PARLOR GAMES : Robin Rose Dips Into the Super-Premium Boutique Ice Cream Market

Robin Rose, euphonious of name but a rough-and- ready entrepreneur at heart, boasts of the quality of the ingredients she uses in her ice creams and candies: fine chocolates, raspberries from the Pacific Northwest, rich cream, exotic liqueurs. “Flavors with real integrity” is what she strives to create, and her Chocolate Raspberry Truffle ice cream is already something of a cult item among faithful customers, who gladly pay a 25-cent surcharge for the privilege of buying a scoop. But the popularity of this confection owes as much to her knack for small-scale, low-tech capitalism as it does to what actually goes into the mixer.

“I have a child, I have a passion--and it’s Robin Rose Ice Cream & Chocolate,” she declares. “There is no room in my life for anything else.”

Today, at 33, Rose is the proprietor of a chain of ice cream and candy boutiques that started in a converted bakery on Rose Avenue in Venice and soon expanded to some of the poshest shopping centers in Southern California--the Rodeo Collection in Beverly Hills, the Westside Pavilion in West Los Angeles, the Galleria at South Bay in Redondo Beach. She has already opened a store in Denver, and soon will launch five more in Japan. And she’s just signed a deal with Von’s Grocery Co. that will put a Robin Rose “dipping store” in a Garden Grove supermarket at the end of this month, with seven more to follow next year. Each is a small masterpiece of what the shopping center industry calls “presentation”--she favors open, airy spaces with colorful tile work and a lavish use of neon--and each is a shrine of self-indulgence.

“Robin Rose has invented something truly innovative in what was becoming a tired industry,” says one real estate broker who specializes in “high-end” retail locations. Indeed, next weekend she’ll be flying to Savannah, Ga., to receive the 1985 Retailer of the Year Award from the National Ice Cream Retailers Assn. and Dairy Record magazine.

Above all, Rose is taken seriously within the highly competitive ice cream industry. Having invented herself as the purveyor of superb ice creams in distinctive settings, she can no longer be safely ignored by any player in the ice cream game, whether it’s a rival boutique down the block or a global operation like Baskin-Robbins. When it comes to ice cream, Robin Rose means business.

Despite her protestations of single-minded dedication, Robin Rose has a distinctly sentimental streak, which expresses itself primarily in a fierce loyalty toward her parents, Ben and Florence Friedman.

“I come from a family of workaholics,” she says, recalling the days her father drove a cab and worked on an automobile assembly line to supplement the meager profits of his small furniture factory. Later he realized an enduring ambition by buying a small farm in the Russian River Valley--he’s called “Farmer Ben” by the young people who scoop at the Robin Rose stores--but he sold the farm when it became apparent that, as Rose puts it, “he was running a resort for friends and relatives.” Significantly, the name of her corporation, which owns and operates the ice cream business, is BFD Inc.--”Ben Friedman’s Daughter.”

A graduate of Fairfax High School, Rose aspired to Stanford University, where she completed her bachelor’s degree in a breathless three years. From there, she moved on to the master’s program at the University of Chicago, chiefly because it was the home of economic guru Milton Friedman. “I read his book, ‘Capitalism and Freedom,’ when I was in the 11th grade,” she says. “He was my Moses, and the University of Chicago was my Mecca.” In 1974, armed with an MBA, she landed a job as a marketing executive with the Ernest and Julio Gallo Winery in Modesto.

“An aggressive and articulate woman” is how Rose is remembered by her former colleagues at Gallo, and she still lionizes Ernest Gallo and his company. “We have a lot in common,” she says, referring to the improvised beginnings of her own ice cream and candy factory. “The first batch of Gallo wine back in the ‘30s was made from scratch with the aid of a pre-Prohibition pamphlet on wine making from the Modesto Public Library.” Rose nevertheless resigned from Gallo to pursue her own grandiose notion of promoting liquor products as gourmet food.

“The best thing that ever happened to me was my failure to get a major company to buy my idea,” she says now. As a result, she resolved to launch her own business, selling liqueur-charged chocolates through department stores. It took an initial investment of $250,000--”a quarter million too short,” she says, but “what I didn’t have in money I had in energy.”

Working after-hours in the borrowed kitchen of a Newport Beach candy shop, Rose ran through more than 500 batches before coming up with the recipe for her line of truffles. Then she rented a defunct factory--squeezed between a custom motorcycle shop and a lingerie boutique--and set up a production line with the help of Florence and Farmer Ben. When faced with a failed batch of raspberry-flavored chocolate truffles too misshapen to be sold, she decided to break them up and use them to make some chocolate chip ice cream in an old ice-cream maker that she’d found in a corner of the bakery.

“It was 1:30 in the morning, and my father was standing behind me. I didn’t want him to know that I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Rose remembers. “The ice cream turned a purple, moth-brown color--and I thought to myself, ‘I’m in deep trouble!’ ” In fact, she had accidentally invented her signature ice cream, the best-selling (and much imitated) Chocolate Raspberry Truffle. She went on to create dozens of memorable flavors, ranging from the divine White Chocolate to the somewhat-too-exotic Rose Petal, as well as a line of dessert-liqueur ice creams. Her own favorite is Bailey’s Irish Cream, “the most aesthetically perfect ice cream on earth,” she says. “It’s what I’d take to a desert island.” Today, ice cream outsells candy four-to-one in the Robin Rose stores.

Another happy accident transformed Robin Friedman into Robin Rose and provided the rationale for changing the name of her business from Via Dolce, which even regular customers persisted in calling Dolce Vita. A fellow named Roy Rose was dispatched to the original Rose Avenue store to install a closed-circuit television. He ended up spending the day making ice cream and carrying out repairs under the direction of Farmer Ben, who informed his daughter (in Rose’s presence) that he had no objection to giving away her hand in marriage. As it turned out, Roy Rose became not only Robin’s husband but also her business partner. Today, he owns 49% of the corporation.

“He must think that I married him because I couldn’t get a bank loan,” Robin Rose says. “Someday, when we’re plusher, I’ll be able to convince him that what I love about him is his wicked smile.”

But those early struggles only sharpened her appreciation of business. “I always looked at myself as an incurable risk-taker,” she says. “But if you raise money from friends and family, you have a different sense of responsibility. I went to bed every night knowing I’d either make it or lose everything.”

Barely three years after the fortuitous mishap with the cast-off ice-cream maker, Robin Rose is a significant figure in the “dipping store” business. Of course, her chain is modest when compared to other purveyors of “super-premium” ice cream, a product with a low “overrun”--that is, very little air--and a butterfat content in excess of 16%. Swensen’s and Haagen-Dazs, for instance, each operate more than 300 stores. And Robin Rose is dwarfed by the 3,000-store Baskin-Robbins chain, which sells mostly “premium” ice cream with 10% to 14% butterfat content. Her annual output of 135,000 gallons is modest as well, compared to California’s total of 141.1 million gallons last year.

“We eat boutique-type dipping stores like Robin Rose for lunch,” says Carol Kirby, vice president of marketing for Baskin-Robbins. But the company is not unaware of the potential of the boutique approach. Kirby admits that Baskin-Robbins is developing a new line of super-premium ice creams in what she calls “gourmet-oriented, upscale flavors.”

Indeed, the economics of the ice cream business work against Rose’s notion of a small-scale, high-quality operation. The profit is usually made on such high mark-up items as sundaes and toppings. But Rose--who still scoops ice cream in the Venice store Saturday nights--has been known to discourage customers from ordering sundaes because the ice cream is so rich and the flavors are so exotic. In fact, her ice cream may be too intense for the mainstay of most ice cream makers--the kids. “We don’t see many children in the store,” she says. “Parents will buy ice cream for the kids at Sav-On, then come to Robin Rose for a scoop of their own.”

Of course, when you can buy a gallon of supermarket ice cream for the price of a double scoop at Robin Rose, the latter product has to be compelling. “That’s the problem with ice cream--even when it’s bad, it’s good,” she says.

Still, the prospect of taking on “the big boys,” particularly in her Japan venture, delights Rose. A Japanese company called House Foods, equivalent to Kraft in this country, plans to open five Robin Rose stores within a year. “We are teaching them everything we know, and saying ‘run with it,’ ” Rose says. “I hope it leaves the competition in the dust. As far as ice cream in Japan goes, Baskin-Robbins is it. In the countryside, they all know ’31.’ ”

Although Rose is also exploring the prospects of bringing her ice cream to the People’s Republic of China, she insists that she’s not driven by visions of a multinational empire. “Our concept is still handcrafted ice cream,” she says. To this day, in fact, she mixes chocolate in an odd contraption that a friend fashioned from a discarded steam kettle, a free-standing electric motor and a stainless-steel boat propeller.

But the purity of her concept may prove self-limiting. “We’ve created a monster,” she says. “We’ve created such incredibly wonderful ice cream that you don’t need a second-scoop customer.”

And her concept of success in entrepreneurial capitalism has acquired an almost Zen-like quality. “I no longer define success in terms of a bottom line,” Rose says. “I define success as the ability to survive your mistakes.”