Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Will Be ‘Gone by Lunch Time’ in New Zealand

By John Bernard McCormick

WAIPUKURAU, New Zealand –  When I go to Hastings city 50 kilometers north of my home which is just out of town, 9 kilometers southwest of Waipukurau, I often go to a place my Dad used to go to. I go to Hastings as I used to live there from 1982 till 2001. My doctor, accountant and book seller are there and Hastings is the big smoke to Waipukurau. What you can’t buy in Waipukurau you can in Hastings.

The place that Dad used to go to is today in the same location as it was in the late 1920’s. Its a very good location as its near neighbors include a big supermarket, and food outlets such as McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, KFC and other smaller restaurants and take away joints selling  fish and chips, fresh fish, European and Asian food.

All these businesses set up over the years within a mile of Rush Munro’s ice cream parlor which sells only its own ice cream. In Dad’s day it was hand made and he would walk a mile down Tomoana road to the shop on Heretaunga Street after school for the best ice cream in the country. The shop today is  a Happy Days TV show style ice cream  parlor with soda drinks and the like, but no burgers or chips. It has an indoor area with a garden bar area with a fish pond that has been there since Dad was a boy. The shop has not changed since the 1950’s. I go there for an ice cream in a waffle cone and a soda drink. I buy a Fijoa ice cream. It’s a fruit that grows here and most Americans have never heard of it.

Rush Munro’s sells its ice  cream to high end restaurants and some specialist retailers around the place. The ice cream sells in the retail outlets in tubs, smaller ones than what Ben and Jerry use.  Rush Munro’s is in its third ownership today and is still privately owned. Its marketing still uses the tried and true  methods of the past.   Rush Munro’s is the only company that retail ice cream in tubs that I know of in the country.

Most ice cream retailed in New Zealand to corner shops or a dairy  are either in a cone or on a stick. I buy them both ways. A cone can be  anything up to 4 or 5 scoops. If they are on the ball they give you the option of having it dipped in liquid chocolate.  Ice creams on a stick come in a wide variety of flavors in a colorful wrapper.

Super markets mostly sell Ice cream in 2 liter tubs which go  to your home freezer.  They also sell packets of  a dozen or so stick ice creams that also go home to the freezer.

The only place in Waipukurau to ever sell Ben and Jerry’s was the local Mobil service station. They sold it in tubs in a special freezer unit supplied by Unilever. It was the only ice cream in the shop in a tub. New Zealand ice cream is in two freezers each about 7 feet long. They stock about 40 different ices and ice creams on sticks.

Drivers in cars don’t have much if any experience of buying an ice cream in a tub. It is easy to eat a stick ice cream while driving and its easy to dispose of a stick and wrapper rather than an empty tub, lid and spoon.  Tub ice cream requires two hands to eat it.

Its poor marketing of the B & J product to say the least.  The quality of New Zealand ice cream is very high, which makes trying to get people to buy a tub of a new product even harder. It came into the service station just over two years ago and was gone in about six months. That’s gone by ‘breakfast time’.

I headlined this article ‘Gone by Lunch time’. There is a political story behind the saying. A former leader of the Conservative  National Party, Don Brash, said if he were in charge, the situation would change and be Gone by Lunch Time. Well he was wrong, he never got to be Prime Minister. So he was Gone.

In the last week, Australian Kosher Food Authorities have all decided to not promote Ben and Jerry’s product anymore and The Kosher Kingdom Market in Melbourne is discounting what Ben and Jerry’s product they have  to get rid of them and has said it will not be buying any more.   The Australian Kosher Authorities work here in New Zealand and have an influence in the Pacific Island nations south of the equator.  While the islands have very small if any Jewish communities they do have large Christian communities who support Israel and will boycott Ben and Jerry’s products.

Rush Munro’s ice Cream has been around way past ‘Lunch time’, ‘Dinner time’ and is into its second Day (100 years).

Ben and Jerry’s is struggling to get to breakfast time, let alone  morning tea or lunch time. It won’t survive here with the poor marketing and poor presentation of the product. It will be gone in 10 years.

You can of course eat ice cream any time of the day and night. Eat it from a spoon or cone or lick from a cone or stick.

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John Bernard McCormick is chairman of the Hawkes Bay Friends of Israel.