The Freeze That Pleases

The first hot breath of summer is upon the land, and with it has come a perennially deepening dementia that turns otherwise lucid adults into drooling, lip-smacking lunatics, children into chocolate-mustachioed gluttons and family dogs into insatiable beggars. This year, more than ever before, they all scream for ice cream.

Americans have always been afflicted with ice-creamania. Their per capita consumption, currently at 30 pints a year and still counting, has traditionally led the world. Though the invention of ice cream is usually credited to the Emperor Nero,* it was the U.S. that gave mankind the ice cream cone and the soda. Now there are signs of a fundamental shift in the frozen foundations of the Republic: Americans are beginning to turn a cold shoulder to the three pillars of their forefathers' frigid faith--chocolate, strawberry and vanilla --and flocking to flagrantly concupiscent flavors like Passion Fruit, Kumquat, Papaya, Sparkling Burgundy and Brandy Alexander.

Consummate Concoctions. Leading the gallop to gloppiness is Baskin-Robbins, a California-based franchise chain with $52 million in annual sales (up 30% from 1969) and more than 900 ice cream stores sprinkled across the country. The company is the nation's largest take-out chain specializing in "hard" ice cream; it sells more of the stuff than even Howard Johnson's, where, it is commonly said, the ice cream comes in 28 flavors and the food comes in one.

It is because of its flavors that Baskin-Robbins is unslurpassed. The company's polka-dotted pleasure palaces offer 31 constantly changing tastes. Right now, for example, ice cream cravers can commit caloric immolation with Blueberries 'n Cream, Pink Bubble Gum and Boysenberry Cheesecake. There is a newly consummated marriage of Bananas 'n Strawberries, a tangerine-vanilla merger called Tanganilla, plus the usual array of popular holdovers from months past: Caramel Rocky Road, German Chocolate Cake and Pistachio Almond Fudge, among others.

Baskin-Robbins concocts hundreds of new flavors a year at its gleaming research laboratory in beautiful uptown Burbank, Calif. But only eight or nine a year ever make it to the market. The rest are shot down by the company's discriminating marketing specialists or its finger-in-the-wind president, Irvine Robbins. "We don't sell ice cream," he philosophizes. "We sell fun."

Robbins began merchandising mirth in 1949, after he and his late brother-in-law, Burt Baskin, sold their separate dairy-store chains and began manufacturing ice cream. Their creamy dreams had begun in the New Hebrides, where Baskin was in charge of a Navy PX during World War II. He traded a Jeep to the supply officer of a visiting aircraft carrier in exchange for a big ice cream freezer and set about mixing some of the exotic local fruits into precedent-setting flavors.

Today Robbins encourages the same kind of entrepreneurial experimentation. As part of their three-week training program, fledgling district sales representatives are asked to concoct a new flavor. Robbins even turned TIME'S Michael Creedman loose in the lab last week. The reporter mixed print-stock-white vanilla with letter-size bits of black chocolate and a ribbon of magazine-border-red strawberry to produce a flavor called Stop the Presses.

Cryogenic Euphoria. Unlike other successful ice cream chains, Baskin-Robbins has resisted the temptation to branch out into other foods. "It's one of the best franchises in the world," attests Morton Cohen, who owns a Baskin-Robbins store in Manhattan. "We don't sell cigarettes, sandwiches or coffee. This is what makes it a clean, old-fashioned ice cream place. We don't want tables for kids to hang around all day. Adults love to come to a store like this." But when they do, they often have in tow hungry tots bent on a bedtime snack.

Ice Cream Cohen, like other B.R. owners, had to put up about $30,000 for his franchise. His store sells upwards of $100,000 a year in one-scoop (25-c-) and two-scoop (45-c-) cones, hand-packed cartons (75-c- a pint) and other goodies.

Some Baskin-Robbins ice creams contain as much as 20% butterfat--double the federal minimum--and all are made with fresh cream and no preservatives. "A whole generation is starved for good ice cream," Robbins notes. "They have had plenty of ice cream of a sort, the cheap stuff sold in supermarkets, but it wasn't fun ice cream." By rapidly rotating his flavors, Robbins hopes to create a nationwide cryogenic euphoria. Only once has he erred. Goody Goody Gumdrop, with tiny gumdrops blended into tutti-frutti-flavor ice cream, was invented in 1965. But the gumdrops kept freezing solid. "When people bit into it," Robbins recalls, "it was like biting a rock. That was the only flavor we had to drop. We were afraid someone would break a tooth."

*Who in the 1st century A.D. sent runners into the Apennines to fetch mountain snow, which he then flavored with honey and fruit.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.