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Suggestions of new ice cream flavors to the Ben & Jerry's websiteFlavor #1: Blowin' Chunks-----Original Message----- From: consumer_affairs@benjerry.com [mailto:consumer_affairs@benjerry.com] Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 2:01 PM To: jfreese@indiana.edu Subject: Thanks for the suggestion Hello Jeremy Freese, Your idea has been logged into our Random Genius Ideas Database. If we decide to use it, you'll be hearing from us. Idea Type: Flavor Idea Name: Blowin' Chunks Description: You won't believe this unless you try it: regular vanilla ice cream with little bits of (cooked but not warm) Chicago ballpark franks mixed in. It's *awesome*. The name Blowin' Chunks comes from the fact that the ice cream has little chunks of meat in it and that Chicago is the "windy city" (get it?). My friends all thought this idea was totally insane until they tried it, and a few still do think I'm insane, but several of them are *hooked*. We make it all the time now at each other's houses. The chunks have to be small: you want them to be no larger than .25 cm on each side. If you start selling this flavor, you will ROCK the ice-cream world. (Also, if you think the meat thing will just strike people as too gross, we've found that tofu dogs make a passable substitute.) Flavor #2: Peas and Queues-----Original Message----- From: consumer_affairs@benjerry.com [mailto:consumer_affairs@benjerry.com] Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 2:30 PM To: jfreese@indiana.edu Subject: Thanks for the suggestion Hello Jeremy Freese, Your idea has been logged into our Random Genius Ideas Database. If we decide to use it, you'll be hearing from us. Idea Type: Flavor Idea Name: Peas and Queues Description: Okay, this is the other cool flavor some of my friends and I have invented. You start with chocolate ice cream, you stir in bits of cream-filled chocolate cake (we use Hostess Suzy Q's), and then you put in little bits of chick peas (a.k.a Garbanzo beans). The chick peas taste a little bit like peanuts, except better and they give it this sort of exotic taste. You need to ground up the chickpeas pretty small, to about the size of sprinkles on an ice cream cone. Also, we've found that about two tablespoons of chopped-up chickpeas per 8 ounces of ice cream makes the best mix. We call it peas and "queues" because people will be lining up outside for more once they've tried it! Flavor #3: Oreo Speedwagon
(Note: Erin Maher deserves credit for the idea for this ice cream, but she didn't give it as good of a name.) -----Original Message----- From: consumer_affairs@benjerry.com [mailto:consumer_affairs@benjerry.com] Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2000 11:13 PM To: jfreese@indiana.edu Subject: Thanks for the suggestion Hello Jeremy Freese, Your idea has been logged into our Random Genius Ideas Database. If we decide to use it, you'll be hearing from us. Idea Type: Flavor Idea Name: Oreo Speedwagon Description: Oreo stirred in with an espresso flavored ice cream. "Speedwagon" captures the caffeine buzz that one gets from the ice cream, and gives Ben and Jerry's yet another fond retro tie-in. Flavor #4: Loritta Lynn-----Original Message----- From: suggestion_box@benjerry.com [mailto:suggestion_box@benjerry.com] Sent: Friday, May 25, 2001 3:58 PM To: jfreese@ssc.wisc.edu Subject: Thanks for the suggestion Hello Jeremy Freese, Your idea has been logged into our Random Genius Ideas Database. If we decide to use it, you'll be hearing from us. Idea Type: Flavor Idea Name: Loritta Lynn Description: Like a Neopolitan ice cream for the New Millennium, this ice cream brings together three ascendant trends in consumption over the past 20 years: namely, the ever-rising popularity of (1) Ben and Jerry's ice cream, (2) "old school" country music, and (3) the psychiatric diagnosis of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The ice cream itself is classic rocky road ice-cream (chocolate ice cream, pecans, and marshmallows), with an added twist of a small dose of powdered Ritalin in every spoonful. While I recognize that this would make it the first ice cream that can only be dispensed with a prescription, and thus would require the added hassle of needing a licensed pharmacist in the store at all times it is served, I hasten to point out the following upsides: (1) profit margins in the pharmaceutical industry are even higher than those in the psuedocountercultural ice cream racket; (2) diagnoses of ADHD are easy to come by, especially for people of the main ice-cream consuming demographics; and (3) the success of the product can provide a beachhead for the dispensing of other prescription medications in ice-cream format (chocolate-and-raspberry Paxl Rose, anyone?), which can provide considerable opportunity for cross-industry synergy between Ben and Jerry's parent conglomerate and the nation's major pharmaceutical firms. Thanks again for your idea. Consumer Assistance Ben & Jerry's Flavor #5: Albert Ca-Moo!-----Original Message----- From: suggestion_box@benjerry.com [mailto:suggestion_box@benjerry.com] Sent: Friday, May 25, 2001 10:25 PM To: jfreese@ssc.wisc.edu Subject: Thanks for the suggestion Hello Jeremy Freese, Your idea has been logged into our Random Genius Ideas Database. If we decide to use it, you'll be hearing from us. Idea Type: Flavor Idea Name: Albert Ca-Moo! Description: Sold only by the pint, this pure white unflavored ice cream (*not* vanilla) sometimes has a single almond located near the bottom of the carton, and sometimes not. The "point" of this flavor would be to underscore the whole pointlessness of an endless proliferation of ice cream flavors in a world that has gone so terribly wrong. Indeed, the sheer absurdity of this ice cream might be enough to provoke an existential crisis in some emotionally complicated consumers, leading them to rapidly consume more pints as they search for sufficient meaning to justify going on with their miserable and utterly inconsequential existence. Yum! Thanks again for your idea. Consumer Assistance Ben & Jerry's Flavor #6: Elmer Fudge-----Original Message----- From: suggestion_box@benjerry.com [mailto:suggestion_box@benjerry.com] Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 12:38 PM To: jfreese@ssc.wisc.edu Subject: Thanks for the suggestion Hello Jeremy Freese, Your idea has been logged into our Random Genius Ideas Database. If we decide to use it, you'll be hearing from us. Idea Type: Flavor Idea Name: Elmer Fudge Description: Now that I've had more of a chance to review the sales and marketing information from the dossier that you sent me, it's plain that B&J does not do well relative to other ice cream makers among this nation's gun enthusiasts. Undoubtedly this is due in part to the liberal, countercultural image that B&J nurtured while it was trying to secure a market niche. But now that the company has sold out and become thoroughly mainstream, it's time to mend those fences with a flavor represented by the lovable hunter of Looney Tunes fame. The gimmick would be that after all these frustrated years of pursuing his elusive leporine quarry, Elmer finally bags his prey and settles down to celebrate the kill with some good ol' homemade ice cream. Elmer Fudge is a chocolate fudge ice cream, but with cherry swirl and marshmallows mixed in to represent the blood and fur of his vanquished foe. Perhaps finely chopped walnuts could also be included to represent shards of rabbit bone--the marketing boys will have to decide if this enhances or detracts from the flavor. Also, the company might considering offering a promotional donation to the NRA for every pint sold, so hunters can be celebrating individual freedoms with every scrumptuous spoonful! Thanks again for your idea. Consumer Assistance Ben & Jerry's Flavor #7: r.e.minem-----Original Message----- From: suggestion_box@benjerry.com [mailto:suggestion_box@benjerry.com] Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 5:51 PM To: jfreese@ssc.wisc.edu Subject: Thanks for the suggestion Hello Jeremy Freese, Your idea has been logged into our Random Genius Ideas Database. If we decide to use it, you'll be hearing from us. Idea Type: Flavor Idea Name: r.e.minem Description: Georgia Peach and Detroit's Motown Marshmallow ice creams are combined in a flavor that brings together the countercultural music titans of a half-generation ago with a counterpart titan of today. Two colors of M&M's--aluminum and red*--provide a delicious candy mix-in. For the ingredients list and other text on the carton, half of it will be largely incomprehensible, even while sounding very earnest and making mysterious allusions to hyacinth, Lenny Bruce, and trains. Meanwhile, the other half will be articulated with perfect clarity, albeit replete with profanities and concerned mainly with threatening harm to anyone who does not show the flavor appropriate respect. My idea for an ad campaign for this one could be a take-off on eminem's "Stan", where you have a Ben and Jerry's fan sending in increasingly demented flavor suggestions and seeming to become more crazed and hostile as the result of getting no response, until one day he abducts one of the Ben and Jerry's cows and rides her off a bridge, with a pint of r.e.minem in hand as he plunges cackling to his doom. Amusing, poignant, and scrrrumptuous! * Fans will also appreciate the attention to authenticity in choosing these colors. The references are to the poetically compelling lyrics "Aluminum, tastes like fear / Adrenaline, it pulls us near" in R.E.M.'s "E-Bow the Letter" and "My favorite color is red, like the bloodshed / From Kurt Cobain's head when he shot himself dead" in eminem's "Cum on Everybody." What better way to use the conglomerate marketing power of Ben & Jerry's to celebrate such deft couplets!
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