Cool-A-Coo was a vanilla ice cream sandwich made with oatmeal cookies and dipped in chocolate. It was a specialty in the Los Angeles area for over 25 years and was made fresh in Southern California. It was the original ice cream sandwich of the Los Angeles Dodgers.[1] As of August 2016, it has been discontinued and is no longer available.
Leo Politis, the original maker of Cool-A-Coo in El Monte, California, along with 30 employees, made 3 million Cool-A-Coos a year to keep up with an average of 4,000 Cool-A-Coos being consumed per game at Dodger Stadium before the early 1990s.[2]
Although it is the original ice cream sandwich of the Dodgers, Cool-A-Coo disappeared from Dodger stadium in 1998 when Peter O'Malley sold the Dodgers to News Corp.[3] Due to thousands of requests through a suggestion box put out by Stan Kasten, CEO of the Dodgers, Cool-A-Coo made its comeback to the stadium in 2012.[4]
After being removed from sale at Dodgers Stadium, Leo Politis sold his company and the Cool-A-Coo trademark to Sweet Novelty Inc which ceased production of the dessert. In order to bring Cool-A-Coo back, the Dodgers negotiated a contract with Sweet Novelty to produce Cool-A-Coo and revisited deals with existing ice cream vendors in order to compete with a new concession stand vendor.[5] Levy Restaurants, the Dodger Stadium concessionaire's new recipe leaves all of the basics unchanged from the original.
As part of development of the new recipe, a few prototypes were created and tasted by Dodgers Stadium employees that had eaten the original Cool-A-Coo. In their opinion, the prototypes — with less sweet and more dense vanilla ice cream — did not taste like the original Cool-A-Coo. The perfection of the new recipe also required a missing ingredient in the oatmeal cookies in the form of cinnamon.
In 2016, the Cool-A-Coo was discontinued and is no longer being manufactured or sold.