken cooking process. He signed up only five restaurants in the first two years. Still he persevered. In two more years he had sold 200 franchises. Over the next decade Colonel Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken would become famous the world over.
In Japan the Colonel, with his white hair, white goatee, black string tie and double-breasted suit, is the most recognizable of all Americans. A life-size statue stands outside of everyone of the Colonel’s restaurants in Japan. The Colonel traveled more than 250,000 miles a year promoting his chicken.
In 1964 Sanders sold his interest in Kentucky Fried Chicken for $2,000,000 but remained active promoting his chicken and starring in folksy commercials until his death in 1980 at the age of 90. In honor of his achievements his body lay in state in the rotunda of the State Capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky. His chicken was being sold in more than 8000 outlets in 60 countries.
Baskin & Robbins
And the men behind the brand are...
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.
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.
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