Selling soft serve ice cream or frozen yogurt is a great way to make money. Ice cream is one of the best ways to make a profit in the food industry. Here’s everything you need to know to help you decide.
The Popularity of Ice Cream
Ice cream has always been popular, but never more so than since the surge of interest in soft serve ice creams in the 1970s and 80s. Today it’s one of the top three items that astronauts most report missing, along with pizza and sodas. While all ice cream is popular, seven out of 10 consumers will choose a soft serve over a hard ice cream. This is good news for people who want to find a Taylor ice cream machine for sale and get started turning a profit because soft serve typically has 35% air overrun. This means that four ounces of soft serve mix turns out a volume that appears six ounces.
Know Your Frozen Dairy Products
You have to know what will be coming out of that Taylor ice cream machine for sale if you buy it and start using it. First, federal law mandates that you may only refer to your product as “ice cream” if it has at least 10% milkfat. It also has to weigh a minimum of 4.5 pounds to the gallon. If you want something lower fat, sherbert is a frozen dessert with a milkfat content between 1% and 2%, and it has to weigh at least 6 pounds to the gallon. If you’re serving something with at least 10% milkfat and at least 1.4% egg yolk solids, this can be called frozen custard or French ice cream.
What You Need to Be Successful
That Taylor ice cream machine for sale is a great place to start, as a Taylor soft serve machine is one of the best you can buy. But beyond the equipment, you’ll need to choose product and make decisions on what to sell. Your product can be anything from a largely water-based non-dairy mix, which can be sold at very low cost, all the way up to a fine frozen custard, which can be sold more expensively. Then you’ll need to decide if you intend on selling simple cones and bowls, which are assumed to be included in the price, or if you want to also include waffle cones and bowls, which you can charge extra for. Toppings are another item to consider. The more toppings you provide, the more perceived value your product has; but toppings will, of course, cost you money.
Figuring Costs
Price is the most important factor in your soft serve ice cream program. If you aren’t selling premium ice cream, you’d be a fool to try and sell it at premium prices. Customers will notice, and they will stop coming. People buy repeatedly what they perceive to be of value, so many times lower prices actually translate to higher profits. Location is also an important factor in choosing prices.
Figuring Your Traffic
How much ice cream you’ll be selling out of that Taylor soft serve machine for sale is dependent on four things: how many people go by, location, promotion, and how well you serve your customers. To sell ice cream within an existing restaurant or store, you can usually expect to sell to about 10% of your daily customers. If you’re operating an ice cream stand then you have amazing potential for sales if you get customer service, price, and location right.
Selling More
It could just be enough to get that Taylor ice cream machine for sale and sell basic vanilla and chocolate cones, or possibly even flavorburst cones. But you can usually increase profits by adding on milkshakes, mixers, sundaes, ice cream floats, and banana splits. People perceive these to have great value and will pay a lot more for them.
Selling soft serve ice cream can be a great way to maximise you profits. See what that Taylor ice cream machine for sale can do to increase your bottom line.
