A sad day for everyone. The world entire should cry a tear. An ice cream sample spoon sized tear.

Irvine Robbins, co-founder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor has died.

Robbins, born in 1917 was a Canadian-American who co-founded Baskin-Robbins in 1945 with brother-in-law Burt Baskin.

He died on Monday and he was 90-years-old.

The Baskin-Robbins story began when Robbins was released from the Army in 1945 and opened the Snowbird Ice Cream store in Glendale, California. Robbins cashed in a $6,000 insurance policy given to him for his bar-mitzvah to start the business. Brother-in-law Burt Baskin owned a men’s store in Chicago, and married Robbins’ sister Shirley in 1942. He had enlisted in the Navy and was released from service early 1946 and came to California, where Robbins convinced him that selling ice cream was more fun than selling men’s ties & shirts, and within a couple of months he opened Burton’s Ice Cream in Pasadena, California.

By 1948, the five Snowbird and three Burton’s shops had been combined into a single enterprise, and they had devised their 31st flavor — Chocolate Mint. The partners came to the conclusion that because of the new stores they had opened, they were devoting less and less time to each individual store. “That’s when we hit on selling our stores to our managers,” Robbins said in the 1985 Los Angeles Times story. “Without realizing it at the time, we were in the franchise business before the word ‘franchise’ was fashionable. We opened another store and another and another. . .

In 1953, they renamed the company Baskin-Robbins, deciding the order of their names with a coin toss. The “31 flavors” concept was introduced that same year to bring attention to a deep menu that featured a flavor for every day of the month.

The company was sold to United Fruit Company for an estimated $12 million in 1967. Six months later, Burt Baskin died of a heart attack at age 54. Robbins stayed involved with the company for 11 more years and retired in 1978.

By 2003, Baskin-Robbins had become the world’s largest chain of ice cream stores, with 5,500 outlets around the world.

Tweet This Post 

• David Cook Wins Special Olympics… er, American Idol!
• Deborah Kerr = Dead
• 2007 RAZZIE Nominees Announced
• Sean Levert = Dead
• CBS buys Canadian series “Flashpoint”