Irvine Robbins, who started scooping ice cream as a kid in his family’s Seattle and Tacoma stores, used his entrepreneurial spirit to create Baskin-Robbins, the world’s best-known ice cream business. The oldest of three children born in Canada, Robbins and his family moved to Seattle in the 1920s. He attended Garfield High School and, after his father started the Olympic Dairy in Tacoma, Stadium High School, where he graduated in 1935. After earning a degree in political science from the University of Washington and serving in the U.S. Army, Robbins started his first ice cream shop in Glendale, California, on December 7, 1945, funded primarily by a cashed insurance policy gifted by his father at Irvine's Seattle bar mitzvah. Partnering with his brother-in-law Burt Baskin and renaming his business Baskin-Robbins in 1953, the company grew to include more than 8,000 shops in 52 counties, serving more than 300 million guests annually – including President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle (Robinson) Obama on their first date. As Robbins often said: "We don't just sell ice cream; we sell fun."
Uncle Sam, the Ice Cream Man
Irvine Robbins was born on December 6, 1917, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He was the oldest of three children and the only boy born to Goldie (Chmelnitsky) Robbins (1894-1991) and Aaron Ernest Robbins (1886-1948). His mother was born in the Ukraine; his father was born in Russia and moved to Montreal with his family when he was a child. Aaron and Goldie struggled financially, and that struggle made Aaron Robbins insistent on not wasting anything, an ethos that carried on for decades in his dairy business – and his son’s future ice cream empire.
Goldie’s sister Rose married Samuel Berch (1888-1951), a Russian immigrant whose family immigrated to Winnipeg for work in the milling business. Berch followed his father into the grain business, but in 1920 the 31-year-old decided to move his wife and three daughters to Seattle. He first worked with produce, and then, after saving a few thousand dollars, used the money to purchase the Velvet Ice Cream Company. Velvet Ice Cream first appeared in Seattle newspapers in 1916, when it was located in the 600 block of Pine Street, and then at 2nd and Pike. By 1920, the company was at 1222 Howell Street. The small storefront started as a one-truck operation, but in 1921 Velvet merged with Arctic Ice Cream (4333 University Way) and opened an ice cream plant at 1620 Broadway on Capitol Hill.
The Velvet Ice Cream Company was sometimes advertised as having the first ice cream plant in Seattle, making Arctic bars, nutty rolls (with ice cream in the middle), Velvet cherry gold ice cream, bricks of ice cream with angel food coating, and more. While they may have had the first large-scale plant and the first of some unique flavors, there were other manufacturers, and ice cream was first sold in Seattle decades earlier, on May 18, 1872 by a merchant on Mill Street (now Yesler Way) with ice imported by the Puget Sound Ice Company from the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Velvet became the exclusive ice cream of the Bon Marche department store, went on ships to Asia, and was served in Great Northern Railway dining cars. By March 1921, the construction of the new million-gallon capacity plant was advertised in newspapers, and nearly 100 drug stores and confectionary shops were selling Velvet ice cream, often promoted as a health benefit. Flavors included cherry marshmallow, roasted almond, peach bisque, and pineapple walnut. Velvet also made ice cream cakes with marshmallow icing, and advertisements boasted their ice cream was more nutritious than steak.
In 1924, when Berch was president of Seattle-based Western Dairy Products – a manufacturer of ice cream across Washington, Oregon, and into Alaska – he was also elected to the National Ice Cream Manufacturers Board of Directors. Berch, who spoke five languages and lived along Lake Washington Boulevard, obtained a patent for packaging ice cream and turned the Velvet company into a multimillion-dollar operation. Velvet and Western Dairy had operations in the 1500 block of 4th Avenue S, just south of where T-Mobile Park is today, and after Berch and J. Frank Holt founded Arden Farms Company in 1925, those facilities became an Arden operation. By the time of Berch’s death in 1951, he’d grown the business from a one-truck operation to a company with 48 plants across Washington, Oregon, and California. But perhaps his most lasting impression was inspiring his young nephew, Irvine Robbins. Sticking a scoop into an ice cream container at his uncle’s store "was the greatest thrill of my life," Robbins once said, recalling how he stood on a chair to dig into a 10-gallon bucket (Marshall).
Irv Goes to Work
Early in his time in Washington, Berch convinced his sister and brother-in-law – Irv’s parents – to move to Seattle, which they did in 1923. The Robbins family lived on 22nd Avenue on Capitol Hill, and Aaron Robbins became president of the men’s club at Temple De Hirsch. Irv walked four blocks to Isaac Stevens Elementary School and took part in Boy Scout Troop 10 meetings in the school’s basement. Robbins said his father – who started selling newspapers in Montreal at age 12 to help his struggling family – had expectations for Irv that were higher than for his sisters because he was an older boy, and that attention developed patterns of work that benefited Robbins later in his career.
"In Seattle at that time, it was almost a tradition in the Temple De Hirsch that the young lad would be bar mitzvahed in the morning, and there would be a luncheon, and then they would take them to a movie at the Blue Mouse Theatre," Robbins recalled in 1996. "Mine followed that tradition ... We had all my friends there, and my parents' friends, at this bar mitzvah. Then we went to the Washington Athletic Club in Seattle for a luncheon ... It was a very exciting day, and when I came home my bed was covered with presents. I was told that as I opened each present I must write down who it came from because it was my responsibility to write each one of them a letter. It’s funny how that training caused me to do the same with my children, and now I see it with our children doing the same thing with their youngsters" (Robbins interview).
Robbins's first two high school years were spent at Garfield, which he took three streetcars to reach. He graduated from Tacoma’s Stadium High in 1935. Meanwhile, Berch helped convince Irv's father to buy a dairy, which he did when he purchased the Olympic Dairy in Tacoma. Irv Robbins recalled his business career started when he was about 10, working in his dad’s ice cream store in the alley behind Rhodes Brothers Department Store in Tacoma. The ice cream store, at 954 Court C, was primarily designed to sell surplus from the milk plant as cottage cheese or ice cream. "When they came in to buy cottage cheese or a loaf of bread or whatever, it was a drudgery," Irv Robbins recalled. "But when they came in to buy ice cream, everybody got a kick out of it. And I guess because I’m a fun-loving guy, I got a kick out of being behind the counter. I could joke with the customers and nobody felt upset. So, in a sense, that may have been the start of what became Baskin-Robbins” (Robbins interview).
Tacoma Days
On May 26, 1924, a three-story factory for Velvet and Olympic ice cream opened at 613 E 25th Street in Tacoma with fanfare from hundreds of onlookers. Visitors were invited to inspect the plant and take tours. Tacoma Mayor A. V. Fawcett handed a key to Aaron Robbins to officially open the plant. Ice cream was given to all guests, and kids received caps and souvenirs. Robbins arranged for dancing throughout the evening, and told reporters that visitors could expect one of the best orchestras in Tacoma. Irv Robbins worked at that location, too, developing marketing skills to help grocery stores and soda fountains sell more ice cream. He recalled having a knack for developing interesting ice cream flavors, and noticed how all kinds of people would come to his father’s Tacoma shop for a small, affordable pleasure.
The crowds were so large at the plant opening, Aaron Robbins personally wrote an apology to the thousands of people who came but were unable to tour the plant, saying people could come back for an inspection any time, and that those visits would come with samples. The apology and invitation ran in the Tacoma Times and the Tacoma News-Tribune – and were effective. Aaron Robbins's Olympic Dairy kept growing until a new plant was needed in 1939. That plant, at South 9th and K streets, was constructed for more than $75,000 (roughly $1.64 million in 2024 dollars) and had the finest all-new manufacturing and refrigeration equipment, Irv Robbins said. Olympic Dairy Company moved in on May 26, 1939. Aaron Robbins commissioned a 30-foot-high milk carton - a landmark advertised as the biggest milk bottle in Tacoma – to go atop the building, which later was known as the Arden Farms building. The concrete and wire milk bottle lasted until October 5, 1961, when it was scrapped because the company had moved to paper cartons.
In the fall of 1934, Irv Robbins enrolled at Stadium High School. "When I arrived in Tacoma, I didn’t know a soul in school," he recalled. "I remember learning that they were going to have an assembly of all the students, where anybody who want to try out for yell leader could do it. I said, 'How can I do anything? Nobody knows me and I’m not going to get any votes on the strength of relationships.' So I cooked up a little scheme that got me elected over students who had been there for years. It happened that the Stadium High School auditorium had a balcony, and part of that balcony looked over or was almost at the stage. So when the kids were sitting on the stage waiting to be called, I wasn’t there. And then finally the guy says, 'Well, Irvine Robbins is next, but I don’t know where he is.' And I was in the very back of the balcony and I yelled out as loud as I could, 'I’m Irv!' And I ran down the steps and jumped from the balcony to the stage – almost killed myself – and then led a yell. Well, everybody got excited about the novelty of that, and I was elected yell leader, and I’d been in the school all of two days! ... Two days later, I’m out on the football field leading yells and I don’t even know the school colors!" (Robbins interview).
Robbins worked on the school newspaper The World, thinking he might someday be a professional reporter. "But I got into the business end of the paper somehow, and became involved as the circulation manager. Now, the circulation manager was to get the paper distributed in all the classrooms. But I had an idea that we could sell that paper in the little stores that surrounded the school. And I went out and sold newspapers to those stores and made a few bucks for the circulation department" (Robbins interview). By 1935, classmates listed him as a prominent senior in the yearbook. He was chairman of the pep parade, was involved with drama productions, became a study hall assistant, and helped with assemblies. His grades were fair, though not quite what his father wanted. As Robbins once explained, he never had any academic honors, but he had a lot of buddies.
A Baskin-Robbins Wedding
After Aaron Robbins's dairy merged with his brother-in-law’s dairy, the Robbins family moved back to Seattle, where Aaron worked as general manager. His brother-in-law’s role was to expand by finding other dairies in Washington they could buy.
Irv Robbins attended the College of Puget Sound (now the University of Puget Sound) and in 1939 earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Washington, where he joined the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. He met the former Irma Gevurtz, a Portland, Oregon, native whom Robbins married in 1942, and they had three children: Marsha, John, and Erin. Irma also earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Washington.
Robbins enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. He was a recruiting and induction officer in Fort Douglas, Utah; worked in the Army’s specialized training program at Stanford, California, and also served at Camp Roberts in Central California. It was during this period at Camp Roberts that Robbins thought of what he might do after his service. He dreamt of what the perfect ice cream store would look like. "To my knowledge," he said, "there were no stores that specialized solely in ice cream. Over the years I became so frustrated when I was working for my dad with these merchants who had ice cream but didn’t market it properly. They put it on the back burner, so to speak. It was also in addition to other goods. I said, 'My goodness, what would happen if that was the key item? How we could glorify it!' So, I had this crazy idea of opening a store that sold just ice cream" (Robbins interview).
On October 10, 1943, Irv's sister Shirley Belle married Chicago native Burt Baskin at Glendale Golf and Country Club just south of the Seattle city limits. Irv, then an Army sergeant, was the best man, his wife Irma was matron of honor, and the Robbins's sister Elka was maid of honor. Baskin, who served as a Naval Reserve Lieutenant Commander in World War II, bought an ice cream freezer from an aircraft carrier supply officer and sold his first ice cream to fellow servicemen in the South Pacific. A decade later, in 1953, Irv Robbins and Burt Baskin would open the first Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop.
Launching in Southern California
Robbins intended to open his first store in Tacoma. But when he couldn’t find a suitable location, he shifted his sights to the San Francisco Bay Area because of his World War II connection to Stanford. On a vacation to Southern California, Robbins wanted to see the celebrity gravesites at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. He didn’t make it to Forest Lawn, but he did spend time exploring Glendale and found a small storefront for rent. It would be perfect for an ice cream shop, he thought. He would call it Snowbird Ice Cream.
Robbins's plan was to open on his 28th birthday, December 6, 1945, but he was concerned about the shop’s scuffed cement. Robbins made a quick trip to Sears, bought gray enamel paint, and covered the floor until he thought it was perfect. But when he returned the next morning, the paint advertised as quick-drying still wasn’t dry. When he went back to the salesman, Robbins realized that quick-drying in those days meant up to 36 hours – and Robbins took that as a lesson to define your words. When the floor was finally set, he set up school chairs with armrests – designs he would eventually buy by the hundreds – that followed the model of his father’s store in Tacoma. When Snowbird opened on December 7, 1945, in Glendale, Robbins brought in $53 – nearly $900 in 2024 dollars. Many of the Berch family that had been in Seattle were among the first customers. Samuel Berch had moved to Los Angeles in 1928, but kept his Capitol Hill home, telling friends the move would be temporary. It became official after he purchased a Beverly Hills mansion and moved Arden Farms' headquarters to Los Angeles. In the early days of Snowbird, Robbins bought ice cream from Arden. He also believed he benefited from the timing of Snowbird’s opening – roughly two months after the end of World War II – selling new and traditional flavors of ice cream after sugar rations during the war years.
Details on the amount of startup money he had vary, but Robbins cashed in an insurance policy of at least $3,000 given by his father at his bar mitzvah at Seattle’s Temple De Hirsch. Snowbird, Robbins once said, was the best name he could come up with. His advertising was large window signs and classified ads in the Glendale News Press. Initially, Snowbird also sold frozen foods as a way to help Robbins make the rent. That didn’t last long, with grocery stores selling the bulk of frozen meals. But the ice cream did, and Robbins wanted to sell all kinds of it: cones, sundaes, banana splits, milkshakes. "My dad was so very supportive. Goodness, he would write me a letter – he was in Tacoma at the time – and I would get pages upon pages of letters ... I have those same letters. I have re-read them, and they were just jewels of wisdom" (Robbins interview). In one, Aaron Robbins told his son not to worry about the struggling sales that were leading to a lack of sleep. Maybe that’s good because you can do some thinking, he wrote.
Robbins's second store was in a former Glendale gas station – a place he advertised as the world’s first drive-through ice cream store. The first franchisee, Charles Kovaliker, was a former bike store owner who learned of the opportunity from a classified ad. When Baskin returned from his war service, Robbins had three stores of his own and offered to show his brother-in-law where to get equipment and supplies. Baskin and Robbins might have been partners earlier if not for the advice of Robbins's father, who had partnered with his own brother-in-law. Creating a partnership early would lead them to compromise too often in an effort to get along, he advised. As a result, Baskin opened a Burton's Ice Cream Shop in Pasadena in 1946. By 1949, the pair had more than 40 stores in Southern California and had purchased their first dairy, in Burbank – a move that allowed them to have complete control over ice cream production and flavor development. The separate store identities remained until 1953, when the original Snowbird location at 1130 South Adams Street in Glendale became the first Baskin-Robbins.
31 Flavors
Baskin-Robbins would become known for serving 31 flavors of ice cream. "As a kid, I was in Chicago at the World’s Fair in 1933, and like every able-bodied young man, I had to go to a burlesque," Robbins recalled. "I went to Minsky’s Burlesque, where I saw a sign that said, '21 Girls 21,' so that gave me the idea for making a sign of '21 Flavors 21.' When the first (Snowbird) store opened, it had that sign in the window" (Robbins interview). The 31 Flavors branding – a flavor for each day of the month – came in 1953. Irma Robbins was a high school friend of Jack Roberts, who with Carson/Roberts created the largest ad agency in Los Angeles. For $500, they wrote ads for Baskin and Robbins, suggested the 31 Flavors logo, and recommended they combine to a single name. It was a coin flip that decided the order of Baskin-Robbins.
By 1959, Baskin-Robbins had spread throughout Southern California, and that year the first Arizona store opened in Phoenix. There were four stores there within four months. The company then expanded to Wisconsin, Maryland, and Chicago. It reached Washington in the 1960s, opening the first store at 3200 NE 45th Street in Seattle's Laurelhurst neighborhood. That store lasted until 2014 and was demolished in 2020.
Early in his Snowbird days, Robbins was introduced by his father to a salesman for the Lily-Tulip Cup Company who sold five-spindle milkshake mixers to soda fountains. Robbins didn’t have the money for one of the mixers, but offered to make roughly 11 weekly payments until he did. As Baskin and Robbins's ice cream business expanded – benefiting from licensing and selling stores to dedicated on-site managers – he ordered more and more milkshake machines from that entrepreneur. Robbins recalled: "He saw I was starting to franchise and said, 'Hey, that’s a good idea. Incidentally, I’ve got to go call on a guy up in San Bernardino. You want to go with me? He’s buying three machines, he’s got a hamburger joint up there.' So I went with this guy up to see the store, and sure enough he was selling milkshakes like crazy. My friend – now my friend – got the idea that he could franchise that scheme, and this is the story of Ray Kroc and McDonald’s Hamburgers, and how I had a proprietary interest in what they were doing" (Robbins interview).
A National, and then International Brand
Robbins and his wife Irma brainstormed the idea to send kids a birthday postcard for a free cone. Irma would take home the sign-up cards, catalog them by date, and five days ahead of each birthday address the postcards by hand. Nearly 80 years later, the company still offers free birthday cones to a database of millions.
The couple’s trip to New Orleans inspired Pralines ‘N Cream – the company’s most popular flavor internationally. Once when the stores ran out, the company’s headquarters received fan mail wanting it back, and even the newspaper column Dear Abby pleaded for its return. Lunar Cheesecake was created for the moon landings. Valley Force Fudge was made for the 1976 bicentennial. Baseball Nut was unveiled in 1958 after the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. Gorba Chocolate was named for Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the fall of communism. Daiquiri Ice, created by Robbins, was the favorite flavor of both Bing Crosby and Justin Timberlake. In February 1964, during the excitement surrounding the Beatles’ first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show, a New York Post reporter called Robbins to ask if the company was creating a new flavor for the event. Beatle Nut, he replied – then modified the name of an ice cream already in process and had it delivered to stores in five days.
By the mid-1960s there were more than 400 stores nationwide. Baskin and Robbins continued to lead operations until 1967, when they sold the company to United Fruit (now United Brands) for an estimated $12 million – roughly $110 million in 2024 dollars adjusted for inflation. Less than six months later, Burt Baskin died of a heart attack at age 54. Robbins remained with the company, which expanded internationally in 1971, until his retirement in 1978. The Robbinses named their boat the 32nd Flavor, and the backyard of their Encino, California, home had an ice cream cone-shaped swimming pool and a soda fountain. Though Pralines ‘N Cream, mint chocolate chip, vanilla, and chocolate were the most popular flavors, Robbins said Jamoca Almond Fudge – first made with coffee brewed at the manufacturing facilities – was his favorite if he was forced to choose.
Into Retirement
In the summer of 1978, the same year Robbins retired, a teenaged Barack Obama got his first job, at a Honolulu Baskin-Robbins near his grandparents' home. Reflecting on that job in 2016, the President said he ate so many free scoops that he lost his taste for ice cream for a while. The policy that employees would get free scoops was one set by Robbins from the start: better to have them enjoy it than steal it, he thought. Obama said that while his first job wasn’t exactly glamorous, it taught him about responsibility and the hard work of balancing a job, family, and school. "I’ll never forget that job – or the people who gave me that opportunity – and how they helped me get to where I am today," he said during his second term (Feloni).
On a summer night in 1989, when Obama finally convinced Michelle Robinson to go out with him after weeks of trying, he offered to buy her ice cream. "I treated her to the finest ice cream Baskin-Robbins had to offer, our dinner table doubling as the curb," Obama recalled. "I kissed her, and it tasted like chocolate." Today, a plaque with that quote marks the spot outside the Baskin-Robbins that still operates at 1418 E 53rd Street in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.
By its 75th anniversary, Baskin-Robbins had marketed more than 1,300 flavors and opened 8,000 shops in 52 countries, serving more than 300 million guests annually. In 2020, parent company Duncan Brands was sold to Inspire Brands, which includes Arby’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Jimmy Johns, and Sonic Drive-In. The year prior, Baskin-Robbins reported $160 million in U.S. revenue with more than 2,400 U.S. stores, all locally owned and operated. That included Seattle’s last remaining location (as of 2024) at 826 NE Northgate Way, which franchisee-owners Don and Terry Tschopp opened on March 26, 1970.
Robbins’s son John – an environmentalist and best-selling author of multiple books – wrote Diet for a New America in 1987, which sold more than 3 million copies. The pro-environment book linked the impacts of factory farming on human health. According to The Independent, when Irv Robbins was ill in the late 1980s, a doctor advised him to read it – and adopting some of that advice was a factor in living another two decades.
Irv Robbins died at age 90 of natural causes on May 5, 2008, at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California. Four days later, Baskin-Robbins invited ice cream lovers across the globe to honor his memory with 31 seconds of silence at 3:31 p.m. local time. He was survived by Irma, his wife of 66 years, his three children, his sisters Shirley Familian and Elka Weiner, five grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. His oldest daughter, Marsha Veit, recalled that he always came home for family dinner, but loved to work Christmas and Thanksgiving and other typical vacation days because he found a profession he truly enjoyed. "As hard as we were working, as many hours as we were putting in, we did not feel put upon," Irv Robbins once said. "We didn’t feel sorry for ourselves, working so hard – because we were enjoying every minute of it" (Robbins interview).
