Call it collateral damage. Sometimes a business gets hurt through no fault of its own.

Thousands of restaurants and retailers, for example, lost customers when the Covid pandemic forced people to work from home. If people didn’t go to work, they didn’t have an opportunity to get coffee from the shops built to serve their buildings or buy lunch from nearby restaurants.

Related: Iconic Baskin-Robbins local ice cream rival closes after 40 years

Since many companies kept either a work-from-home or hybrid schedule after the impact of Covid ebbed, many of those customers simply never came back. That was not the fault of those businesses, but they suffered anyway.

It’s like when The Avengers smash their way through New York City in an effort to save the world. The end product is worth it, but a lot of good people have their homes, businesses, and cars smashed while Hulk fights Ultron, or Thanos.

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Bankruptcies often have their own collateral damage. Sometimes a company that files for bankruptcy owns brands that are successful on their own. 

Those brands can be sold as part of a Chapter 11 filing, or they could simply be lost as part of the process. It’s a sad situation that’s popping up again as part of the Rite Aid bankruptcy.

Thrifty Ice Cream may disappear.

Image source: Thrifty Ice Cream

Rite Aid owns an ice cream brand

Drugstores and ice cream have a long history. Many pharmacies had ice cream counters, and some, including Rite Aid, owned their own brands.

“Thrifty ice cream was launched in 1940 at a small factory in West Hollywood. Angelenos soon flocked to the flagship Thrifty Drug Store in downtown Los Angeles to sample ice cream from the soda fountain. The high-quality, small-batch ice cream even snagged awards from the L.A. County Fair. By the 1970s, Thrifty ice cream had attained cult status along the West Coast, with significant celebrity shoutouts,” the ice cream brand shared on its website.

Rite Aid currently own Thrifty Ice Cream and has 500 pharmacies that offer it via an old-school ice cream counter.

Thrifty Ice Cream is known for two things. First, it has a patented scoop that delivers a sort of square ice cream cone. The company has also been known for flavor innovation.

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“With love comes longevity. Our plant in El Monte, CA, is full of familiar faces. Many of our employees have been churning out ice cream for three decades, marking each hand-crafted carton they scoop with their name. We also taste-test hundreds of new flavors every year. It’s a hard job, but somebody’s gotta do it! Our team can even make exclusive, custom flavors like Sriracha Swirl and Bacon & Cheddar,” it shared.

Thrifty Ice Cream faces an uncertain future

The 500 (or so) Thrifty Ice Cream locations that are inside Rite Aid stores will all be closed as part of Rite Aid’s bankruptcy. Since these locations are inside the Rite Aid pharmacies, they can’t be sold as a separate asset.

Thrifty Ice Cream is also sold in the freezer section of multiple retailers.

“You can find Thrifty ice cream in the freezer section of your favorite retailers, like Rite Aid, Albertsons, Vons and more. You can also find it at scoop counters across California, Arizona and a growing number of regions in the U.S. and Mexico,” the company shared.

There are some franchised scoop counters that not owned by Rite Aid.

Thrifty Ice Cream will be sold as an asset as part of Rite Aid’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy sale. A buyer could continue to operate the brand, selling pints, quarts, and packaged ice cream to grocery chains. It could also continue to supply the non-Rite-Aid ice cream counters.

Related: Popular pizza maker closed after Chapter 11 bankruptcy moves forward

It’s also possible a buyer could purchase the factory to make its own ice cream or even produce something else. And, it’s always possible that no buyer will emerge.

Thrifty Ice Cream will close around 500 locations as part of the Rite Aid shutdown, but its future is not certain. The brand could survive, but that’s very much in doubt.