Ice cool: Jelly Tip, a pinnacle of Kiwi innovation

The idea behind the Jelly Tip was to create an icecream that children could enjoy on the move. Picture / Kenny Rodger

The icecream has been around since the 1950s, and is a definite NZ favourite

Who remembers the disappointment when you arrived at the end of the raspberry jelly?

Go on, hands up, who used to suck the jelly part until it was pointy?

It's estimated that New Zealanders have chomped their way through 150 million Jelly Tips since they were created way back in 1951.

The Jelly Tip was conceived by a team of creative-minded chemists - today we'd call them food technologists - who were charged with the job of developing an icecream that children could eat while on the go.

Icecreams, once the exclusive hand-rolled product of our milk bar culture, were now portable and could be sold with no mess, fuss or preparation, at the beach or the zoo.

The creative team investigated overseas products to see what was happening there. In the United States the closest thing to the Jelly Tip was the original icecream on a stick, the jelly-less Good Humour Bar, which was invented in the 1920s.

But the desire for a product that was unique to New Zealand was strong. What the chemists came up with has stood the test of time.

The mix of creamy vanilla icecream, tipped with a raspberry flavoured jelly, and encased in a chocolate coating is still popular today and has helped Jelly Tip to remain one of the top-10 novelty icecreams. There was even the giant sized Jelly Tip, with more jelly bang for your buck.

Other icecreams on sticks soon followed such as the Topsy - its original packaging portrayed Topsy as a young black girl - but it was considered racially insensitive.

In more culturally aware times, the packaging has been changed so as not to cause offence.

Later came the Choc Bar, with its solid chocolate centre, as well as the Rocky Road and Toppa.

Compared to the later model of choc-coated icecreams such as Moritz and Magnum, these perennial favourites don't make you feel like you're over-indulging.

In a 2001 interview with The Lord of the Rings Hobbits Dominic Monaghan, Elijah Wood and Billy Boyd, their recall on items of Kiwi trivia, while not instantaneous, included Jelly Tips alongside Jandals and the All Blacks.

The Jelly Tip remains the pinnacle of innovation in the kiwi choc-ice world, and a strong link to New Zealand's heritage of 1950s milk bars.