You know! The delicious multi-layered dessert ice cream. But where did the idea come from?
According to court reports from the 1990s, the Viennetta
product was conceived in 1979 by a product development manager, Kevin Hillman,
at Wall’s (Unilever) factory in Gloucester, England. He was looking through a
cook book he had given his wife for Christmas, when he noticed an illustration
of a traditional French cake, mille-feuille – a thousand leaves.
Suddenly he saw not a thousand layers of puff pastry, cream
and jam, but “a cake consisting of layers of ice cream alternated with strata
of chocolate.”
It was to become one of Unilever’s best-selling ice cream
brands around the world, proof that good new ideas come from connection-making from the
past, in this case from something that had existed for decades, maybe centuries.
Posts
