The return of the most viral ice cream on the internet

BarcelonaA vanilla ice cream inside a plastic casing shaped like a toucan. In mid-March, the ice cream maker La Menorquina announced that they would discontinue the iconic Punky, the firm's vanilla ice cream sold in very original packaging. "New generations are looking for other things and adults... well, they remember it fondly, but are too embarrassed to ask for it in public," explained the Minorcan-Catalan company on its social media. From then on, the island's most famous toucan became a viral phenomenon on social media; especially thanks to an Instagram account dedicated to demanding its return with a handful of pranks at La Menorquina's offices.

It is the user @punky.vuelve, managed by Marc Pujol, who, following the announcement that it would no longer be sold, made a series of videos demanding the return of the vanilla toucan with extreme insistence. The posts were very well received by millions of users: specifically, according to data collected by La Menorquina, they have achieved 54 million views and are estimated to have reached 9 million people. The vertical format videos would also have generated over 300,000 reactions. The post announcing Punky's return finally already has 14 million views on Instagram. "An success like this could not be planned. It shows people's desire to have a good time and how this ice cream manages to connect with people," explains the ice cream maker's marketing director, Enric Costa.

Stopping traffic in front of La Menorquina's offices, recreating a crime against a giant Punky in the ice cream maker's car park, or sabotaging ads for the company's new ice cream menu are some of the actions that have made the phenomenon even more viral. Costa explains that, when they started planning the company's new marketing strategy, they detected that the company had a raw diamond in the Punky that they were not exploiting: "Looking through social media, we saw that a not very elaborate video of a person unwrapping a Punky had almost two million views." Thus, they detected how "iconic" and "nostalgic" the product was. This type of move is not new. Another example of a similar campaign was led in 2022 by the desk accessories company Milan, which announced that it would stop manufacturing the popular square eraser, its model 430, in green. A wave of users also asked that they not stop manufacturing it.

Innovative ice creams

The company La Menorquina opened its doors 86 years ago with the first workshop located in the Minorcan municipality of Alaior. Its founder, Fernando Sintes, was the architect of a large number of very innovative ice creams in his time. Among his great works are, for example, the frozen lemon or the frozen coconut, two desserts that are still very recognizable today. The company founded in 1940 was also the first Spanish firm to produce an ice cream sandwich, as explained by the marketing director himself. "The firm has always had the great purpose of creating new products; Fernando Sintes is surely one of the most important ice cream inventors in the world," assures Enric Costa. Now, according to him, they are recovering this spirit to create a new menu with up to 15 new ice creams. The Punky will also reappear on the menu, although it had been sold independently for 19 years. They are also updating their logo in a more "90s" line.

Since its founding, however, the company has been transforming. Currently, in fact, its headquarters are in Santa Perpètua de Mogoda and it has a large factory in Palau-solità i Plegamans. Ownership has changed hands in recent decades: while in the late nineties it was acquired by the Canary Islands company Kalise, in 2017 it was taken over by the Farga group. Three years later it changed hands again with the purchase by the British fund Cheyne Capital, which currently owns almost the entire company.

According to the company's data, in recent years La Menorquina has maintained sustained growth of 15% annually and, in 2025, it invoiced 131 million euros. For this year, the company – which has a workforce of around 800 employees – expects to experience double-digit growth again. To achieve this, the strategy consists of continuing to boost its expansion in both the national and international markets. In February of this year, the company announced that it would make an investment of 15 million euros to create a new production line thatwill allow them to increase their production volume to 10 million liters.