Irvine Robbins: Maker of Baskin-Robbins ice-cream

The enormous ice-cream franchise Baskin-Robbins, with its famous 31 flavours, could as easily have been Robbins-Baskin, as Irvine Robbins and his brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, decided the order of their names by tossing a coin. This light-hearted approach to business paid off extremely well.

Even today, the first rule for candidates for being awarded a Baskin-Robbins franchise is that "You must be in touch with your ice-cream side", and the success of the business has depended as much on a facility for constructing puns as for using good ingredients. By 1968, the partners had created a total of 401 flavours (over the years there have been more than a thousand); the marketing genius was in naming confections such as Nuts to You, Huckleberry Finn, Here Comes the Fudge, Candi-date (for the 1960 presidential elections), Beatle Nut (coinciding with the Beatlemania of 1964) and Lunar Cheesecake (marking the 1969 moon landing).

Irvine Robbins was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1917, the son of Aaron Chmelnitsky Robbins, from Poland; Irv's mother, Goldie, was a Russian immigrant. He moved as a child to Tacoma, Washington, where his father, formerly a travelling salesman, became a partner in a dairy that had a retail outlet, which used surplus milk to make ice-cream and cottage cheese. The teenaged Robbins worked there, and sold ice-cream at five cents a cone – "a pretty big one, too".

Even then, he showed a flair for marketing, increasing banana-split sales by replacing the written description of "three scoops of ice-cream, a slice of banana, two kinds of toppings" with the punchier phrase "Super Banana Treat". This experience also persuaded him that ice-cream could be sold in larger quantity and more profitably in a dedicated ice-cream shop than in more general food shops.

He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in political science in 1939, and served in the US Army in the Second World War. Following being demobbed, Robbins opened his first shop in Glendale, California in December 1945. For capital, he used the $6,000 cash value of an insurance policy his father had bought for him at his bar mitzvah. Even then he offered 21 flavours. He called the shop "Snowbird" simply because, he said, he couldn't think of anything better.

A year later, his brother-in-law opened an ice-cream shop in nearby Pasadena. Robbins' father advised the pair not to go into business with each other, but by 1948 they had combined five Snowbird and three Burton shops into a single business, and bought a factory in Burbank to make their product. They devised their 31st flavour, Chocolate Mint, and hit on the idea of always stocking 31 flavours, one for every day of the month. But of the hundreds a year they experimented with at Burbank, only eight or nine would actually get into the shops; among those that failed the taste test were Lox and Bagels, Ketchup and Grape Britain.

In 1953 they began trading under the name Baskin-Robbins, decided to operate as a franchise operation, and by 1967, when the company was sold to the United Fruit Company for about $12m (£6.2m), had 500 franchises. Baskin died that December, aged only 54; but Robbins stayed on with the company for another 11 years as it expanded worldwide, including to the UK. He was always amazed, he said, at how his customers pitched ideas for new flavours to him. The current owners, Dunkin' Brands Inc, has about 5,800 franchises but, because of the contemporary complications of intellectual property ownership, does not any longer accept flavour ideas from the public.

At the Robbins family home in Encino, California, there was a soda fountain and the swimming pool was shaped like an ice-cream cone; Irvine Robbins' boat was named The 32nd Flavour. His son, John Robbins, rejected the family business and in his 1987 book, Diet for a New America, strongly criticised the meat and dairy industries.

Paul Levy

Irvine Robbins, ice-cream maker: born Winnipeg, Manitoba 6 December 1917; married 1942 Irma Gevurtz (one son, two daughters); died Rancho Mirage, California 5 May 2008.