| Owner | Unilever |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Introduced | 1908 |
| Markets | United States |
| Website | www.breyers.com |
Breyers is a brand of frozen dessert and ice cream owned by Unilever (part of their United States Good Humor-Breyers unit). They have a large plant in the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, outside Boston.
For years, Breyers was known for its short, all-natural ingredients list. This featured prominently in an advertising campaign where a child would attempt to read the ingredients from another brand, experiencing extreme difficulty pronouncing the artificial additives. He then turned to the Breyers list and quickly rattled off the four ingredients (in their vanilla at the time): milk, cream, sugar, and vanilla. In recent years, as part of cost cutting measures since the acquisition by Unilever, the list has expanded to include synthetic Tara gum and corn syrup.
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Breyer’s son, Henry, incorporated the business in 1908. The formerly independent Breyer Ice Cream Company was sold to the National Dairy Products Corporation in 1926; National Dairy changed its name to Kraft in 1969. Kraft sold its ice cream brands to Unilever in 1993, while retaining the rights to the name for yogurt products.
Breyers is sometimes confused with Dreyer's, a Nestlé brand. While William Breyer founded his ice cream on the east coast, another man, William Dreyer, founded an ice cream company on the west coast. As the two brands increased their reach across the country, a similarity of name issue was inevitable. In 1981, Joseph Edy sought to market its product east of the Rocky Mountains under the "Edy's Grand" name.[1] However, Breyers made no similar reciprocal agreement, and by the mid-1980s began to distribute Breyers ice cream to states throughout the midwestern and western United States.[2] As a result, both Breyers and Dreyer's can be found on grocery shelves in western states.
Breyers Yogurt was a brand of yogurt, owned previously by Kraft Foods then by CoolBrands International, a Canadian company, and it was sold to Healthy Food Holdings, an affiliate of Catterton Partners, a private equity firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 2007.[3] The yogurt was manufactured under license from Unilever at an upstate New York facility until the licensing agreement was terminated and the Breyers Yogurt line was discontinued in April 2011.[4] Catterton continues to produce YoCrunch yogurt but without the Breyers co-branding.
Breyers is also available in Canada, where the product is sold in 1.89-L (half-US-gallon) containers. Some are marketed as a "frozen dessert" instead of ice cream,[5] since certain products are made with hydrogenated vegetable oils and modified milk ingredients rather than milk.
Breyers has a variety of different product lines including:
→ Standard (previously All Natural)- Uses ingredients mostly derived from natural sources.
→ Smooth & Dreamy- Uses mostly all-natural ingredients with half the fat and fewer calories than regular ice cream."
→ Double Churn Fat Free- Fat-free Ice Cream
→ Double Churn No Sugar Added- Creamy ice cream with no sugar added.
→ CarbSmart- A low-carb ice cream product with 4 grams of net carbs per 1/2-cup serving.
Although promoting itself as a 'natural ice cream' in the past, like some of their competitors Breyers has recently reformulated many of its flavors with cheaper nontraditional ingredients.