You work backward, but the numbers are the most important part. Can you tell us about that process in ? In fact, a lot of the farmers we still work with still sell at the market. Before that, for about a year, I made ice cream from my house.
I was trying to convince the bankers to give me money, and I could not afford the machine I wanted. He bought it for me, and I still have it. At the time, I was making ice cream for local chefs and for people in the community who remembered Scream, my first ice cream shop, and because of that, the bank was more willing to give me a loan. They could see that I had a cottage industry. At the time, you could sell a limited amount from your home.
I had been doing well, especially with chefs who were putting my ice cream on their menus. That helped me get the loan. But in , I still needed Charly. I was not able to get the loan on my own; I needed a co-signer. They were not willing to give a woman in her twenties even that small amount of money. He was four and a half years older, too; he was stable.
The bank liked stability! So he and I went in together to get the loan. It took us six months, and it was really because Charly signed on, which I always thought was a little unfair.
If I could do anything of significance in America, bigger picture, I would want to find a way to get more people, young women especially, those small loans for businesses. Who cares if you fail? You learn so much if you fail.
The Helm: What were those early days of your business like? How did you decide what flavors to start with? I had friends who were chefs, and I thought that when you were a chef, you were an artist. You made the things you loved, and people would come to experience what you made.
But that is not how business works. That is not how restaurants work, though some smaller restaurants and high-achieving chefs get away with it. If you are constantly changing your menu and your flavors, you cannot create that crave-able reason to return for a customer. With Scream, I only made what I wanted every single day, and you never knew what I had.
I had flavors people loved, like Salty Caramel, which I would only do every once in a while and no one was doing in America at the time. I put a lot of thought into why I visited other businesses. I knew that half of the flavors were going to be flavors that had done well at Scream, and then the other half would be flavors I just wanted to make for whatever reason—if an ingredient was in season, or if I was excited about it.
From the moment we opened we were busy. I made it clear to customers that we would have limited pints of the rotating flavors and we would always have pints on hand of our signature flavors, which, no matter what time of day, you could always get. Then people could really fall in love with certain flavors and spread the word for us, and then new people would come out for them.
That was how we started to blossom and grow into the community. We opened November 15, at the same North Market and we had a long line the entire winter. Sometimes it would be out the door. It was crazy. And that growth has continued. Were you partners when you opened up? I think Charly would have said that I was the owner of the business, even though he was helping me with the bank. The beautiful thing is that when he bought me that new ice cream machine, I was trying to get money from a family connection to be able to buy it.
They agreed to give me the money at first, but then they told me not to take it. They told me to go to the bank and get a loan because then I would own percent of the company. If I took the money from the family, they would own too much of the company. When Charly bought it for me, it felt like we were married at that point. She fell in love with her job, working almost full-time, first there, then later at a French bakery that opened across the street.
When Britton Bauer was a senior in high school, she applied to The Ohio State University and got a rejection letter in the mail. Instead of accepting the rejection like most applicants, she wrote an appeal letter explaining why her grades were subpar. At that time her mother was ill and her father was out of the picture, so responsibility for her baby brother often fell to her. School was often her lowest priority as the teenager preferred to bake pastries rather than do homework on top of family responsibilities.
Admissions at university read her appeal and opened their doors. In college, she studied fine art and art history while entertaining the idea of becoming a perfumer. As she discovered essential oils, she started experimenting by mixing a few drops into pints of ice cream. She would put her experiments in the freezer and then bring them to parties for feedback.
The ice cream was such a hit that one day in the middle of a particularly onerous figure drawing class during her sophomore spring she decided to leave college and start an ice cream company.
A few months after leaving school, she partnered with a friend to open the Scream Ice Cream stand in the North Market in Columbus in It was a labor of love, with Britton Bauer even crashing on friends' couches and occasionally in her hatchback Chevette to make ends meet for the first couple of months.
The business lasted about four years, despite meager take-home pay. Eventually, she and her business partner split and the business closed. She had observed what recipes resonated with customers and how to build loyal fans with good customer service. The only problem was that she had no funds to invest in a new business, so the deal stalled. No one looks too cool with a cone in their hand. It makes you kind of feel dorky! From the beginning we would get fan mail that relates our ice cream to an orgasm or a first kiss or something sexual.
So we must be doing something right. I do eat ice cream every day. But then every day, I also eat it just to enjoy it with my kids. The scoop matters. Then I like to put toppings on. I need that a lot. I put it in our cookbook , and we called it Ylang Ylang With Clove.
Ylang-ylang is so beautiful. In the last couple of years, I made this honeycomb candy and threw that in too. So we eventually tweaked the name and called it Nectar Honeycomb—like nectar of the gods.
When you put this flavor in front of someone, they love it, but we need a name that makes them want to try it. So we just have to figure out how to explain it and connect people to it. But these flavors are so good! Once we took yogurt off and just called them parfait or chiffon, they started selling out completely. A lot of times it really is about the name.
It matters in ice cream, but it matters in so many different industries. I know as a lifelong Democrat that the Democrats are terrible at this! So many of their messages are not connecting with people. She eventually quit art school — just walked out of art class one day — and started a small shop called Scream Ice Cream in Columbus' North Market in Britton Bauer spent each day learning on the job, working out of a tiny freezer to create flavors that combined ingredients from other local vendors in the market.
One of the first flavors Britton Bauer offered was a salty caramel. She had mastered the art of caramel making while working in a French bakery. And it proved to be a winning recipe for her. But the popularity of one flavor did not turn Scream Ice Cream into an instant business success.
I only ate because merchants in the market would help me. I'd trade ice cream for food. I didn't have a car, I took the bus every day or I rode my bike," she says. Nobody told me to go get a real job. And so she pushed forward. Eventually, she closed Scream Ice Cream in and spent the next two years fine-tuning the business. Britton Bauer opened a revamped shop simply called Jeni's at North Market in Starting at a farmer's market in Columbus, Ohio, turned out to be one of the best things for Jeni's, Britton Bauer says.
Not only was the rent cheap, but she had direct access farmers and a wider community of specialty chocolate and spice vendors who had all the ingredients she could ever need for her bespoke flavor combinations. That allowed Jeni's to grow a shipping business just two years after opening, which led to interest by the national press.
Even as the company grew, Britton Bauer knew she wanted to stay involved with developing new flavors and serving customers.
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