Prices Often Hottest Topic for Ice-Cream Shops

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Prices Often Hottest Topic for Ice-Cream Shops
Salt & Straw employee with cone at the ice-cream shop in Venice.

As more gourmet ice-cream shops open across Los Angeles, the key to success in the scoop wars is consistent pricing.

Flavors such as olive with goat cheese and rosemary with butterscotch vary in production cost but the businesses that are thriving and expanding say nailing a single price is crucial.

“It would be really confusing for folks to have multiple prices for the same size but different flavors,” said Leo Neveux of Neveux Artisan Creamery on Melrose Avenue. “It’s not worth doing.”

He knows because he once tried to charge extra for cherry saffron ice cream because saffron is pricey, but customers couldn’t understand the cost bump.

This strategy of keeping prices level across the board, no matter the expense of a recipe’s ingredients, appears to have paid off for a growing number of local artisan ice-cream parlors.

Sweet Rose Creamery has opened five shops in five years. Salt & Straw just opened its second L.A. store and plans to launch two more this year. Neveux Artisan Creamery is considering expansion to a second location. And L.A. Creamery sells pints to various grocery stores including Albertsons and Bristol Farms Inc.

Eventually, the cheaper flavors – as long as they are popular – subsidize the costlier ones.

“We’ll lose on some and win on others,” said Jon-Patrick Lopez, co-founder of Wanderlust Creamery, which launched last summer in Tarzana.

Rolling dice

But there’s always a risk that calculations will go awry. What if customers shun the cheaper fare in favor of the most expensive flavors?

“If everyone comes in and gets pistachio, we’ll be kind of screwed,” said Lopez.

He needs a pound of Sicilian pistachios costing $30 to $35 to produce a gallon of pistachio ice cream, while the earl grey tea flavor, for example, requires just a few bucks.

Wanderlust and other gourmet parlors average out costs across their offerings to set prices. While the world’s largest ice-cream chain, Baskin-Robbins, charges $2.49 for one scoop, or about 4 ounces, artisan shops charge more for the same size, $3.75 at Neveux, $4 at Wanderlust, $4.50 at Sweet Rose and $4.90 at Salt & Straw.

Neveux, who opened his shop in 2011, got a jump on L.A.’s artisanal ice-cream boom. Now, he is feeling local competition bite into his sales and wants to open a second spot. He said he would keep overheard relatively flat by operating a single kitchen.

That’s what Salt & Straw has done with its 6,000-square-foot site in Boyle Heights, which serves both its L.A. locations. From there, nine people prepare ingredients by hand, laboring three or four days on each batch before delivering the final product to Salt & Straw’s shops in Larchmont Village and Venice.

Salt & Straw, which offers several new flavors every month along with about a dozen standbys, plans to double the size of its kitchen staff when it opens locations in Studio City and downtown L.A.’s Arts District later this year.

Co-founder Kim Malek said she didn’t want to ship ice cream from the company’s home base in Portland, Ore., where it launched three shops before branching into Los Angeles. She wanted instead to create a made-in-L.A. product – even at a cost of more than $1 million to open the kitchen.

Picking produce

Some ice-cream makers shape their menus around the availability of produce from local farmers who are at the whim of the seasons.

Shiho Yoshikawa of Sweet Rose, speaking after a trip to the Santa Monica Farmers Market last week, said she had selected passionfruit, mangos, guavas, cherimoyas and citruses to convert into new flavors.

She even uses the peels, trying to squeeze out as much value as possible from expensive organic fruits. To make sure she stays on budget, Yoshikawa plans her flavors a month in advance.

“We have a very strict labor-costs target that we adhere to,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a higher cost and other times it’s a super-low cost. But I do have to watch that.”

The flavors now sell for $4.50 a scoop, a price that went up 50 cents this year to account for increasing cost of ingredients and the rising minimum wage. Sweet Rose employs 60 people.

Yoshikawa has found that one of her best sellers – fresh mint chip – is also one of the most expensive and labor intensive to create. Each week, the recipe requires 50 pounds of mint picked and cleaned by hand, mixed with 100 pounds of Guittard chocolate from the Bay Area.

So she can understand the frequent lament among ice-cream makers – of having invented a flavor that is pricey yet delicious. They often say: I wish I never created this flavor, but I have to do it because it’s so popular.

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