Greater's Ice Cream by Robin Davis Heigel Page A

The “new” line of ice cream was little more than a marketing ploy.
A P LAN AND A P LANT
    To compete with all of the different ice creams currently on the market, Graeter’s has decided to take its ice cream into new markets outside of Ohio and Kentucky. But instead of opening more retail stores, they’ll be selling pints at more grocery stores. To cover the product needed to move Graeter’s into more markets from Denver to Houston to Atlanta, in 2009 the company announced plans to build a new plant. The twenty-eight-thousand-square-foot facility located in the Bond Hill area of Cincinnati is scheduled for completion in mid-2010.
    The plant is necessary, the third generation says. “They’re marketing faster than they’ve got room to support it—ice cream wise, I mean,” Dick said.
    When plans for the new plant were announced, in the midst of the recession, the city of Cincinnati was especially pleased.“Graeter’s is a Cincinnati institution,” said Mayor Mark Mallory. “It is exciting to see one of our hometown, family companies grow and succeed.”
    The city has also put its money behind the expansion, offering Graeter’s a 4.5-acre parcel on which to build the plant as well as a low-interest loan to fund the construction.
    When the expansion is complete, the company will go from having fourteen ice cream machines that can make 300,000 gallons of ice cream a year when the plant is at full production to double that with an additional ten machines plus room to expand capacity to up to 1.5 million gallons a year.
    Another big change is the new plant’s shrink-wrap facility for packaging—something that used to be done by United Dairy Farmers—and a large freezer to store ice cream after it’s made. This means the ice cream can get to the far-away stores in a matter of days. Unlike mass-produced ice cream, which may be as much as a year old by the time it hits the supermarket freezer shelves, Graeter’s is just weeks, maybe even days, old.
    â€œIt’s an exciting time,” said Chip. “It’s either the smartest thing we ever did or our kids may hate us forever, if we laden them with this huge factory. It’s a great product. And I think people will want us in other places, too. That’s what we’re betting on.”
    But some things in the new plant won’t change at all. The new machines will run virtually the same way as the old ones, churning out just two to three gallons at a time. And the raw ingredients won’t change at all. The dairy products for the ice cream will still come from Trauth Dairy in Newport, Kentucky, and from Smith Dairy in Orville. Vanilla beans will be ground with sugar before being mixed in for the vanilla flavor. Strawberries and peaches will be added at the beginning of the freezing process so that they will be broken down into smaller pieces for those two popular seasonal flavors. And the blackraspberries for the company’s number one flavor will be pureed, the seeds removed and then cooked down and sweetened to intensify its flavor and color. None of that will change.
    Richard said when he started with the company in 1989 it was a $5 million company, freezing 100,000 gallons of ice cream a year. When he and his cousins took over in 2004, they froze 200,000 gallons. In 2010, it will be a $35 million company when all the franchises are included, producing 300,000 gallons of ice cream each year, fifteen times the production of twenty years ago. “We have seen steady growth for the last one hundred years. We’re probably on the cusp of an atypical growth,” Richard said.
    Nonetheless, by national standards Graeter’s is still small. Pierre’s, another family-owned one-hundred-year-old Ohio ice cream company was worth $37 million in 2007. At its peak in 1982, Häagen-Dazs sold sixty-five million pints a year and was worth $115 million before it was sold to the