Cold Stone Creamery

Cold Stone Creamery, not to be confused with Stone Cold Steve Austin, one of them being a key personality during the WWF's attitude era, while the other, I mean they're not that similar beyond the name, I don'think I have to explain the difference here. Cold Stone is a chain of ice cream parlors found all across the United States. They have almost 900 locations in the US, with an additional 300 or so found in 30 other markets around the world. That makes them the third largest ice cream chain in the country, though they are trailing quite a bit behind Dairy Queen and Baskin Robbins, I wouldn't expect those rankings to change anytime soon. But to Cold Stone's credit, consider that the other two had more than a 40 year head start and in 2021 I conducted a poll on this channel asking which ice cream chain is the best, providing the big three is the main choices. Well, after more than 100,000 votes, the winner was Cold Stone Creamery. All things leading me to believe that this is a popular well I think that raises a few questions that I'd So I've put together a list of what I believe to be the five biggest reasons behind the success of Cold Stone Creamery, starting where else put with the ice cream. Cold Stone Creamery was founded by Donald and Susan Sutherland, a husband and wife team that were huge fans of ice cream. So much so that they traveled around the world, tasting it all over the place, trying to find which one was the best, which honestly sounds They were bold enough to believe that they can make something that was better than anything else they tried, and that's what they set out to do. That is why at Cold Stone Creamery, from the beginning, you could almost objectively a high quality ice cream. I use the word objectively because the International Dairy Foods Association has official categories and ways of measuring it. I don't want to get too technical, but it has to do with the fat content, the amount of air inside of it, and the quality of the ingredients. The ice cream sold at Cold Stone Creamery qualifies as super premi Another key difference from the others is the fact that the ice cream is also made fresh daily using machines at the restaurants, as opposed to having it pre-made and shipped to the restaurants. So in 1988, the Sutherlands opened the first ever Cold Stone Creamery in Tempe, Arizona to sell their high quality, freshly made ice cream that apparently they felt was superior to anything else on the market. Despite serving a quality product, business was slow at first. They had very few customers in their first years, seemingly because the public didn't know about it. According to Donald, they had days where they only made $6, but then a local newspaper published an article where they were praising the ice cream and made people want to try it, and since it was a good product, they continued coming back, and the business sort of took off from there. Enough to open a second location in Phoenix, followed by a couple others in the area. My second reason behind their success is the experience you have when you go there. They put a lot of work into that, famously calling it the ultimate ice cream experience, saying that they want each visit from a customer to be Anyone who has been to Cold Stone can hopefully back me up on some of this, but what I see as the entertaining parts would include the way that they name everything. I am talking about puns all over the place when it comes to their signature creations, like the apple of my p For the sizes you can order And speaking of potentially awkward but with a fun vibe, in the early 2000s they really started emphasizing the entertainment aspect. I believe it was an attempt to compensate for the fact that the wait times in their stores tend to be much higher than the competitors, so they started this policy where the employees were expected to sing and potentially even dance whenever a customer left a tip. It caused them to start hiring people much more based on their personality, friendliness, and even performance abilities. Variety is another thing that enhances the customer's experience, offering 11 flavors of ice cream that are always available in addition to seasonal or local favorites, and they have more than 30 mix-ins, creating more than, in their words, a gazillion possibilities. And how have I talked this long without even mentioning their mix-ins? That's When you walk in, you choose your ice cream and then you choose what you want mixed into it, then they take all of the ingredients over to the 16 degree cold stone and use these spatulas to mix it all together. Again, it's all part of the experience to watch them do it. The concept is believed to go back to the 1970s with this place called Steve's Ice Cream, and you trademark them as Smush-Ins, probably a catchier name, but Cold Stone is the place that became widely known for it. Maybe the grossest thing they've done for entertainment purposes was back in 2001 when they offered chocolate-covered crickets in all of their 142 stores at the time. Yeah, it was If you ate them, you would get a free ice cream the next time you came in and be entered into a raffle to win a trip to the area in Australia where they had filmed the show. I don't know if I would be willing to try that or not, but you have to admit it would be an experience. There's more that could be said about the experience you get at Cold Stone, but those are the biggest parts that stand out to me. Maybe go there, check it out, and see the parts that stand out the most to you. My third reason behind their success would be franchising, because having other people open their own Cold Stone creameries while paying the central company for the rights to do it is what has allowed them to grow from four locations in Arizona into the international brand that they are today. And Doug Ducey was the main person behind this. He graduated from college in 1986, spent some time in the marketing department of some big companies, and in 1995 he was essentially put in charge of their franchising operations right when they opened their first franchise in Tucson, Arizona. Over the next five years, they used that model to grow to 100 locations, making them one of the fastest growing franchises in America, and Doug Ducey became Cold Stone's new president and CEO. Then, the next few years became their biggest growth period ever, reaching 1000 locations during that time, expanding heavily into the eastern part of the country, even opening a Cold Stone in New York's Times Square. The growing name recognition, along with lower franchising fees and small restaurant sizes, made it easy enough for them to open new ones and attract stable franchisees. Though, I should mention that in 2014, Doug Ducey was elected governor of Arizona and re-elected four years later. His success in expanding Cold Stone Creamery was kinda There are obviously political motivations behind a lot of it, so I recommend you look further into it so you can form your own opinions there. But in 2007, Cold Stone merged with Kahala, which was See, the company that became Kahala started in the early 1980s as a smoothie chain called Surf City Squeeze. Over the years, they acquired some smaller restaurants Well, the following year, they merged with Cold Stone Creamery, creating a new company with over a billion dollars in sales each year, coming from 4,600 locations of various franchised brands. I think it's funny that at the time, the head of the company said, if you look at the portfolio, you can basically build an entire food court with all of the brands in Kahala Cold Stone. In 2016, that large company was bought by a similar large company called MTY Food Group. They were based in Canada and looking for a presence in the US, so they bought Kahala to create an even larger company with 5,500 locations, but Cold Stone Creamery is the largest of all the different franchises. So clearly franchising has been a major part of their strategy over the years and I would say one of the biggest parts of their success. Another big part of it has been co-branding, because Cold Stone is a history of seeking out partners that would be complimentary enough for them to open shared locations. You know, like when there's two different companies operating under the same building, it's an attempt to save money on real estate while hopefully increasing the n In 2007, they paired up with the original Superman to open a restaurant in New York City, you might not know that name, but they were connected to the guy who inspired that famous Seinfeld episode. The following year, they started opening co-branded locations with Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. They operate gourmet chocolate stores, so they figured it would be a good pairing given that they both sell higher end sweet dessert stuff, but also because chocolate sales tend to be higher in the winter, whereas ice cream sales tend to be higher in the selling them together meant that people would be visiting the store throughout the entire year. In 2009, they started opening new restaurants with Tim Hortons, with kind of a similar reasoning. Tim Hortons is busiest selling coffee and donuts in the mornings, whereas Cold Stone is busiest selling ice cream in the evenings, so the idea was that the restaurant would remain busy throughout the entire day. The whole thing is not entirely un My final reason behind the success of Cold Stone Creamery is somewhat similar to my previous reason, collaborations. Not necessarily sharing a building with another brand, but working with a brand to either gain publicity or create a product. Just some of the highlights, a big example of this would be the non-profit Make-A-Wish Foundation in 2002 that came together to host the world's largest ice cream social, obviously for charity, and continue doing it, I believe, for the next 11 years. They also had a thing where they would select a month of each year and donate $1 to the foundation every time they made a sale of select sizes of ice cream, raising millions of dollars between all of it. Another collaboration, a fun one would be with Jell-O back in 2009, for a couple months they sold this pudding ice cream that didn'technically melt, it just turned into pudding. That one got a lot of attention, and then in 2008 they made a licensing deal with Jelly Belly for them to make a line of Cold Stone branded jelly beans that I can fully recommend. Within a couple years they even became Jelly Belly's fourth best selling mix. In 2022, they teamed up with the makers of the silk brand to make some treats using their almond milk instead of the traditional stuff, creating vegan friendly plant based desserts. So there you have it, Cold Stone Creamery is among the most successful, well Let me know in the comments, what do you think of Cold Stone Creamery? How do you rank it next to Dairy Queen or Baskin Robbins or any other similar chain? If you are among the 30 something thousand people that voted to say they are the best, have I talked about the reasons for it or is there still more to say? Or on the other hand, if you Any other thoughts you have about Cold Stone Creamery or Stone Cold Steve Austin, I guess, or anything else I talked about I'd