Imagining Viennetta

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.

Mrs Thatcher and Mr Whippy

Having myself worked on innovation and marketing in ice cream for so long, it came as quite a shock to discover in the broadcast of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral that she was involved in the development of Mr Whippy soft ice cream.

Of course, one knew that before she was a politician she had been a research chemist at Oxford University. After Oxford she had joined the R&D department of J Lyons ice cream (now part of the Nestlé food giant). 

Soft ice cream itself had originated in the USA before the Second World War. What she and the team at Lyons did in the late 1950s was to discover how to pump extra air into ice cream. Lyons Maid launched Mr Softee and Wall’s (Unilever) responded with Mr Whippy, which rapidly became market leader in Britain.

It transformed the market – in take-home ice cream as well as in van sales.  

Not so many political leaders can have had a grounding in practical innovation.

On being interviewed in Australia

I was sent to Sydney in 1980 to see the Unilever Ice Cream client and review the work of our agency. I was responsible at that time for Lintas’s Unilever ice cream portfolio around the world.

I was there for about two and a half days. All went well. The people in the agency seemed terrific. And, of course, I loved Sydney and thought how great it would be to live there.

On the final afternoon, the bar opened around five, and a party of us moved on to dinner. Then to bar one, bar two and so on.

At something like five in the morning, all that was left of us was the brilliant and witty Jeff Seldon, and myself.

When I got home, the boss of the network said, “Well they liked you. Do you want the job?”

And that’s how I became chairman of Lintas Australia. I had the time of my life there.