Springfield, a second shop and a move to Wilbraham.

Friendly’s started as a single ice-cream shop. English Wikipedia says the brothers S. Prestley Blake and Curtis Blake opened it in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1935, selling double-dip cones. The Boston Globe, in a feature published on 20 November 2025, says the brothers called their shop simply “Friendly” because kindness was in short supply during the Depression. The apostrophe and the s came later. Wikipedia says the name was made official as Friendly’s after Donald N. Smith bought the company in 1988, and Business Insider, in a history of the chain published in November 2020, says the name was officially changed a year after that sale.

Food arrived early. Wikipedia says a second Friendly opened in West Springfield in 1940 with an expanded food menu, and that the brothers closed the business during the Second World War until the war’s end. Business Insider says they put signs in their windows saying they would reopen “when we win the war”, and that they reopened in 1945. It also says the chain began selling its ice cream in large take-home containers in 1950, and that a banana-split sundae the brothers originally called the “One Dandy split” became the Jim Dandy.

The company’s home moved east of the city. The Globe says the Blakes moved the ice-cream operation to Wilbraham, a suburb of Springfield, in 1960, and Wikipedia says the headquarters moved there the same year. Business Insider says the new headquarters sat next to a creamery that, according to the company’s website at the time, still made the ice cream for much of the Friendly system. Wikipedia says the chain’s thick shake, the Awful-Awful, was renamed the Fribble in 1965, and that a food-processing and distribution plant opened in Troy, Ohio, in 1974.

Hershey, Sun Capital, Dean Foods and a name shared by two companies.

The Blakes sold the business in 1979. Both Wikipedia and the Globe say the buyer was Hershey Foods, and Wikipedia says Hershey ran the chain as a wholly owned subsidiary. In 1988 it passed to a group of investors: Business Insider names the Tennessee Restaurant Company, led by Donald Smith, and says the restaurants were converted into full-service establishments. Wikipedia says Friendly Ice Cream Corporation listed on the NASDAQ in 1997, and that in the summer of 2007 the company was bought by the private investment firm Sun Capital Partners.

Ice cream for the supermarket became a business of its own. Business Insider says Friendly began selling its ice cream in supermarkets in 1987. The formal split came in 2016. In a press release dated 20 June 2016, Dean Foods said it had completed its acquisition of the Friendly’s manufacturing and retail ice-cream business, together with the Friendly’s trademark and the intellectual property associated with the ice-cream business. The same release said Friendly’s Restaurants would continue to be owned and operated by an affiliate of Sun Capital Partners and would use the Friendly’s trademark under licence and supply agreements entered into as part of the transaction. Dean Foods described the products it was buying as packaged ice cream and other frozen desserts, including single-serve sundae cups, novelty items, cakes and rolls.

Both halves have changed hands again since then. Wikipedia’s article on Dean Foods says its assets were sold in 2020, with Dairy Farmers of America among the buyers. The Globe reported in November 2025 that the Friendly’s ice-cream business belongs to Dairy Farmers of America, which also owns the manufacturing facility in Wilbraham, and the ice-cream website, friendlys.com, carries a Dairy Farmers of America copyright line. On the restaurant side, a release issued through PR Newswire on 19 January 2021 said Amici Partners Group, LLC had completed its acquisition of Friendly’s Restaurants; its president and chief executive, Craig Erlich, also led the affiliated BRIX Holdings, and the release said the new owners planned new ice-cream flavours, an updated app for ordering and a loyalty programme. Amici Partners Group has owned the restaurants since 2021. Wikipedia says the restaurant company filed for Chapter 11 protection in October 2011 and again in November 2020. Wikipedia lists the ice cream at friendlys.com and the restaurants at friendlysrestaurants.com.

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 hedge, a jingle and a sundae roll.

One well-known piece of Friendly’s lettering is a hedge. The Globe says that in 1974 a collection of Japanese yews appeared on a former junk lot on the south side of the Massachusetts Turnpike in Wilbraham, beneath a sign reading “Welcome to Wilbraham Home of”, with the young bushes forming the words “Friendly Ice Cream” in a distinctive script. A bed of small white stones was added to make the letters easier to read from a distance. Benson Blake, Prestley Blake’s son, told the paper it was “a pet project” of his father’s, and the Globe says the elder Blake paid for it himself. In his memoir, A Friendly Life, Blake wrote that the topiary was a way around a ban on billboards along interstate highways. When there was opposition, the Globe says, he enlisted friends including Peter L. Picknelly of Peter Pan Bus Lines, whose drivers liked seeing the sign as they passed.

The hedge has stayed through each change of owner. The Globe says that in the early 2000s the then-owner, the Tennessee Restaurant Company, installed a well and a sprinkler system to keep the grass and shrubs green all summer, and that Dairy Farmers of America now owns the topiary as well as the Wilbraham plant. A Dairy Farmers of America spokesperson told the paper: “The sign is a staple in the local community and nostalgic to a lot of people, so we think it’s important to maintain.”

The rest of the identity lives on menus, cartons and in advertising. The Globe recalls patty melts served “the Friendly way”, on grilled rye, and chocolate Fribbles in Formica-topped tables. Business Insider says the holiday Jubilee Roll dates from 1975, and that in 2008 the chain launched an “I Wanna Go To Friendly’s” campaign aimed at families with children. The friendlys.com site, read in October 2026, sorts its range into ice cream, sandwiches, cakes, cones and cups, uses the line “We’ve been scooping out smiles since 1935” and promotes its ice-cream cakes with “A celebration in every slice!”

For a design guide, Friendly’s shows how one name can be shared by an ice-cream maker and a restaurant chain under licence, while a roadside hedge in script keeps the older story in view. Compare it with Breyers and Edy’s, two more American ice-cream names in this collection. For this guide we use sundae red, vanilla cream and booth blue with a script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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