Super-Rich Ice Cream : Baskin Adds Zip to Its Line, Laces Entries With Liqueur

Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream Co., the Glendale-based granddaddy of the ice cream franchise business, plans to unveil today a new line of super-rich flavors--some laced with liqueur--that the company hopes will freeze the competition.

Baskin-Robbins is spending $5 million--a company record--to advertise its new International Creams, which the company describes as “a heightened taste sensation never before experienced by ice cream lovers.”

Baskin-Robbins Chief Executive Ron Marley doesn’t back down from that lofty description in its promotional literature.

“It really is a new taste sensation,” he said. “Not only have we heightened the creaminess and the body and texture of the product considerably, but we’ve gone a step further and loaded it with expensive and exotic ingredients.”

The new ice cream will initially be available in four flavors: Grand Marnier, which combines the French brandy and mandarin oranges and has a 1.7% alcohol content; Almond Amaretto, which has a 0.98% alcohol content; Chocolate Raspberry Truffle, and Cappuccino Chip. A fifth flavor, Brandied Cherries Flambe, will appear in July. (The alcohol content is too low to be regulated, Marley said.)

“We tried to make something much different than Baskin-Robbins ever did,” Marley said. “We’ve been inventing flavors for years, but the consumer doesn’t give us credit for coming up with a new product.”

Baskin-Robbins, which was founded 41 years ago by Irv Robbins and Burton Baskin, has had to deal in recent years with increased competition from supermarkets, which began selling a better grade of ice cream, and from ice cream parlors carrying “super-premium” ice cream, the kind with lots of butterfat and little air.

“We needed something that you cannot buy anywhere else and that would convince people to make that additional stop and to come back to those stores again,” Marley said. Baskin-Robbins, now a subsidiary of Allied-Lyons of London, invested more than $500,000 and three years of research developing the International Creams.

The company is so protective of its new product that the complete recipes for the ice creams supposedly are known to only three senior lab technicians. “I know they taste good, but I’m not sure how they’re made,” Marley allowed.