Eskimo Pie ice-cream to be renamed to help achieve ‘racial equality’, says Peters
An Australian ice-cream company will rename one of its signature brands, the Eskimo Pie, to help achieve “racial equality”.
Peters has announced the icecream, which was introduced in Australia in 1923, will be re-branded as the Polar Pie, citing the colonial and derogatory connotations of the word Eskimo.
In a statement, Peters said the company was “committed to being a part of the solution on racial equality and we acknowledge that now is the time for change”.
It comes after US company Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream announced it would also change the name of its equivalent product after previously conceding that the term was “derogatory”.
“We have been reviewing our Eskimo Pie business for some time and will be changing the brand name and marketing,” the US company said in a statement in June. In response, Donald Trump Jr tweeted: “The bullshit never ends.”
The word Eskimo is a colonial term that has been used in Alaska to refer to Inuit and Yupik people. Lawrence Kaplan from the University of Alaska’s Native Language Centre has written that the term is “now considered unacceptable by many or even most Alaska Natives, largely since it is a colonial name imposed by non-Indigenous people”.
Norma Dunning, an Inuit writer and academic from Edmonton in Canada, told the Guardian in June that the term Eskimo had the effect of turning her ethnic group into a caricature. “We have to think about how these renderings of Indigenous people have a subconscious effect on the public imagination,” she said.
Peters’ decision to rename the icecream follows a string of high-profile decisions by companies to do away with racist or insensitive brand names.
In July, the dairy company Saputo announced it would change the name of its cheese brand Coon more than 20 years after it was first lobbied to do so. It followed the announcement by confectionary company Nestle that it plans to rename its Allen’s Lollies-branded Red Skins and Chicos products due to “overtones” which it said were “out of step” with its values.
Peters, which was sold to a European food firm in 2014, said it had chosen the term Polar Pie because it “retains a strong association back to the original brand and product idea – a frozen treat you eat much like a pie – with your hands and hence the name Polar Pie”.