In June, the actress Ayo Edebiri went on Late Night with Seth Meyers to promote her show “The Bear.” Both performers grew up in New England, so naturally talk turned to Things Only New Englanders Know About. One of them? A novelty ice cream product called the Cool Dog.
“It’s a treat that I had as a child at Boston sports games,” Edebiri told Meyers, who held up a photograph of two logs of vanilla ice cream, complete with a little pucker on the ends, just like real hot dogs – though these were topped with whipped cream and sprinkles. “They’re foul,” Edebiri declared. “And they’re perfect.”
Cool Dogs were once sold at Fenway Park and Roche Brothers stores around the region. New Englanders may remember buying the whimsical treats at Story Land in New Hampshire or Six Flags in Massachusetts. But the treat has quietly disappeared from shelves. As Edebiri’s interview ricocheted around the internet, I wondered – how did this quirky local product get so big, and what caused its demise?
The answer lay in a picturesque gated community in Falmouth, Massachusetts, where the inventor of Cool Dogs now lives.
Peter Franklin greeted me in the kitchen of his home dressed in a yellow polo shirt embroidered with the Cool Dogs logo: a cartoon dog wearing sunglasses and a scarf. (Get it? Because he’s cool, and also cold.) “I haven’t worn my shirt in ages!” Peter exclaimed. The kitchen counter was covered in photos and merchandise from the earliest days of the business, stickers and t-shirts and even a little wax candle shaped like a Cool Dog.
Peter’s wife, Tara, picked up one of the cardboard sleeves they used to sell the ice cream in, which were printed on the inside with punny sayings.
“When you finish it, it says ‘dog gone,’ ” Tara said, as Peter chuckled. “That was my contribution to the whole marketing thing.”
The Franklins are two of the most cheerful people you’ll ever meet. Peter tends to punctuate the end of each thought, positive or negative, with a burst of warm laughter. He is outshined only by Tara’s effusive, mile-a-minute patter. They don’t finish each other’s sentences so much as speak in parallel, as two versions of the same thought unfurl in a burst of excited chatter.
The couple sells real estate on the Cape, a duo called Team Franklin. But they were more than happy to reminisce about Cool Dogs, which was probably the best job, and the biggest failure, they ever had.
The beginning
Peter came up with the idea for hot dog-shaped ice cream in the late ‘90s. Recently widowed, he wanted to start a business so he could make his own hours and spend more time with his two children. He wrote the business plan while he was still employed as the marketing director of a tech company. The concept – vanilla ice cream shaped like a hot dog inside a yellow cake bun – seemed like a novelty sure to sell, an ice cream treat you could hold in your hand and load up with toppings, like the most American food of all.
“The only question I had in my mind when I first came up with it is, ‘Why didn’t anybody do this before?’ ” Peter said. “Then I found out why.”
According to Peter, the experts he consulted told him it was basically impossible to manufacture ice cream in a hot dog shape. The ice cream needed to be soft when it was poured out, and a perfect cylinder wouldn’t stay round for long. But Peter was skeptical.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he recalled thinking. “This is America!”
The solution, Peter realized, was to use hot dog-making equipment. You’d simply squeeze the ice cream into cellulose hot dog casings, twist them up into long links of dogs, freeze them solid, and then remove the casings.
It took about 18 months to perfect the process. In the film version of the story, this is the point when we’d be hit with a montage of wacky failures and triumphs: the family cat chewing up a stack of cakes left cooling on the kitchen counter; the Franklins handing out early prototypes at the Clam Shack in Kennebunkport, Maine; Peter’s comical attempts to calibrate the hot dog making machine as it spewed ice cream into the air.
“We’d run the ice cream in, and it was so much pressure that it would blow the casing off and it would be ice cream all over the wall,” Peter recalled with a laugh.
Eventually, they got the system down. An ice cream maker in Vermont manufactured the hot dog links and shipped them to the Franklin’s factory in Shirley, Massachusetts. There, another machine stripped off the casings, leaving every Cool Dog with a little crimp on each end as it dropped into the soft embrace of a sponge cake bun.
The Franklins’ big break came in 2001 when they won a best new product award at the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. Tara remembered the shock of being approached by a camera crew at their small, unassuming booth.
“That was the first time I was on TV,” she said. “And we were interviewed, and it just went wild from there.”
The Franklins sold Cool Dogs at Fenway Park in Boston, Story Land in New Hampshire, Universal Studios in Florida and Six Flags in Massachusetts. For a while you could buy Cool Dogs at BJ’s and Sam’s Club. They even sold Cool Dogs at the 2005 Super Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida.
It was an exciting period that the Franklins remember fondly: summers spent at Fenway, making full use of those all-access passes; running into Christian Fauria in the bowels of the stadium after the Patriots won that Super Bowl; the sheen of small-town celebrity that swirled around them as they went about their daily lives in Concord, Massachusetts.
“It was my little brush with fame,” Tara said, chuckling. “It was great.”
But even with all that success, it was difficult to turn a profit. In order to sell the product in supermarkets, the Franklins would’ve had to pay something called a slotting fee – essentially, the price of shelf space – which was prohibitively expensive for the fledgling business.
The only way out was to be bought. According to Peter, they got really close, in a handshake deal with Dreyer’s, then a subsidiary of Nestlé, in October of 2007.
“And they said, ‘Come back in January and we’ll sign a deal and you’ll get a royalty for life,’ ” Peter recalled. “We broke up the champagne, which was a mistake. Never do that before you sign the deal.”
No deal with Nestlé materialized. Sales had already been falling, and then the recession hit. The Franklins lost enough money that they had to sell their house in Concord. Peter sold what was left of the business to a local entrepreneur. Let someone else make a go of it. They were done.
The next chapter
Dan Weil lives with his wife, Joanne, in a spacious Back Bay apartment, the kind with an elevator that opens directly onto it. The former printer company executive likes to collect things – perfumes, Inuit carvings – which he keeps in tall glass display cases, everything arranged just so.
Weil bought the patent for Cool Dogs in 2009. He was retired from corporate life and looking for a project. An investment banker he knew pitched him Cool Dogs. It had none of the criteria he was looking for, but he found himself enamored with the concept.
“I thought it was a really cool product in a very mature industry with very little exciting going on,” Weil told me.
Weil thought he could build a sustainable business by focusing on New England and not expanding too quickly. But he ran into the same kinds of problems the Franklins did trying to launch a new ice cream brand. Distributors didn’t want to deal with a small company. A couple national grocery chains expressed interest, but Weil couldn’t afford the kind of marketing campaign he thought was necessary to support an expansion. Even when he found success, his big-name competitors easily quashed any threat he posed by paying venues not to carry Cool Dogs.
“I got into 23 baseball parks in New England,” Weil said. “I was bought out of every single one.”
Ultimately, Weil came to the same conclusion his predecessors did: he needed to get acquired by one of the big ice cream companies. He set his sights on Nestlé.
“And I called the CEO up and he said, ‘Well, you know, it really does sound like a really interesting product, but … we’ve been trying to get out of ice cream for years,’ ” Weil recalled.
No dice. So after only five or six years selling Cool Dogs, Weil closed up shop.
“Ice cream and the distribution of ice cream is a big boys’ business,” he said. “It’s not for the little guy.”
A final taste
The Weils still have some boxes of Cool Dogs stashed in the extra freezer of that Back Bay apartment. They’re about a decade old, but Weil assured me the ice cream was still edible – technically.
The chocolate drizzle had smudged, but it was still recognizably a Cool Dog, those uncanny hot dog puckers still intact. Weil struggled to peel the sleeve away from the cake bun, which had become quite sticky.
“Oh, it’s really hard!” Weil exclaimed as he attempted to run a knife through the ice cream. With some effort, he managed to cut the Cool Dog into quarters, and then handed a piece each to me and Joanne.
We raised them in a toast and popped the ice cream into our mouths. Everyone was quiet for a moment while they chewed. “It’s good!” Joanne exclaimed with a note of surprise.
It was clearly not the Cool Dog it once was – Weil felt the ice cream had lost some of its flavor – but the cake was delicate and sweet, a bit like a Twinkie. I could imagine ordering it at a ballpark on a hot summer night: beer in one hand, Cool Dog in the other.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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