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

Graeter’s flavor, accounting for 20 percent of total sales of the ice cream.
    Dick said they made the black raspberry both with and without chips for a long time but eventually got rid of the one without chips, much to his dismay, because it didn’t sell as well. “I quit eating black raspberry when I put the chips in. I don’t like it. I never liked it.”
    Lou, however, is a big fan of the chocolate chip flavors, including black raspberry chocolate chip, though his favorite flavor is mocha chocolate chip. For customers, too, the flavors with chocolate chips are by far the favorite, accounting for 70 percent of total ice cream sales.
    For Kathy, her favorite flavor remains the simplest: vanilla. “I like the texture of the smoothness, the coolness,” she said. And while she doesn’t mind the chocolate chips in some flavors, she says, “I always want my final bite to be vanilla.” She feels the customers enjoy the chocolate chip flavors so much because it’s an indulgence. To the Graeter family, who eat ice cream every day, it’s a little too much.
    Another of Dick’s contributions is the rotating seasonal flavors. He came up with the concept, he says, to keep customers coming back. “I just did one a month. We’d run it for six or seven weeks then drop it,” he said. “You can almost tell by the month what flavor I had.”
    Coconut was in January, followed by cherry chocolate chip in February and chocolate almond in March. July always brought peach, and the fall brought autumn flavors such as pumpkin in October, cinnamon in November and peppermint and eggnog in December. Now the company offers seasonal flavors instead of monthly flavors, bringing in a few different ones for longer stretches: peach, for example, might run from July to August, and strawberry chocolate chip, a spring favorite, will begin in April and run through May.
S HIPPING TO N EW M ARKETS
    In addition to grocery stores, Graeter’s Ice Cream also turned to shipping to reach markets outside of Ohio and Kentucky.
    In the early ’90s, the only option for shipping was FedEx because UPS wouldn’t accept dry ice, which was necessary toship ice cream. The problem with FedEx, however, was that its distribution didn’t reach everywhere. And the U.S. Postal Service? “They were impossible to work with,” Dick said.
    In the mid-’90s, everything changed. “Sometime in ’94 or ’95, [UPS] changed their policy and they started taking dry ice shipments,” Dick said. “UPS was the best way to ship to individual homes and things. Distribution was 100 percent of the United States. There were very few places they didn’t go.”
    In 1994, shipping was 0 percent of the family business. Today, it brings in $3 million a year.

TOUGH TRANSITION
    The transition of Graeter’s Ice Cream from the third generation to the fourth started by accident—literally. In 1989, Jon tumbled down a flight of stairs in a house he was renovating. After a lengthy recovery, he looked at his life, the long hours and hour-long commute from Georgetown every day, and decided it was time to retire. Kathy, who until this point had worked for the company but had not been an owner, bought out his shares.
    Jon’s accident made the other three siblings, Kathy, Dick and Lou, realize that if they were going to actually transition to the fourth generation any time in the near future, they needed to start working toward that now. That fact was reinforced in 1991 when Wilmer, who had unofficially retired a few years earlier to take care of his ailing wife, died.
    But the transition wasn’t easy. Dick’s son, Richard, came into the business when he was finishing law school at the University of Cincinnati in 1989. He had worked with his uncle Jon at various times, helping with the financials and getting thecompany’s business onto computers. But when Richard originally