A German ship, a creamery in Visalia and a plant in Oakland.

Dreyer’s is an American ice cream brand that carries the surname of William Dreyer, an ice cream maker who came to California from Germany. It is the western name of a business whose cartons read Edy’s in the eastern half of the country; English Wikipedia says the Dreyer’s name is used in the Western United States and Texas and the Edy’s name in the Eastern and Midwestern United States. Our Edy’s guide tells the shared story of the two names. This one follows Dreyer himself and the company that kept his name.

A detailed account of his career comes from the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, which ran an oral history project on Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, interviewing owners, investors and employees about the company’s growth between 1978 and 2006. The project page includes a timeline. It says that in 1906 Dreyer, then a galley boy, was given the job of making ice cream to celebrate his German ship’s arrival in America. After a brief stint making ice cream in New York City, the timeline says, he moved to Northern California and served a long apprenticeship with Peerless Ice Cream and the National Ice Cream Company.

He then worked for himself. The Bancroft timeline says Dreyer opened his own ice creamery in Visalia, in California’s dairy country, in 1921, and that during the 1920s he taught ice cream courses at the University of California, Davis and served as an officer of the California Dairy Industries Association. In 1926, it says, National Ice Cream recruited him to run a large new plant in Oakland.

Oakland is where the brand began. The timeline says that in 1928 Dreyer partnered with Joseph Edy, a successful Bay Area candy maker, to found a small ice cream factory on Grand Avenue, named the Grand Ice Cream Company. The street gave the business the word that still sits beside both family names on the carton. The following year produced a flavour tied to the partnership. The Bancroft timeline credits Dreyer with Rocky Road: it says that in 1929, purportedly to calm his nerves after the stock market crash of Black Thursday, he added walnuts, later replaced with almonds, to his chocolate ice cream and cut marshmallows into small pieces with his wife’s sewing shears. The name, the timeline says, gave people something to smile about in the face of the Great Depression; the same entry notes that an Australian confection of 1853 had been sold under the same name. The timeline also credits Edy and Dreyer with Toasted Almond and Candy Mint.

A son, three officers, two restaurateurs and Nestlé.

The partnership came apart after the Second World War. The Bancroft timeline says Dreyer’s son, William Dreyer Jr., entered the business in 1946, while Edy shifted his attention to candy, and that Edy and Dreyer officially dissolved their partnership in 1947. It dates the next step to 1948, when Dreyer built a new ice cream plant in Oakland and renamed the company Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, Inc.; English Wikipedia dates the change of name to 1953, the year the timeline says Dreyer retired and passed management to his son.

The family then sold. The timeline says that in 1963 William Dreyer Jr. sold the company to three of its key officers, Al Wolff, Bob Boone and Ken Cook. In 1977 it changed hands again, to William “Rick” Cronk and T. Gary Rogers, described in the timeline as fraternity brothers and struggling restaurateurs. Under them the brand moved beyond the Bay Area. The timeline says that in 1979 Dreyer’s entered Washington, Oregon and Arizona while keeping its direct store delivery model, in which the company used its own trucks, drivers and routes to look after its ice cream in the store.

Expansion brought the name question that gave the brand its eastern twin. The Bancroft timeline says that as East Coast-based Breyers, then owned by Kraft, and West Coast-based Dreyer’s moved into national markets, concerns about brand confusion led Dreyer’s to agree to use the name Edy’s in the eastern United States. In 1981 the company went public, with shares traded on NASDAQ under the ticker DRYR. In 1983 the Edy’s brand reached St. Louis, Milwaukee and parts of Ohio, and in 1985 and 1986, the timeline says, the company bought Maryland-based Berliner Foods and Midwest Distributing to serve new territory.

A Swiss buyer arrived in stages. The timeline says Nestlé acquired a stake in the company in 1994, and that in 2002 it acquired a majority, with rights to purchase the rest by 2006. BBC News reported on 19 January 2006 that Nestlé had taken full ownership of Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, a deal it had been poised to complete since taking its majority stake in 2003. English Wikipedia says that in December 2019 Nestlé announced it would sell all of its U.S. ice cream businesses, including Dreyer’s, Häagen-Dazs and Drumstick, to Froneri, the ice cream company Nestlé co-owns with the investment firm PAI Partners.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit in three corners of the freezer and the baby-food shelf: bagged frozen vegetables, pints and tubs of ice cream and gelato, and food for babies sold in jars and squeeze pouches. Each of those formats asks a lot of a small surface. A frozen bag is read through frost and at a glance from an open case; an ice-cream pint is turned in the hand, its lid seen from above; a jar or pouch is bought by a parent who wants to know quickly what is inside.

Names in these categories have often started with a family, a farm or a single shop and later passed to larger food companies, sometimes more than once. A label can therefore outlast several owners, and the place on the front of a pack is not always the place where the food is now grown, churned or packed.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where its food is made and how its packs and logos have changed — and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

Cookies ’n’ Cream, light lines, super-premium pints and Slow Churned.

Much of Dreyer’s identity has been carried by what went into the carton. The Bancroft timeline credits the company’s official ice cream taster, John Harrison, with Cookies ’n’ Cream in 1982. It lists a run of product lines that followed: lighter ice creams in 1987, a cholesterol-free frozen dessert called American Dream in 1990, No Sugar Added lines under both the Dreyer’s and Edy’s names in 1992, and a super-premium line of pints called Dreamery in September 1999. The same year, it says, Dreyer’s began a partnership with Mars to make mix-in products such as a Snickers ice cream bar, which ended with the Nestlé buy-out in 2002.

The company also made and moved other brands. The timeline says that from 1987 Dreyer’s acted as a distributor for Ben & Jerry’s, which helped cover the cost of its own delivery trucks, and that from 1989 it manufactured some Ben & Jerry’s pints at its plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In the 1990s it partnered with Nissho Iwai to market and sell Dreyer’s products in Japan. In 1993, the timeline records, Unilever outbid Dreyer’s for Breyers.

A change to the product itself came in 2004. The timeline says Dreyer’s and Edy’s Slow Churned Grand Light ice cream was made with a churning process called low-temperature extrusion. That year, it says, the company opened an East Coast plant in Laurel, Maryland, acquired Silhouette Brands, owner of the Skinny Cow frozen snacks, and bought the franchise rights to the U.S. Häagen-Dazs shops from General Mills.

Behind the cartons sat a company culture with a name of its own. The timeline says that during the 1980s Rogers composed an “I Can Make a Difference” philosophy, defined by a set of tenets the company called “Grooves”, and that Dreyer’s established a charitable foundation in 1987 to support community, youth and public school programmes in the towns where it operated. The direct store delivery trucks, the Oakland factory, which the timeline says ran public tours, and the word Grand on every carton all carried the name into daily life on the West Coast.

For a design guide, Dreyer’s shows how a founder’s surname and a street name can travel together for decades, through family ownership, new partners and a multinational parent, while a second name does the same job in the other half of the country. Compare it with Edy’s, the same ice cream under the other founder’s name, and Häagen-Dazs, another brand in the U.S. business that Nestlé agreed to sell to Froneri. For this guide we use grand red, vanilla cream, Rocky Road brown and toasted almond with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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