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One of the real oddities of the ice cream industry is that business firms ranging in size from megacorp down to mom and pop can all do very well. No company can be said to dominate; Dart & Kraft, which makes Sealtest and Breyers ice cream, is in first place with sales of $337.3 million in 1979, but its market share is only 12.2%. Borden, with $257.8 million in sales and a 9.3% market share, comes second; Lever Bros., which owns Good Humor, is in seventh place with $62.9 million in sales and a 2.3% market share; and Howard Johnson is ninth with $48.6 million in sales and a 1.7% slice of the ice-cream pie. At the other end of the range, often with thoughts of rising fast, is the beefy red arm offering a just-scooped cone to a customer through a candy-store window. Sometimes the arm can write some impressive profit figures. The Baskin-Robbins chain (whose promotion of bubble-gum ice cream means that discriminating adult coneheads write off its 2,600 shops as hangouts for eleven-year-olds) has oases in Kuwait and Qatar. But Baskin-Robbins, now owned by a European-based conglomerate, started out in California in the 1940s as a two-man operation, with Brothers-in-Law Irv Robbins and Burt Baskin scooping furiously. Another pioneer scooper is Earl Swensen, 69, who still owns his original San Francisco ice-cream parlor. Ten years ago, he sold the chain it gave birth to, however, and Swensen's, which has a shop in the Singapore airport, among many other places, recently opened its 300th franchise.
People are lining up with their money in their hands, but there is a question to be asked about the status-label ice-cream craze. Are people buying the alligator or the shirt? Is the good stuff really that good? "If you think it is, it is," says Glenn Witte, a spokesman for the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers.
One pop-psychology mix-in ladled freely on the expensive-ice-cream phenomenon proposes that when a meal in a good restaurant costs what a used car once did, and when a new car costs what a house once did, a $2 cone is the only way most of us have to gratify our wistful yearning for luxury. Cheap at the price.
A variant entrail-reading suggests that when people break faith with their diets, as they always do sooner or later, they want to do it with a strumpet certifiably and wickedly luxurious. Actually, according to a recent Consumer Reports calculation, a half-cup serving of superpremium vanilla ice cream contains only 267 calories, compared with 363 for a 5-oz. piece of homemade apple pie. A 154-lb. person, nutritionists say, can burn off half a dish in 21.2 min. of moderate skiing, 87.6 min. of golfing or painting furniture, or 188.6 min. of lying down and daydreaming. The difficulty, of course, lies with those of us for whom half a cup of ice cream is a trifling preamble to an evening of empty-the-carton.