Greater's Ice Cream by Robin Davis Heigel Read Free Book Online Page A

think they had an interest in expanding, but they never had the ability because they were very hands-on,” Levine said. Richard says it was the persistence of the duo—and their apparent business savvy—that finally convinced Dick to sell them a franchise.
    Levine and Cookery opened the first Columbus store on Lane Avenue on August 24, 1989. The franchise agreement allowed them to make the ice cream according to the recipes and specifications of Graeter’s and on the leased French pot machines. They were allowed to open stores within Franklin and, eventually, Montgomery Counties.
    Levine and Cookery expanded to eleven stores in Columbus and four more in Dayton, but never without careful planning. Levine, who said it was a joy working for Dick, remembers Dick’s words of wisdom when it came to opening stores: “Once you’re dead, you’re dead a long time.”
    Since 2000, all of the Graeter’s Ice Cream sold in Columbus and Dayton—including that sold at grocery stores—has been made at the Bethel Road location, where the plant portion of the store is glass-enclosed and customers can watch the ice cream being made.
    After offering a franchise to Levine and Cookery, Graeter’s changed the license agreement with Brumfield in Kentucky to be a full franchise so that he could open stores anywhere in the state. Jim Tedesko, a homegrown Cincinnatian, was a certified public accountant at the time, and Brumfield was one of his clients. Brumfield convinced him to come to work for him in the franchise operation in Kentucky in 1997. Not long after, Tedesko decided he wanted his own franchise, so he approached the Graeters about expanding to Indianapolis.
    â€œThey said they weren’t set up for Indiana and suggested I buy the Louisville portion from Brumfield,” Tedesko said. So in 1998, that’s what he did.
    For Tedesko, being a franchise owner of Graeter’s was ideal. “I was born and raised in Cincinnati, so I grew up on the product,” he said. “I wanted to be in business for myself. And over the years I’d become familiar with their processes.”
    Now Tedesko is the owner of eight stores in Louisville and the ten surrounding counties. In addition he owns a ten-thousand-square-foot plant, where he produces the ice cream for all of the Louisville stores and, as in Columbus, for all the Louisville grocery stores that carry it, too.
    â€œIt’s such a labor-intensive product, we have to make it locally,” Tedesko said. “Customers, the press talk aboutGraeter’s being a Cincinnati-based company, but the ice cream we sell is really homemade in Louisville.”
    Brumfield eventually retired and sold the northern Kentucky part of his business in 2003 to Zaki Barakat, who now owns four Graeter’s stores.
    â€œThe original concept of the franchise was that they would have a couple of these machines and operate them on premises, manufacturing, selling,” Dick said. “But most of them, like Columbus, started at one store and made it in the back room then used that store as the manufacturing then opened up the satellite stores.”
S PECIAL F LAVORS
    The basic ingredients may be the same, but there are some Graeter’s flavors no one else has been able to duplicate. Black raspberry ice cream, for example, was Dick’s creation. “I was the first one to make black raspberry. The reason I made it: I could find the puree to make it with,” he said.
    The flavor was a childhood memory for him. “I remember as a youngster buying black raspberry ice cream from the local drugstore. All the soda fountains at the drugstores had black raspberry,” he said. “For some reason I liked it.”
    Later—Dick doesn’t remember the exact date, though he thinks it was in the 1970s—he tried adding chocolate chips to the black raspberry flavor. It quickly became—and remains—the bestselling