The word “Oreo” is being scrubbed from any J.P. Licks ice cream shop flavor names after the cookie’s parent company demanded a fee for use of its brand.
Oreos will still be used in the store’s recipes, but such flavor names as “Oreo Cookie Dough” have to go. The Jamaica Plain-based store, which has a One Brigham Circle location, held a contest to rename the affected flavors, which now will be called “Cookies ’n’ Cream.”
“We were contacted by Oreo’s parent company. It comes down to, for us to use the word ‘Oreo,’ we need to have a licensing agreement,” J.P. Licks owner Vince Petryk told the Gazette last month. “It would wind up being prohibitively expensive.”
All the recipes will remain the same. “It’s just the name that’s gotta go,” Petryk said. The cookie is used in over a dozen ice cream flavors and “our best selling cake is based on it.”
“It’s a mighty cookie,” he said.
The winning suggestion, “Cookies ’n’ Cream,” was sent by 29 entrants, Petryk told the Gazette this week. He received about 2,500 entries, he said. The winners will all receive a quart of ice cream and a tour of the JP facilities, J.P. Licks’ Facebook page says.
“My employees and managers talked me out of anything clever or interesting [for a new name],” he said. “What’s more important here, being clever and funny, or using something that, when spring rolls around and the line is out the door, everybody already knows?”
People have expressed their disappointment with the “traditional” choice on the Facebook page, with about 40 negative comments.
“I didn’t have it in me to make my employees’ jobs any harder for the sake of a unique name,” Petryk wrote in reply to those comments.
Gazette calls to Mondelez International, Oreo’s parent company, were not returned.
As of Feb. 3, the J.P. Licks website, jplicks.com, had not been updated and was still using the “Oreo” name.
This is an issue JP Licks has faced before, Petryk said. “Kahlúa,” a brand-name liqueur, was an issue a few years ago, he said, as was “Cherry Garcia,” a trademarked flavor name of the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream chain. Both names have been removed from flavor names.
J.P. Licks owner Vince Petryk poses at the ice cream store’s Jamaica Plain headquarters with a box of Oreos, whose name will be stricken from flavor names. (Gazette Photo by Rebeca Oliveira)