Collabs are a dime a dozen these days. From lazy logo slaps and licensing masquerading as collaboration to tie-ups without a reason to exist (or for people to care) beyond the business opportunity. Some brands are for hire no matter who comes calling, lacking their own POV and addicted to the empty calories of a short-lived revenue and relevancy lift, renting access to culture vs contributing to culture in a long-term, sustainable way.
At Jeni’s, we’re inspired by people who have their own unique and distinctive flavor, who do things in a way that only they could or would, and who spend their days building worlds that otherwise wouldn’t exist. It’s what we love doing ourselves more than anything else. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It makes us feel alive.
We love collaborating with people like this because what comes out of it is always an authentic expression of who we both are—you can feel when it’s real—and when each side is bringing something to the table that the other couldn’t (true collaboration), it pushes the work in interesting and unexpected ways.
Our fave collabs create something new and different—earning attention rather than begging for it, staying with you rather than leaving you feeling empty, and helping people feel what we already know to be true: if it's not Jeni's, it's just ice cream.
OPAQUE—a collaboration between Jeni’s and artist Cj Hendry—was an exploration of color and flavor that blurred the line between food and contemporary art.
Featuring a limited-edition black ice cream flavor, new artwork by Hendry, and a fully immersive, monochromatic pop-up in New York City, OPAQUE challenged one of the most ingrained assumptions about ice cream: that it should be colorful.
At the center of the collaboration was an all-black ice cream—made without activated charcoal or artificial coloring—that was as delicious as it was visually shocking, an edible work of art. Ribbons of tart cherry balsamic jam (dyed black with all-natural ingredients) and creamy espresso fudge were encapsulated in a black cocoa ice cream, but nearly indistinguishable from the ice cream itself. Stripping the traditionally vibrant ice cream experience of all color made the ordinary suddenly unfamiliar, creating a sensory experience that made you feel everything more deeply—the taste, the texture, the emotion—as the flavor unfolded with each bite.
New hyperrealistic drawings of ice cream scoops by Hendry (12 colors, 100 of each color) were available in signed editions, blind-box style—buyers didn’t know what color they had until they peeled back the packaging. Among the 1,200 prints was one black OPAQUE ice cream scoop, the recipient of which won the original oversized drawing by Hendry valued at $450,000.
The drawing was on display at a three-day pop-up ice cream shop in NYC. Hendry, known for immersive installations that challenge traditional boundaries between art and audience and transform passive observation into active participation, created a completely monochromatic shop to bring the flavor to life. As with the ice cream itself, the pop-up shop was devoid of color, but as it unfolded, so too did the nuances of the space and the artwork.
With zero media spend, OPAQUE generated 1.28B+ earned media impressions, lines around the block in NYC, and—a month after the flavor sold out online and in our scoop shops across the country—a whole new wave of UGC: unboxing videos of people discovering which color ice cream scoop they received.
"In a world oversaturated with image and spectacle, Hendry and Jeni’s created something startling in its restraint. Not about absence, but rather about presence, OPAQUE encourages the presence of taste, of touch, of attention. A jet-black scoop that reminds us that sometimes, the less we see, the more we feel." -- PRINT magazine
