Leveraging the sheer joy of ice cream as his marketing tool, Irvine Robbins co-founded America’s first national ice cream franchise, Baskin-Robbins. Robbins died Monday at 90 at a hospital in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Baskin-Robbins offered a trademark 31 flavors — three more than its motel chain rival Howard Johnson. Customers faced a blizzard of choices. There was Jamoca Almond, Chocolate Mint, Yankee Doodle Strudel for the bicentennial, and Flip Wilson’s favorite, Here Comes the Fudge.

Founded after World War II, Baskin-Robbins skated to success as a dessert stop amid the burgeoning burger chains of Southern California. Franchising emerged as a way of giving managers a stake in their store’s performance, and the chain grew to 400 outlets nationwide by 1960.

Thirty-one flavor choices became enough of a national byword for ice cream that in 1967, Fidel Castro boasted that Cuba already was producing 26 flavors of ice cream and would shortly achieve 42 flavors, putting America to shame.

But Mr. Castro underestimated his free-market foe. Although Baskin-Robbins advertised just 31 flavors, it usually sold 34 (the oddballs plus vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry). And in reserve were hundreds of other flavors, some vaguely martial, which Baskin-Robbins had developed at the company’s Skunk Works at Burbank, Calif. There was Beatle Nut, in honor of the British Invasion rockers; there was a cherry chocolate chip concoction that echoed Cuba’s signature dance, ChaChaCha; and there was even Lunar Cheesecake, in honor of the Cold War-era space program.

The same year that Mr. Castro made his preposterous boast, Robbins and his partner, Burton Baskin, sold their 476-outlet franchise operation to the United Fruit Co. Baskin suffered a fatal heart attack late in 1967, but Robbins continued on for another decade as chairman of the board. By the time he retired to take up traveling in his yacht, the 32nd Flavor, Baskin-Robbins had grown to 1,600 stores. Today it is up to 2,700 outlets in America, many of them combination stores with Dunkin’ Donuts; both chains are owned by Dunkin’ Brands Inc. There are 5,800 Baskin-Robbins stores in 34 countries.

Irvine Robbins was born December 6, 1917, in Winnipeg, Canada, the son of an Eastern European immigrant who soon moved his family to Tacoma, Wash., to become a dairyman. He became a partner in the Olympic Dairy. While working as an assistant in the store, which sold sandwiches, coffee, milk, and ice cream, Irvine Robbins became convinced of the marketing power of what he once called “the magic of the unusual.”

After he returned home in 1945 from serving as an enlisted man during World War II, Robbins opened his first Snowbird Ice Cream Store in Glendale, Calif.

“There was really no such thing anyplace as a pure ice cream store,” Robbins told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. From the start, things were unusual: The store was triangular and on the menu were 21 flavors, including such then-oddities as mint chocolate chip and coconut pineapple. With help from his father, he opened two more Snowbirds nearby. Meanwhile, Navy vet Burton Baskin had married Robbins’ sister, Shirley. He had intended to open a haberdashery, but at Robbins’s urging opened his own ice cream shop, Burton’s, in Pasadena, Calif., in 1946. In 1948, the brothers-in-law merged their eight-shop operation, then hit on the idea of franchising the outlets. Growth was fast, but it was not until 1953 that an ad agency helped them settle on the iconic number of 31 flavors, one for each day of the month.

Robbins wore his prosperity lightly. In addition to his ice-cream-themed yacht, he had a cone-shaped pool in the back yard of his Encino, Calif., home. His family helped him formulate new flavors by taste testing around the dinner table. Among the rejects: Ketchup and Lox and Bagels. He continued to eat several scoops of ice cream daily. Less enthusiastic was his son, John Robbins, who spurned the family business, became an environmental activist, and wrote “Diet for a New America.” In 1991, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I ate enough for 12 lifetimes.” He added, “We should be dramatically reducing the amount of animal fat that runs through our bloodstreams.” John Robbins’s latest tome bears the less-than-cheerful subtitle, “How your diet can help save your life and save the world.”

Undaunted, Irvine Robbins after retirement moved to a home in Rancho Mirage, where his kitchen included a six-flavor ice cream counter. He traveled the world, from Panama to China, and restored classic cars.

His cars kept him in touch with members of the public, who wanted to suggest new flavors. “I’ve even had people stop me in my car, which has the license plate ’31 BR,'” he told Investor’s Business Daily in 1999. “I guess some people think it’s legal to stop on a California freeway if you’re doing it for ice cream.”

Baskin-Robbins announced it would commemorate his life with 31 seconds of silence at its outlets this Friday.