A Youngstown ice-cream parlour and a family idea.

Good Humor began in an ice-cream parlour in Youngstown, Ohio. English Wikipedia says the brand was started by Harry Burt in the early 1920s with the Good Humor bar, a chocolate-coated ice-cream bar on a stick sold from ice-cream trucks and retail outlets. The company story Wikipedia tells is a family one. Burt, who owned the parlour, copied the chocolate-coated ice-cream bar that had recently appeared in Iowa. His daughter Ruth thought the new novelty tasted good but was too messy, and his son, Harry Burt Jr., suggested using a wooden stick as a handle. Wikipedia says they tried the idea in the store’s hardening room and found that the stick formed a strong bond once the ice cream had frozen.

The stick came with a way of selling. Wikipedia says that in 1920 Burt outfitted twelve street-vending trucks in Youngstown with simple freezers and bells to sell his “Good Humor Ice Cream Suckers”, and that the original bells came from his son’s old bobsled. Wikipedia says Harry Burt Jr. opened a franchise in Miami, Florida, by 1925.

Burt sought legal protection for the method. According to Wikipedia, he applied for patents in January 1922, and they were granted in October 1923 after Burt Jr. travelled to Washington, D.C., with samples to show how the product differed from the chocolate-coated bar from Iowa. The patents covered the equipment and process for making frozen novelties on a stick rather than the product itself. Wikipedia says Good Humor sued the Popsicle Corporation in 1925 and that the parties settled out of court by October 1925.

In 1928, Wikipedia says, the Burt family sold its interest to the Midland Food Products Company, owned by a group of Cleveland businessmen, which renamed the business the Good Humor Corporation of America and began selling franchises. Franchises and company branches soon carried the name to Detroit, Chicago, New York and other cities.

Salutes, a handbook, Lipton and a merger.

Through the 1930s, Wikipedia says, the business was controlled by the family of the New York financier Michael J. Meehan. Good Humor sold through trucks and also through push carts, bicycles, shoulder boxes and even a boat, and at most branches the season ran from April to September. Vendors followed strict rules. Wikipedia says a vendor could be fired for not saluting a customer smartly, or for saying “Good Humor Ice Cream” instead of the proper “Ice Cream Good Humor”, because the company treated “Good Humor” as a noun and “ice cream” as the description. The rules were set out in a handbook titled “Making Good at Good Humor”, and women were not hired as vendors until 1967.

The name reached the cinema too. Wikipedia says the company parked trucks outside film studios to attract publicity, and that in 1950 the actor Jack Carson starred in the feature film The Good Humor Man. Wikipedia says a promotion awarded a free bar to customers who found “lucky stick” stamped on their stick.

In 1961, Wikipedia says, the Meehan family sold Good Humor to Thomas J. Lipton, the U.S. subsidiary of Unilever, and Lipton created a grocery division to sell Good Humor products in supermarkets. Unilever owned the brand from 1961. The street business changed under that ownership. Wikipedia says Good Humor replaced some of its older trucks with large vans and worked with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to fit vending trucks with school-bus-style “stop” swing arms. In 1978, it says, Good Humor closed its street-vending operations and became a distributor; many former vendors became independent operators, and the company concentrated on the grocery trade.

Unilever then built a larger American ice-cream business around the name. Wikipedia says that in 1989 Unilever bought Gold Bond Ice Cream of Green Bay, Wisconsin, which owned Popsicle, and that in 1993 it bought Isaly Klondike, maker of the Klondike bar, and the ice-cream division of Kraft General Foods, including Breyers and Sealtest. These operations were combined as Good Humor-Breyers. Wikipedia says Unilever moved its American ice-cream division into its main offices in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in 2007.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all American ice-cream names. Ice-cream brands in general reach people in several ways at once: a carton in a supermarket freezer, a wrapped novelty in a corner-shop cabinet, a cone handed out of a truck window or a sundae served at a restaurant counter. A single name can travel through all of these, and the same product can be sold under different names in different parts of the country.

Because the product is frozen, much of an ice-cream brand’s identity is carried by its packaging and its outlets rather than by the ice cream itself: the shape and colour of a carton, the print on a paper or plastic wrapper, the livery of a truck, a jingle or a slogan, and the lettering on a sign. The company behind the name may have changed hands, merged its factories or licensed the name to someone else, so the questions worth asking are plain ones: who started it, who owns it now, and where it is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A shared logo, a new tune and a demerger.

The Good Humor mark has been tied to Unilever’s wider ice-cream identity for much of this century. Wikipedia says that since 2000 Good Humor has been one of many Unilever ice-cream businesses to use the international Heartbrand in its logo; it removed the Heartbrand in 2009 and brought it back as part of the logo from 2014. The products themselves have long been varied. Wikipedia says the original “Good Humor” was a chocolate-coated vanilla ice-cream bar on a stick, and that later bars were coated in toasted almond, coconut, chocolate cake, strawberry shortcake and chocolate éclair.

The trucks returned to the story in 2020, through their music. InsideHook reported on 13 August 2020 that Good Humor was dropping the traditional tune “Turkey in the Straw”, a folk melody from the early 19th century commonly played by ice-cream trucks and also used in blackface minstrel shows, and had asked the Wu-Tang Clan rapper RZA to write a replacement. Citing a press release, InsideHook said RZA drew on childhood memories of chasing ice-cream trucks in Staten Island, blending traditional truck sounds with jazz and hip-hop. RZA said: “We wanted to make a melody that includes all community, that’s good for every driver, that’s good for every kid.” Wikipedia notes that Good Humor no longer operates trucks directly; the new jingle was offered to drivers from August 2020.

Ownership moved again in 2025. English Wikipedia says that on 1 July 2025 Unilever’s ice-cream division became an independent subsidiary called The Magnum Ice Cream Company, with headquarters in Amsterdam. Food Manufacture reported on 9 December 2025 that Unilever had completed the demerger of its ice-cream business, now known as The Magnum Ice Cream Company, with shares trading in London, Amsterdam and New York. Wikipedia’s Good Humor article places the brand with The Magnum Ice Cream Company.

For a design guide, Good Humor shows how a sales method — the white truck, the bell and the bar on a stick — can become a brand’s visual memory long after the company stopped running the trucks itself. Compare it with Popsicle, the stick brand that later shared an owner with it, and Klondike, another bar that joined it under Unilever in 1993. For this guide we use cherry red, truck white, sky blue and chocolate with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Good Humor’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.