Shipstr

@hunterwalk I started manufacturing the ice cream because I felt that there was no organic or locally sourced ice cream that was readily available and worth the price. I was selling throughout the Whole Foods in the north east when I attracted attention from the largest distributor of natural and specialty foods. It no longer made sense for me to purchase my pint cups in the US so I decided to manufacture them overseas. At the time a friend was opening up a frozen yogurt store so I got him cups as well. Word quickly spread and I started selling more cups than ice cream. I decided to focus my attention on importing because grocery stores make it extremely difficult for newcomers. They wanted me to pay tens of thousands of dollars in slotting fees on top of their ridiculously high margins. For private label contracts (with supermarkets like Trader Joe's) they expected you to loose money because they were putting their name on it. In the same effort that it took me to sell a pint of ice cream, I was selling thousands of paper products. Once the importing started taking off, I decided to keep the operations small with a local co-packer who could manage the business. Eventually it became too time consuming and decided to put it on the back burner.