Ice Cream Franchises

Unlike other specialty food franchises, ice cream shops have been with us since the dawn of the industrial age. Practically as soon as we figured out how to make a freezer, somebody went in business making frozen treats and selling them.

Ice cream franchises are relatively trouble-free compared to other kinds of fast food. There’s no cooking, everything arrives packaged, and you barely even need to train people to run the place. You get to save on real estate square footage, since an ice cream counter fits just about anywhere. You’ll of course need a few extras - many ice cream stores are branching out into sodas, shakes, and smoothies. But generally nobody expects too much of you.

There are dozens of well-known name brand ice cream chains offering franchise opportunities. Baskin Robbins, Ben and Jerry’s, Carvel, Haagen-Dazs, and MaggieMoo’s are all famous name brands which also sell their product in the grocery store, so consumers are familiar with these brands. In addition, many other fast food operations serve ice cream as well.

Ice cream isn’t the only contender for the favored frozen treat, however. Several businesses have also made a name for themselves with frozen yogurt and frozen custard. Each of these have similar appeal to ice cream, as does sherbets, so you might as well pick a business that lets you stock all four. Ice cream franchises also dabble sometimes in other food items - Baskin Robbins made the ice cream cake famous, while other stores have tried Italian gelatos. Whatever new products launch in the ice cream business, count on it being sweet and usually frozen.

Start-up costs for a typical ice cream franchise run to about $70,000 or so, with a little wriggle room higher and lower but never approaching six figures. There is very little fuss to setting one up, and most of the ice cream companies offer set-up help, training, and comprehensive support packages.

Of notable mention is the Dairy Queen franchise. Their franchises start out a bit pricier, but then Dairy Queens have broken into new markets, now serving hamburgers, hot dogs, chili, and various other main-course edibles. Running a Dairy Queen is more like running a full-scale fast food restaurant. Dairy Queen has demonstrated what the franchise business model can do for a place - starting from one store first opened in 1938, they have expanded to 5,600 locations, only 85% of which are located in the United States.

One future market trend you might want to watch in this business: the “juice bar” stores are starting to offer many frozen treats as well. They’re more aiming for beverages, like smoothies, shakes, and yogurt drinks, but it may only be a matter of time before the ice cream stores retaliate by breaking into juice drinks. You’ve seen this market trend before, where taco restaurants start serving hamburgers, hamburger restaurants start serving tacos, and then it ends up with everybody selling everything anyway. All this means is that ice cream franchises and juice franchises should look to merge - or perhaps find themselves in competition.