Richard LaMotta

Chipwich

In 1981, LaMotta developed the Chipwich. On May 1, 1982, he began a guerrilla marketing campaign, in which he trained and enlisted sixty students as street cart vendors to sell the Chipwich on the streets in New York City. A few hours later, all twenty-five thousand Chipwich sandwiches had been sold. After two weeks, forty thousand Chipwiches were being sold each day. The campaign established Chipwich as a successful brand.

CoolBrands International, once the second-largest ice cream distributor in the United States, bought the Chipwich brand in 2002. After encountering financial difficulties in 2004, CoolBrands sold Eskimo Pie and Chipwich to Dreyer's (a division of Nestlé) in 2007, and divested most of its other core businesses. Nestlé ultimately discontinued the Chipwich brand. However, current owners Crave Better Foods LLC relaunched the Chipwich in 2018.

LaMotta was featured in more than 8,000 stories in newspapers, magazines and other media covering the past 25 years. He received the Ad Age Executive Marketing Award, Adweek magazine's Hottest Product of the Year Award, and Sales and Marketing magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year Award.