The ice cream conspiracy

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Take a look in any supermarket ice cream freezer section and you may see a mystery. There are big containers of the typical ice cream brands: Breyers, Turkey Hill, and Edy's. And there are specialty brands that make gelato, low-fat and vegan ice creams. And then there are the fancy pints: which is mostly Ben & Jerry's and Häagen-Dazs.

Häagen-Dazs has flavors like vanilla, chocolate, pistachio—the sort of flavors that run smooth. And then Ben & Jerry's specializes in chunky flavors: Cherry Garcia, The Tonight Dough, Chunky Monkey, etc. The two hardly ever cross into the other's turf. Why?

It's possible they are experiencing something common to natural competition—they are specializing in what works best for them. But, as Christopher Sullivan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison suspects, the two companies may be engaging in what is known as "tacit collusion," where two parties silently agree to... stick to their own territory.

We try to get to the creamy core of what makes up a conspiracy, and how the consumer eventually loses out in this cold, cold war.

Today's episode was produced by Willa Rubin and Alyssa Jeong Perry. It was engineered by Josh Newell and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was edited by Jess Jiang.

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:04.0	Robert Smith.
0:08.0	Amanda Roncheck, fancy meaning you hear at our local Brooklyn supermarket.
0:12.0	Yes, here we are together. We have just randomly found ourselves in the ice cream freezer section.
0:17.0	Well, it is 9.30 at night. It's the traditional time to take an ice cream run.
0:21.0	Yeah, I am on an ice cream run here to pick up some pints.
0:23.0	I am here for a slightly different reason.
0:26.0	I have been staring into these freezers and I have been putting something together.
0:31.0	This may be a little red string bulletin board kind of conspiracy theory.
0:35.0	But I want you to see this. I am going to open up this freezer.
0:38.0	Okay, let me show you what you want to show me.
0:40.0	Okay. Over here in the left we have the big pints of ice cream, right?
0:43.0	The briars, the turkey hill. Over on the far right you can see the specialty stuff, low fat gelato.
0:49.0	And in the middle right here.
0:51.0	Yes, I can see you have got the fancy pint section. This is completely dominated by Ben and Jerry's and Hagen Doss.
0:58.0	Yeah, and that is what is confounding me here.
1:01.0	Okay, look at the flavors of the fancy pints.
1:04.0	Okay, yes, I see all sorts of different flavors. I see coffee. There is vanilla. There is chocolate.
1:10.0	That is the Hagen Doss, right? The Hagen Doss has these basic, smooth, creamy flavors.
1:15.0	They might have a wee bit of pistachio or caramel or a little vanilla bean flak.
1:19.0	But mostly Hagen Doss makes ice cream you could lick off a spoon.
1:23.0	Right. Now, look up at the Ben and Jerry's.
	...

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