Carvel

About Carvel

Carvel is an ice cream franchise owned by FOCUS Brands – Carvel is well-known for its soft serve ice cream, its round Flying Saucer ice cream sandwiches, and its ice cream cakes (including Fudgie the Whale, Hug Me the Bear, and Cookie Puss - only available in the franchised stores). In addition to their franchised locations, FOCUS Brands' Celebration Foods division produces ice cream cakes for supermarket sales; however, the cakes destined for the supermarkets are produced in a factory, warehoused and shipped all over the country, and as such are not as fresh as those found in franchise stores. The stores can also customize their freshly made cakes in a variety of ways, such as flavor changes or putting photo images on cakes.

Carvel was founded and run by Tom Carvel for its first 60 years. In 1929 Tom Carvel built and began operating a frozen custard trailer. For Memorial Day weekend of 1934, Carvel borrowed $15 from his future wife Agnes to buy a load of frozen custard to sell to holiday vacationers. When the truck suffered a flat tire in Hartsdale, New York Carvel started selling his custard at the site of the breakdown, the parking lot of a pottery store. Within two days, his entire stock, much of it partly melted, had been sold, and Carvel realized that both a fixed location and soft (as opposed to hard) frozen desserts were potentially good business ideas. In his first year there, he grossed over $3500. By 1937 he had a custard stand at the Hartsdale site, with a freezer which allowed him to make his own frozen custard. By 1939, gross was over $6000.

In the early 1940s, Tom Carvel traveled, selling custard at carnivals, while his wife Agnes ran the Hartsdale location. During World War II he ran the ice cream stands at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, gaining additional expertise in refrigeration technology. He soon invented and patented his own freezer, the "Custard King", and in 1947 sold 71 freezers at $2900 each. Some of the freezer purchasers defaulted on payments on the units, and upon investigation, Carvel found that they were not running their businesses efficiently, choosing poor locations and not always maintaining high health standards. Carvel decided that the best way to correct the situation was to participate in running the operations of his freezer customers; he later claimed this led him to develop the concept of franchising.