Pivoting our Way Through the Pandemic!
“Pivot” has become the buzzword of the year. Although it has been challenging to find the silver-lining in many situations, without the pandemic we wouldn’t have had to imagine our business in a different way. For that, we are thankful. The pandemic made us question everything; our current model, areas of focus, what new opportunities were best to seek, ROI opportunities and even who best fit our team. We’ve grown so much in the last four months; we are proud of our team. That’s the silver-lining.
On March 23, 2020 the Ontario government broadcasted that all non-essential businesses were to closed until further notice. As an ice cream company with a main focus on foodservice, this was a scary announcement. We had a ton of raw materials with a short shelf life (for example cream), our sales dropped drastically and we had not started stock piling for the summer and did not know what this would mean for the warmer months. We did on the other hand have a few SKUS with a ton of stock that was imperative to start moving out of our warehouse.
We started to notice that there was an up-tick in our Parlour sales. People were stressed and wanting some comfort food. We posted a video on our Instagram simply saying, “we have lots of ice cream, you order, we will bring it to your car” and people started to come!
The next week we decided to have a sale. $5.00 for 1.89L in 5 flavours and only took orders over the phone with credit card numbers to reduce the number of touches. We had 4 people in the office answering the phone all day, running up and down the stairs from the freezer to cars. We couldn’t believe how busy it was!
The next week we took a bigger risk. Since we had so much stock of flavours in the 11.4L tubs we had a sale of 10 flavours in 11.4L. People were coming from all over to pick-up the big tubs! By testing this in our small market of Peterborough, we knew there was still a need for large tubs of ice cream. This was comforting and we began to devise a plan for the summer. Again, 4 people in our office running to fill orders and put in cars. The whole time we couldn’t believe how many people were coming and being so loyal to buying local. We were so thankful.
We also noticed that the morning was the busiest time for pickup. People would order the day before and plan their grocery store trip to coordinate when they would come pick-up ice cream. Their big plan for the day was picking-up our ice cream. At this time, we began to get smarter about how to organize the orders by time because freezer space near the pick-up area was at a premium.
On April 27th, we launched our Shopify website. The phones went quiet. The number of orders doubled. In the first 10 minutes there were more orders than a whole day in weeks past. We couldn’t believe it. Customers could order at any time of day that was convenient to them, even when we weren’t working!
The hype on the website lasted about a week, but the number one complaint was that our tub sizes were too large for the average family freezer.
On May 5th we launched the variety pack concept. It was a lot of manual labour so we began to hire back our Parlour staff to help us with this. Instead of scooping cones, they were scooping from 11.4L containers to 900ml containers. This was a way to move stock and to satisfy our customer needs. The element of excitement was that the 6 flavours in the pack changed weekly.
The concept of the variety pack came at a great time. Our wholesale partners were also questioning how they were going to scoop ice cream for the summer. Seeing our concept helped many of the other ice cream scooping parlors with a plan of action for take-out ice cream for 2020 summer!
June & July took us by surprise. Since the Canadian/ US boarder was closed this encouraged local travel within Canada. Ice cream sales haven’t stopped. Our stock was challenged. Our parlour still busier than ever. We opened for scoops with a social distanced idea at our factory location. Our scooping parlors and restaurant customers were happy with our consistent stock levels. And this was able to happen because we are so lucky to have such an incredible team. Things at home with the unknown of the virus have been challenging and we are so lucky to have so many committed employees coming to work each day. We have been able to pivot and take-on the curveballs as they have come, but the most important lesson we keep learning is, “Teamwork makes the dream work.”
Hope to see you soon for pre-order pick-up or a scoop!