Soft Ice Cream Success Story

Real soft ice cream anyone?

This store has made a great success since introducing real soft ice cream and sales continue to rise.

Customers serve themselves, which is mainly possible due to the lever that pours the ice cream is easy to control and closes by itself, there is rarely any spills or mess.

We met with the owner for a chat.

Q&A session

Q: Why self serve?

A: The machine doesn’t have to be self service but in our drinks to go section we have a member of staff around at busy times and we feel the gains made by self service are well worth it.

Q: What have sales been like?

A: The sales were encouraging from day one and kept growing are still climbing. Consumers can be choosy about where and when they buy their ice cream and there was an element of changing their habits involved. The key is to do it well, it needs to be a high quality mix, we use Jersey Gold which everyone loves, a couple of quid more than the cheaper ones but you get that back in sales many times over. Also the machine has to be well presented clean and shiny. People love adding their own sauce which is easy to offer and we sell tubs of toppings like sherbet which are very popular and of course 99 Flakes. We do cones and 300ml cups.

Q: How many per day?

A: We sell around 30 on an average day and when the weather was sunny recently we did 84.

Q: Why the 161

A: We chose the 161 having looked at what was available. In the end we chose to pay more for quality and ease of use. There were cheaper machines on the market, typically from the far east, but we we not very confident with some of the companies selling them and we had  doubts regarding reliabilty and parts / engineer support, in the end we decided to go with a company with a solid reputation. I was very impressed with the installation and training and so no problems.

Q: Is it profitable?

A: Noticeably so yes. I hope eventually to add £25-30k to my turnover at a GP of around 85%.  At current sales ROI will be within 9 months.

Q: Future plans?

A: Were just working through how to offer more interesting deserts and a take home family sharer tub.