A horse, a wagon and a dairy in northwest Iowa.

Blue Bunny is the ice cream brand of Wells Enterprises, a dairy company based in Le Mars, Iowa. The company’s history, as told in the International Directory of Company Histories (volume 36, published by St. James Press in 2001), begins in 1913, when Fred H. Wells Jr. started delivering milk in Le Mars. The directory says he signed a contract that year with a local farmer, Ray Bowers, who sold him a horse, a milk wagon and a few cans and bottles, agreed to sell Wells the milk he produced, and agreed not to deliver milk himself in the same territory for five years. All the members of the Wells family, the directory says, helped in the dairy.

Ice cream came in the following decade. English Wikipedia says that around 1925 Wells and his sons began making ice cream and selling it in nearby Iowa towns, among them Remsen, Alton and Sioux City, and the directory’s timeline places the family’s ice cream deliveries in Sioux City in the 1920s. Wikipedia says that in 1928 the Fairmont company bought the ice cream distribution system in Sioux City together with the right to use the Wells name there. The directory says the dairy kept growing in the smaller communities of northwest Iowa through the Depression years, when it continued to buy milk from farmers as prices fell.

The family stayed in charge for decades. Wikipedia says the business was incorporated under Iowa law in 1977 as Wells’ Dairy, Inc., with the family keeping both ownership and management, and that a main ice cream plant, the North Plant, had been built in Le Mars in the 1950s. Wikipedia says the company sold its cultured dairy and fluid milk business to Dean Foods and its yogurt business to Grupo Lala in 2007 and 2008, leaving ice cream at the centre of the business.

A newspaper contest, a rabbit and a family firm sold to Ferrero.

The brand name came from readers. The International Directory of Company Histories says that during the Great Depression Wells Dairy sponsored a contest for a new name and logo for its ice cream, which was growing in popularity, and its timeline dates the adoption of the Blue Bunny name to 1935. The winner, the directory says, was a Sioux City Journal artist named George Vanden Brink, who was inspired by his son’s love of a blue bunny seen at Easter in a department-store window, and who was paid for the original Blue Bunny logo. Wikipedia gives the same account and says the contest was run in the Sioux City Journal because the family could no longer sell ice cream there under its own name.

The rabbit has changed shape over the years. The directory, written at the end of the 1990s, says the company replaced the “funny bunny” logo that had been prominent on the Blue Bunny ice cream label with a classic rabbit image, as part of a push for a more sophisticated image. In the same period, it says, Blue Bunny hired the television actor Kelsey Grammer, known for playing the psychiatrist Frasier Crane, to perform in a series of radio spots, chosen for an epicurean persona and a voice many Americans would recognise.

Growth then moved east. The Sioux City Journal reported on 17 April 2019 that Wells, still family-owned, had acquired Fieldbrook Foods, an ice cream maker headquartered in Dunkirk, New York, with plants in New York and New Jersey, giving the company a stronger foothold in East Coast markets. The paper quoted Mike Wells, then chief executive, on running the Le Mars plants seven days a week and on easing the pressure on staff.

Three years later the family agreed to sell. KTIV, the Sioux City television station, reported on 7 December 2022 that, according to a press release issued that day, Wells Enterprises would be acquired by the Ferrero Group, the Italian family-owned confectioner behind Ferrero Rocher, Nutella and Kinder. The release said Wells would remain a stand-alone business with its offices in Le Mars, and that production would stay in Le Mars, Henderson, Nevada and Dunkirk, New York. KTIV reported that the Wells name would stay on the building, that Mike Wells would become an adviser after the deal closed, and that the president, Liam Killeen, would be named chief executive. Wikipedia says Ferrero completed the purchase in 2023, so Ferrero has owned Blue Bunny since 2023.

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 local name that travelled across the country.

Blue Bunny’s identity rests on a story that the company and its historians have kept telling: a dairy that could not use its own family name in one city, a newspaper contest, and an artist who drew on his son’s delight in a blue rabbit at Easter. The International Directory of Company Histories records how that original drawing gave way to a more classic rabbit in the late 1990s, a change it ties to the company’s wish for a more sophisticated look, and how radio advertising with a well-known actor’s voice was used alongside it. The name itself, chosen in 1935, has stayed on the label through the shift from milk route to ice cream specialist and from family ownership to Ferrero.

The brand also sits within a wider family of products. English Wikipedia lists Blue Bunny alongside Bomb Pop and Halo Top among the brands Wells produces, and says the company acquired the Bomb Pop line when Merritt Foods closed in 1991. The 2001 directory lists drumsticks, ice cream sandwiches and Bomb Pops among the products then sold under or beside the Blue Bunny name. KTIV’s 2022 report on the Ferrero deal quoted Mike Wells describing Wells as a 100-year-old company focused on adapting for the next 100 years.

For a design guide, Blue Bunny shows how a regional name picked by newspaper readers, and a rabbit drawn by a local artist, can be redrawn and carried onto cartons and wrappers sold far from the town where it began. Compare it with Halo Top, another Wells ice cream, and Ferrero Rocher, a confection from its present owner. For this guide we use bunny blue, deep navy, vanilla cream and cherry red with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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