A schoolteacher, a candy store and a chocolate coating.

Edy’s Pie is the current name of an ice-cream bar that was sold for a century under another one. English Wikipedia describes it as an American brand of chocolate-covered vanilla ice-cream bar wrapped in foil, marketed by Dreyer’s, a division of Froneri. Until 2021 the bar was sold as Eskimo Pie, and most of its history was written under that name.

Wikipedia traces the bar to Christian Kent Nelson, a Danish immigrant who worked as a schoolteacher and ran a candy store in Onawa, Iowa. Nelson, Wikipedia says, claimed to have found the idea in 1920, when a boy in his store could not decide whether to spend his money on ice cream or on a chocolate bar. Nelson experimented with different ways to make melted chocolate stick to bricks of ice cream, and when he had a method that worked he began selling the result under the name I-Scream Bars. The name was a pun that would not last, but the product, a brick of ice cream sealed in a thin shell of chocolate, became the core of the brand.

The next step brought in a partner from the chocolate trade. Wikipedia says that in 1921 Nelson filed for a patent and reached an agreement with a local chocolate producer, Russell C. Stover, to mass-produce the bars under a new trademarked name, Eskimo Pie, and to create the Eskimo Pie Corporation. Wikipedia credits the name to Stover’s wife, Clara Stover. The patent was issued on 24 January 1922, and Nelson then franchised the product, letting ice-cream manufacturers make the bars under the Eskimo Pie name. Wikipedia says the patent, which applied to any type of frozen confection encased in candy, was invalidated in 1928.

The partnership did not hold for long. Wikipedia says Stover sold his share of the business and went on to form the chocolate company Russell Stover Candies. Nelson later sold his own share to the United States Foil Company, the firm that made the Eskimo Pie wrappers, which tied the bar’s silver foil to its ownership as well as to its look.

A foil company, a spin-off, two owners and a new name.

The foil connection lasted for decades. Wikipedia says Nelson rejoined the company, by then called Reynolds Metals, in 1935, working on new methods of manufacturing and shipping Eskimo Pies and serving as an executive until he retired in 1961. Wikipedia also says the brand’s original round-faced child icon was drawn by the illustrator Gyo Fujikawa.

Ownership then changed several times. According to Wikipedia, the Eskimo Pie Corporation was spun off from Reynolds in an initial public offering in 1992, as an alternative to an acquisition that Nestlé had proposed in 1991. In 2000 the company was acquired by CoolBrands International, a business based in Markham, Ontario, which held a range of frozen-dessert brands and licences. Wikipedia says that in February 2007 CoolBrands sold Eskimo Pie and Chipwich to the Dreyer’s division of Nestlé, and Dreyer’s has owned the bar since 2007. By 2020, FOX Business was describing Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream as the U.S. subsidiary of Froneri.

The rename came in two stages. In June 2020, the company said it would change the name. FOX Business, in a report republished by FOX 35 Orlando on 6 October 2020, quoted a June statement from Elizabell Marquez, head of marketing for Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream: “We are committed to being a part of the solution on racial equality, and recognize the term is derogatory.” She added: “This move is part of a larger review to ensure our company and brands reflect our people values.” The same report said Dreyer’s had paused production of the bars while it worked on new branding and packaging.

The new name was announced on 5 October 2020. FOX Business reported that the brand had chosen Edy’s Pie, after Joseph Edy, one of the founders of Dreyer’s, and quoted Marquez: “We anticipate Edy’s Pie ice cream bars to be on shelf in early 2021. Our mission at Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream is to bring joy to everyday life with ice cream and we look forward to our Edy’s Pie ice cream bars continuing to do just that.” Wikipedia says the name change took effect in 2021, and it gives the reason the company stated: the former name used the term Eskimo, which is considered offensive by some for Inuit, Yupik and Aleut peoples.

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 wrapper, a word abroad and a founder’s name.

The bar’s physical form has stayed constant through every change of owner. Wikipedia’s description has three parts: vanilla ice cream, a chocolate coating and a foil wrapper. The wrapper links the brand’s design to its business history, since the foil maker bought into the company in its early years and Nelson worked for that firm for decades afterwards. Under Edy’s Pie, the bar keeps that format and takes its name from Joseph Edy, a founder of Dreyer’s.

The original name also travelled well beyond the brand. Wikipedia says the Alaska Ice Cream company in South Australia licensed the Eskimo Pie name and manufacturing process in 1923. In France, it says, a company called Esquimaux-Brick was founded in Paris in June 1924 and made ice-cream bricks that did not yet have a stick; the cheese producer Gervais marketed “Esquimaux Ch. Gervais” from 1928 and bought the Paris company in 1931. Wikipedia says that in France and in the countries of the former Soviet Union, the word Eskimo is used as a generic name for chocolate-covered ice cream on a wooden stick, not as a trademark. In Czechia, Wikipedia says, an Eskimo Pie-style bar was sold as “Eskymo” by Unilever under its Algida brand as of 2020.

Its 1921 deal with Russell C. Stover links it to a chocolate company that still carries his name. The rename shows how a brand can change the word on the wrapper while keeping the product, the shape and the foil.

For a design guide, Edy’s Pie shows how a long-running product can keep its form, its foil and its chocolate-and-vanilla colour story while its name is replaced with one drawn from its owner’s own past. Compare it with Russell Stover, the chocolate company founded by Nelson’s early partner, and Edy’s, which carries the same founder’s name. For this guide we use chocolate brown, foil silver, vanilla cream and deep navy with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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