Sell its product that lung in dozens of ice cream stores by the scoop, in shops by the pint and in motels chains and stadiums country wide
Ice Cream Business enterprise to Open Owings Mills, Md., Plant, Home office.By Lorraine Mirabella, The Baltimore Sun Knight Ridder/Tribune Enterprise Days news
Sep. 10--At a period as soon as the large ice cream chains have bogged down, Lee's Ice Cream is opening a brand new factory and has plans for ambitious maturity. In a large grocery stores where tailor made ice cream mixes are the greatest craze, Lee's is banking on the virtue of its product. And in an age forming ice cream is broadly automated, Lee's believes in doing stuffs the retro way, adding constituents by hand.
The daddy and son group which purchased Lee's Ice Cream one year ago declare their ice cream merely plain preferences better. Which, they think, gives 1 of the area's eldest top rate ice cream brand names the prospective to that lung.
The occupants, Jacques R. Rubin, and his son, Steven Rubin, are going to unveil their new, 15,000-square-foot ice cream plant and home office in an Owings Mills, Md., enterprise park this era. The plant and corporate offices also abode operations of Claudia's Kitchen, a gourmet producer of cooked commodities sold in Lee's ice cream stores, to other boutiques and to corporate consumers.
,000 biscuits 1 day, that are traded in the course of the nine Lee's Ice Cream stores within the Baltimore sector or even to other petite stores.
But the Rubins see the opportunity of more: the opening of up to eight corporately possessed and 20 franchised shops one year; the wholesale retailing of pre-packaged pints to boutiques and an upturn of the nutriment service enterprise, that would serve motels, for example. The factory, with its existing gear, has the ability to double production; or, with increased gear, to generate four times as frequently.
"We are more than awhile aggressive -- coming into all over these at once," Jacques Rubin mentioned.
Their plans come at a period when maturity has slowed within the ice cream classification all in all. Whole milk Queen, the country's biggest ice cream chain, hasn't been expanding. Baskin Robbins is attempting to stick around contested by opening shops in partnership with Dunkin' Donuts or Togos. The large chains are retarding new shop maturity as clients find a variety of other chain stores at that to purchase ice cream, professionnals mentioned.
"You could get ice cream a large amount of zones, if it is only a easy dish of ice cream," mentioned Ron Paul, president of Technomic, a nutriment industry consulting business enterprise based in Chicago. "You have soft-serve at McDonald's. (Ice cream stores) have lost their cache."
But strong point stores which make their own top rate ice cream and mix it to order with mix-ins namely sugary snacks, bananas and biscuit dough on a iced pebble or granitic slab have been expanding. Those encompass Columbia-based Maggie's Moos Multinational, a franchise of almost One hundred ice cream shops, and Scottsdale,, that plans to open 35 to 40 ice cream stores in Maryland beyond the coming 36 months as thing in an East Inshore proliferation.
"There's a shopper crave for something better, something distinct, however some over these new players seem like discovering that niche," Paul mentioned.
The Rubins that lung declare they are not sad to the competitiveness. They declare their "super top rate" ice cream crumbles into a group of its own due to its high plump, low air combine. that lung
The Rubins purchased Lee's in Aug 2002 from firm originator Mary Garfield, who had began the enterprise with her groom Leon "Shelter " Garfield in 1979, with a singular shop on York Road. The coming yr, Lee's turned into certainly one of the original tenants at the then-new Harborplace at the interior Harbor, with a store within the Light Street Pavilion.
As many as six Lee's ice cream stores liberated as time passes, but so therefore did start to close afterwards Shelter Garfield kicked the bucket in 1994, Steve Rubin mentioned.
The Rubins started collaborating full time to enlarge Claudia's Kitchen afterwards retailing a Baltimore biotechnology contracting firm, Biography Science Contract Production Corporation., on East Lombard Street, in June 2001.
They first fastened with Lee's when they were searching an ice cream producer to generate ice cream for Claudia's Kitchen, originally a Miami,. But afterwards tasting Lee's ice cream, they chose to purchase the enterprise downright.
"It was pretty good, we knew it may be a victor and do very much for the firm," Jacques Rubin mentioned.
When they attained the enterprise, merely two Lee's stores continued to be, the one at Harborplace and a money-losing store in Chevy Chase which the fresh occupants closed. The ice cream was produced in an 8,000-square-foot plant on DeSota Road in Southwest Baltimore.
Because Jan, they have moved strenuously to open new shops: a 2nd at Harborplace, one in a prior Ben & Jerry's stand at the Gallery at the Inner Harbor, one at the Ave at White Marsh in White Marsh, two in Owings Mills, one in Annapolis and one at Towson In town. They have in addition boosted the amount of staffs from 20 to One hundred, adding up 10 who work in manufacture at the plant.
Accomplishment within the ice cream enterprise is driven by taste, cost and how simple it is certainly to get, mentioned Harry Balzer, vice chairman of The NPD Team, a Port Washington,.-based shopper promoting research business enterprise.
"It will not be driven by, 'is there crave for ice cream,'" mentioned Balzer, who mentioned day nit which Thirty per cent of all snack food served in the us trait ice cream. "That query has been replied long ago. The u . s always has a aspire for the greatest, most excellent indulgent nutriment."
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