Here’s the Scoop : Brace Yourself: The Ice Cream Wars Are Heating Up
If you don’t like ice cream, you’re going to hate this summer.
Summer is to ice cream sales what winter is to sales of chicken noodle soup. About half of all the ice cream and frozen yogurt sold this year will be dished out over the next four months.
And following three years of virtually flat sales, ice cream makers are mounting a massive effort to whip up excitement in the $11-billion industry. On tap are gobs of new products, stepped-up marketing efforts and a few oddball items resurrected from the ice cream graveyard.
“It’s an utter free-for-all,” said Jerry Dryer, a food industry consultant who specializes in the dairy industry. “There’s still not one true national brand of ice cream out there. But everyone thinks they can be just that.”
That’s why Ben & Jerry’s has unleashed its first-ever national ad campaign, featuring such 1960s social activists as Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, eating vanilla ice cream. Baskin-Robbins, struggling to bolster its staid reputation, is about to break its biggest-ever ad campaign. And this line in a Haagen-Dazs TV spot, showing a couple in a suggestive bedroom scene, implies that eating its ice cream is better than sex: “At 11:30 at night, there’s one thing better than sleep.”
Still, advertising can’t solve one of the industry’s biggest problems: how to simultaneously appeal to health-conscious consumers and lovers of calorie-laden, chunk-filled brands. The ice cream kings are agonizing over whether Americans will increasingly turn to more health-conscious products like nonfat yogurts and sorbets, or continue to pay two bucks a scoop for an ever-broadening batch of super premium products.
So, they are churning out more of everything.
Despite several years of flat sales, industry consultants expect the improving economy and an array of new products to help boost sales 5% or more this year. This optimism has helped to trigger the new marketing campaigns.
Even so, there is concern among industry analysts.
“Consumers are not consistent,” said Jeff Reiter, senior editor at Dairy Foods magazine. “During the week they might want fat-free frozen yogurt, but on the weekend they may splurge with a double-scoop of chocolate-chip cookie dough.”
This has left everyone mimicking everyone else. Baskin-Robbins is stealing a page from Ben & Jerry’s book with a new line of frozen yogurt filled with chunks of fruit and candy. Haagen-Dazs is testing to see if consumers will buy its fruit-flavored sorbet at the supermarket. And Ben & Jerry’s has finally introduced a “smooth, no chunks” line as its belated admission that, to stay alive in the ice cream business, you’d better sell a lot of no-frills chocolate and vanilla.
Even the usually stodgy Dairy Queen chain is repackaging and reintroducing its Mr. Misty drinks as Misty Slushes. “We’re getting gender-sensitive here,” explained Gary See, vice president of marketing at International Dairy Queen.
Meanwhile, just as some are adding chunks to their ice cream, others are adding lines without them.
“Ice cream is really about childhood,” said Carol Moog, a psychologist and ad consultant. “But if your ice cream is all filled with too many chunks and other hardware, it loses the essence of its sensuality.”
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But Ben & Jerry’s says it is introducing its chunk-free line for a more practical reason: more than 25% of all ice cream sold is vanilla. And while supermarkets were happy to stock Ben & Jerry’s chunky flavors, few wanted to carry their vanilla or chocolate flavors, said Holly Alves, marketing manager at Ben & Jerry’s. To convince grocers that it is serious about vanilla and chocolate, Ben & Jerry’s decided to build an entire line around the flavors.
One of the toughest things was figuring out names for the new flavors. After all, Ben & Jerry’s has built its reputation concocting crazy names for its ice creams, like Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey. Among the names it considered for the smooth vanilla: Thrilla Vanilla.
The company finally decided to play it straight and simply call it vanilla. “While everyone is trying to come up with Ben & Jerry’s names for their ice creams, we decided to call them what they are,” Alves said.
But the “smooth” line has not been a hot seller at the chain’s 15 franchise stores in California, said Michael Gale, president of Los Angeles-based Ben & Jerry’s of California. The biggest seller these days is the nonfat yogurt being tested at its five Los Angeles stores.
Ben & Jerry’s is also recycling a flavor that it scrapped years ago--”White Russian,” which, like the drink, is made with coffee, sweet cream and Kahlua.
Meanwhile, rival Haagen-Dazs is testing consumer response in Los Angeles to five new sorbet flavors sold at supermarkets. The sorbet, which it promotes as “0% fat, 100% Haagen-Dazs,” tastes somewhat like a rich, fruit sherbet but contains no dairy ingredients.
Haagen-Dazs figures the best way to boost sales is to make it available everywhere. So the company recently struck deals to have its products sold everywhere from special freezers at Blockbuster Video stores to room service menus at Hyatt hotels, spokesman Dave Gilman said.
After years of watching Ben & Jerry’s and Haagen-Dazs eat away at its market share, Baskin-Robbins is finally fighting back with an $18-million ad campaign. It features an eccentric “Wizard of Wonders” who concocts all sorts of new treats.
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Just six weeks after its introduction, Cappuccino Blast, a sort of cappuccino milkshake, has emerged as Baskin-Robbins’ most successful new product in a decade, said Larry Kurzweil, vice president of marketing for the Glendale-based company.
This month the firm is introducing “Yogurt Gone Crazy,” a line of hard-scoop frozen yogurts. The yogurts are filled with chunky goodies and have Ben & Jerry-like names such as “Boom Choco Choco Laka” and “Raspberry Cheese Louise.”
But Kurzweil is quick to point out that years before Ben & Jerry’s existed, Baskin-Robbins was christening its new ice creams with silly names.
Way back in 1961, Baskin-Robbins called its peppermint with sunflower seed ice cream “Astronut.” But perhaps most original of all, in 1972 it dubbed its caramel fudge ice cream “Here Comes the Fudge.”
Briefly . . .
The Los Angeles agency Asher/Gould Advertising has won the estimated $23-million anti-smoking ad account for the California Department of Health Services. Western International Media will continue to handle media buying. . . . The Santa Monica agency Suissa/Miller has picked up the creative portion of the estimated $54-million account for Jenny Craig. The San Francisco office of J. Walter Thompson will continue to handle media buying. . . . The Los Angeles office of Foote, Cone & Belding has won a portion of the $3-million account for Honolulu-based Kauai Advertising Group.
Crop of the Cream
About half of the nation’s ice cream, frozen yogurt and related products were sold at supermarkets in 1993. Although private label brands still lead all others in ice cream and frozen yogurt sales at the grocery store, they are slowly losing market share. Here are the top five supermarket brands over the past year*, ranked by sales in millions of dollars:
ICE CREAM
Private label: $715.1 Good Humor/Breyer’s: 346.7 Dreyer’s/Edy’s: 156.7 Haagen-Dazs: 150.4 Ben & Jerry’s: 117.2
FROZEN YOGURT
Private label: 94.2 Dreyer’s/Edy’s: 72.3 Marigold: 60.6 Good Humor/Breyer’s: 59.9 Ben & Jerry’s: 44.0
* for 52-week period ended March 27, 1994
Sources: Information Resources, Dairy Foods Magazine
