Leo Stefanos, a Chicago shop and an ice cream bar.

The DOVEBAR began in a Chicago candy shop. English Wikipedia says the bar was created by Leo Stefanos at Dove Candies & Ice Cream, on 60th Street and Pulaski Avenue in Chicago, in 1956, and introduced nationally in 1984. The New York Times, reporting on 12 August 1986, said the Dove Bar, a hand-dipped ice cream bar, had been created more than 30 years earlier by Leo Stefanos.

The company tells the origin as a family story. Its “Dove Story” page, as archived in December 2013, says Stefanos opened the DOVE candy shop on the south side of Chicago in 1939, and that he later sliced a block of ice cream and dipped it in chocolate, which the company marks as the birth of DOVEBAR ice cream. Mars says Stefanos, a Greek-American candy-store owner, developed the bar after seeing his son race down the street after an ice cream truck, out of concern for his children’s safety, and that he spent months refining the recipe. The name, the company says, came from the candy shop, which Stefanos called DOVE for its “peaceful” quality.

The bar stayed close to home for its early decades. The company’s history says that Leo’s son Mike Stefanos took over the family business in 1977, and that in 1984 Mike presented DOVEBAR ice cream at the Fancy Food Show in Washington, D.C., after which orders started coming in from around the country. According to the same history, street vendors were selling the bars to children and adults in Chicago by the late 1970s. The New York Times reported in 1986 that the company was based in Burr Ridge, a suburb of Chicago, and that besides the bar it made Dove Delight, a premium ice cream, and a dessert wafer covered with dark chocolate.

From a family business to a Mars division.

The family sold the business in 1986. The New York Times reported on 12 August 1986 that Mars Inc., the candy maker, had confirmed the day before that it had acquired Dove Bar International Inc., maker of the hand-dipped ice cream bar. Terms were not disclosed. A Mars spokesman told the paper that Dove Bar would become a division of Mars and that its management would be kept on. The Times listed Mars’s other businesses at the time, among them Kal Kan pet food, Uncle Ben’s rice and M&M Mars candy. Mars has owned the DOVEBAR since 1986.

Mars says it bought the Stefanos family business and made DOVEBAR a household name by making it more widely available across the country. Wikipedia says the purchase covered the brand as a whole, including the Dove chocolate line as well as the ice cream, and that the bar is made by Mars today. The archived company timeline shows how the chocolate side grew under the new owner: it lists the launch of DOVE PROMISES milk and dark chocolates, each wrapper carrying a message printed on the inside, and a 50th birthday for DOVEBAR ice cream in 2006, marked with new varieties of DOVE products. The company also notes that what is sold in the United States as a DOVE chocolate bar is known in the United Kingdom as a GALAXY bar.

Production stayed near Chicago. The trade magazine Dairy Foods visited the Mars ice cream plant and reported on 16 February 2012 that Mars makes ice cream bars, sandwiches, stick novelties and cones at a facility in Burr Ridge, Illinois. The magazine said Mars entered the ice cream business in 1986 with the acquisition of Dove ice cream from the Stefanos family, and that within the first year it moved the business to the current site, a building originally put up for truck-parts manufacturing. At first, Dairy Foods reported, the site made only Dove ice cream bars, and a bell was rung each time a truckload was sold. The Snickers ice cream bar line was added in 1991 and the cone and stick lines in 2000. The magazine said Mars’s ice cream novelties for the North American market were all made there, with pints filled by a co-manufacturer, that Mars makes its own chocolate, and that it buys its ice cream mix from regional suppliers in the Midwest.

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.

One word shared by a shop, a bar and a chocolate line.

The DOVEBAR identity starts from a single word. The company says Leo Stefanos chose DOVE for his family candy shop because he wanted a peaceful, soothing name, and the same word passed to the ice cream bar he created there and then to the chocolates Mars built around it. The company styles the bar as one word in capitals, DOVEBAR, while The New York Times wrote “Dove Bar” in 1986 and Wikipedia uses the same two-word form. The name now appears on bars, pints and small bites, and on a chocolate range that shares the bar’s name.

The product itself has kept its basic form. Wikipedia says the bars are usually vanilla ice cream coated in milk or dark chocolate, with other versions including chocolate ice cream, fruit sorbet and coatings with nuts, and that they are sold singly or in three-packs. Wikipedia says Dove ice cream is also sold in pints and as “Minis”. The Dairy Foods visit of 2012 described the bars being made in a continuous length, portioned and then sent to the chocolate enrober, a method it said follows Mars’s approach to candy-bar production, which also turns out the Snickers ice cream bars made at the same plant.

For a design guide, DOVEBAR shows how a name taken from a neighbourhood candy shop can carry a family origin story onto a national brand, and how a chocolate company can let an ice cream bar and a chocolate range share one mark. Compare it with Snickers, whose ice cream bars are made in the same Burr Ridge plant, and Klondike, another chocolate-coated American ice cream bar. For this guide we use milk chocolate, dark cocoa, vanilla and antique gold with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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