A charming, funny, and deeply Kiwi reflection on the humble Tip Top ice cream tub — once a vessel for dessert, now a national symbol of practicality and creativity. From frozen soup to car parts and compost, it holds the everyday essence of New Zealand life, revealing how the ordinary becomes quietly sacred.
AOTEAROA: LAND OF THE SQUARE BLUE TUB
On 10 October 1935, Albert Hayman and Leonard Malaghan opened their first Tip Top Milk Bar on Manners Street in Wellington. Other milkbars soon followed and in 1962 the Tip Top ice cream factory was opened by Sir Keith Holyoake. As Tip Top celebrates 90 years this month, Dan Keane writes in praise of New Zealand’s favourite container, from cradle to grave.
9th October 2025Once a year the school asks our kids to bring in a stash of emergency food. This is earthquake country—woke to a 3.7 love tap the other night, in fact—and the idea is that if/when the Big One separates families past dinnertime, the tamariki will have something to eat. Our first year here we delivered ours in a Ziploc bag. By the next, we’d learned the wonders of the Tip Top tub.
It’s a two-liter ice cream bucket, or begins life that way. Tip Top Ice Cream is one of those adored Kiwiana brands snapped up by a lumbering international beast (Nestle, in 2019). The ice cream is fine but the containers are excellent. They’re plastic half-cubes in the cheery, industrial blue of a playground slide. The corners are rounded. There are no handles to break. Their lids snap tight and they stack like bricks in a pantry or garage. And they’re everywhere, like some shadow national currency.