Chipwich
Two thick chocolate-chip cookies hugging a slab of vanilla ice cream. Invented by a New York lawyer and launched off a fleet of Manhattan street carts, the Chipwich made the ice cream sandwich a handheld event.
The Chipwich was created in 1978 by Richard LaMotta, a New York lawyer, and introduced to the New York City market in 1981: two large, thick chocolate-chip cookies sandwiching a vanilla ice cream filling.
LaMotta launched it with a guerrilla marketing campaign — sixty street-cart vendors, most of them students, hawking Chipwiches for a dollar apiece across Manhattan. It was an immediate hit: roughly 25,000 sold on the first day, and within two weeks the carts were moving about 40,000 a day.
Success didn't translate into stability. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1984, took a $1 million lifeline from Sweden's Hexagon AB in 1987, and slid back into Chapter 11 in 1992 after a $1.4 million loss. The brand passed to CoolBrands International in 2002 and then to Dreyer's/Nestlé in 2007, which halted production in 2009 because it competed with Nestlé's own Toll House ice cream sandwiches. The name was revived in 2018 by Connecticut's Crave Better Foods, and the Chipwich is once again in freezers — proof that a good cookie sandwich never really melts away.
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