The Melbourne ice cream brand that got the cold shoulder in a global takeover
Sennitt’s Ice Cream, one of Australia’s first ice cream makers, was a Melbourne institution for generations until a foreign corporate raider axed the brand and its beloved polar bear logo.
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Ask any ice cream aficionado of a certain age, and they’ll tell you that Melbourne’s own Sennitt’s Ice Cream had the other brands licked.
But Sennitt’s, and its gorgeous polar bear logo that adorned shops and milk bars all over Victoria, disappeared almost overnight in 1961 when a foreign food manufacturer swooped.
Cambridgeshire-born refrigeration engineer John Paul Sennitt had already built an ice works in Durban, South Africa when he, his wife Harriett and their five children arrived in Melbourne in 1888. Two more children later followed.
Large-scale refrigeration was a new and exciting industry that allowed perishable products such as milk and butter to be warehoused and shipped by sea and rail, and Sennitt was at the cutting edge.
He joined a La Trobe St company, the Victorian Cold Accumulation Company, which in 1894 shifted to a huge white stone premises in Miller St (later Riverside Ave and now Southbank Promenade), near today’s Queensbridge Square, in 1894.
This put the company on the south bank of the Yarra, and just metres from the wharves.
By 1899, Sennitt, his eldest son William John Coulbeck Sennitt and a financial backer, Edward Keep, took over the firm, which was renamed JP Sennitt and Son and known as Sennitt’s Ice Works.
With John as manager and William as engineer, the company grew rapidly as demand for ice and cold storage grew and technological advances made the process of making ice much cheaper for consumers.
Around 1904, the company started manufacturing ice cream under the Melbourne Ice Manufactory brand, boasting in advertising that it used the “latest American process” to make the sweet treat.
Initially, the plant made about 600 gallons (a tick over 2700 litres) of ice cream per day, which was produced in large frozen bricks and distributed to shops.
The ice cream was a huge hit at the 1905 Exhibition of Local Manufactures.
The MIM brand soon faded in favour of Sennitt’s Ice Cream – and the family name stuck.
While William kept the factory running, John used his entrepreneurial skill to expand the customer base for the cold storage, the ice works and the ice cream.
The business made it through World War I, but John and Harriett lost their youngest son, Alfred, on the battle field in France in September 1918.
Following that dark period, John died at the family’s home in Middle Park on April 8, 1922, aged 70.
William took over as managing director and moved to buy out interests in the company held by the Keep family, forging into a bright decade in which Australia had one of the highest standards of living in the world.
That meant big business for Sennitt’s. By 1924, the company was producing more than 22,700 litres of ice cream a day.
With the brand available across Victoria, around 1930 William introduced a marketing master stroke – the beloved company logo featuring a polar bear licking an ice cream cone.
Where Peter’s, from Sydney but with substantial interests in Victoria, had its familiar ice cream cone signage on shops and kiosks across the state, Sennitt’s matched Peter’s with its 3D polar bear signs.
A giant neon sign that was visible from the Melbourne CBD across the river sat on the factory’s roof, flashing “Sennett’s Ice Cream” in large red letters with a “moving” polar bear resting his paw on the top of an ice cream cone, then licking ice cream from his paw. Skipping Girl Vinegar, eat your heart out.
As the 1920s ended, Sennitt’s was producing a new range of Polar Pies (a competitor to Peter’s Eskimo Pies) and convenient single-serve Dixie cups.
In the 1930s, the factory began producing ice cream cakes as more sophisticated mechanical refrigeration systems were developed, allowing for wider distribution of frozen and perishable foods.
William died on January 29, 1940, leaving control of the business to his only son Ronald.
In the post-World War II boom, old-fashioned ice boxes were increasingly replaced with modern fridges and the era of supermarket shopping was born.
The Sennitt’s ice cream range expanded by the 1950s to meet consumer demand.
Sennitt’s was available in a range of flavours in cardboard-lined family bricks, Vanilla Slice wafer blocks, paper-wrapped cones, Choc Pies (a Choc Wedge competitor) and Rifleman icy poles.
Advertising for the Rifleman featured the polar bear in a cowboy hat firing the rocket-shaped icy pole from a huge rifle.
There was even a Sennitt’s outlet in Holmesglen, where consumers could by frozen fruit and vegies such as peas, beans, cauliflower, sprouts, sweet corn, mixed vegie packs, loganberries and BlackBerries, along withy frozen waffles and, of course, ice cream.
Sennitt’s was a very profitable company but it lacked a national presence and the marketing impact of Streets with its Heart, Paddle Pop and Gaytime or Peter’s with its Choc Wedges and Eskimo Pies.
This 1956 theatre advertisement featuring popular 3UZ radio stars Clifford “Nicky” Whitta and his young on-air partner, Graham Kennedy, demonstrates the brand’s Victorian-only appeal.
Before television, no-one outside Victoria knew of “Nicky” and Graham, but big money was spent on this film, which would only have been aired in Victorian theatres.
And in an era when old state-based food companies were being snapped up by bigger firms with national ambitions, Sennitt’s was ripe for the picking.
But in the end, it was a much bigger fish – British firm Unilever – that came for Sennitt’s ice cream business in 1961.
In 1960, Unilever bought NSW manufacturer Streets Ice Cream, which had been family owned until a public float in the 1950s.
Once it bought out the Sennitt family, the company merged Sennitt’s with Streets and killed off the Sennitt’s brand, using the enviable Sennitt’s distribution network in Victoria to strengthen Streets’ position.
Soon after, those cute polar bears and the ice cream Victorians loved were lost forever.
These days, there is a healthy market among collectors for Sennitt’s polar bear advertising memorabilia, especially its polar bear shop lights.
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