"We're busy as ever on the retail side," said Linda Mitchell of Mitchell's Ice Cream, a family-owned business in San Francisco that makes its product fresh every day.
"Ice cream, while not as inexpensive as it used to be, is still low enough that families feel like they can treat themselves," she said.
Lynda Utterback, publisher of the National Dipper, a trade magazine delivered to 15,000 U.S. frozen dessert parlors, said many operators tell her their sales are up 20 percent.
"A bad economy is always good for ice cream stores; it's a comfort food," said Utterback, who reckons that two-thirds of her readers are independents and the rest franchises.
The recession has actually emboldened Häagen-Dazs to look for half a dozen new franchise locations in Northern California over the next 18 months, said Dawn Uremovich, president of the company's store division, which is based in Minneapolis.
"There's a lot of great real estate out there, a lot of empty storefronts in high-traffic locations," said Uremovich, who thinks nostalgia explains why ice cream parlors succeed even in bad times.
"It goes back to memories of being a kid and licking on a cone," she said.
But for all its nostalgia, ice cream has become a global industry dominated by a handful of giant firms that sell most of their products through supermarkets, while parlors, whether independents or franchises, represent just a tiny fraction of total sales.
Häagen-Dazs, for instance, is a division of Oakland-based Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, one of the leaders in an industry worth more than $9 billion annually. Dreyer's is itself part of the Swiss multinational Nestle.
Big changes for Dreyer's
This year Dreyer's is celebrating the 80th anniversary of Rocky Road, a flavor that founder William Dreyer introduced in 1929 to put a smile on people's faces during the Great Depression, said company spokeswoman Dori Sera Bailey.
Then Dreyer's was just an ice cream parlor in Oakland. Today it employs about 7,000 people nationwide, including 519 in the Bay Area. Parlor sales are less than 2 percent of its total volume of roughly $2.3 billion. Marketing Vice President Rhonda Ramlo said supermarket sales also have remained strong during the recession.
"If you're staying at home and you're going to have fun once you've had dinner, what better than to scoop a bowl of ice cream," Ramlo said.
Scott Whidden, master blender of Fentons Creamery and Restaurant in Oakland, summarized the consolidation that has created an industry dominated by giants like Dreyer's, but in which some local parlors still thrive.
Whidden said ice cream first took off during the Depression because it was relatively easy to make and offered small dairies a new source of revenue.
A second big expansion occurred after World War II, when many returning veterans opened up parlors. He said they found it relatively easy to install ice-cream-making equipment in the back, serve scoops out front and create a family business.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, these small parlors continued to have a quality edge over supermarket ice cream, but by the 1980s the landscape had started to change. Whidden said innovative brands like Dreyer's started delivering premium ice creams to supermarkets, eroding some of the advantages of parlor-made ice cream.
At the same time, many postwar ice cream manufacturers started to retire. "It's hard work," Whidden said.
Expansion can be tough
He said Fentons tried to expand during the late 1980s and early 1990s by opening other parlors and selling its factory-made ice cream to supermarkets. But the brand could not compete for freezer space, and its parlors lost some of their appeal. "When we stopped making the ice cream on premises, we immediately saw a negative reaction," Whidden said.
So he shrank Fentons back to its Oakland location, where knowing that the ice cream is made on the spot is as important as the flavor. "It's a lot sexier to see it made on premises," Whidden said.
Fentons, which can seat 200 people at a time and dish out a ton of ice cream on a good day, recently got a publicity boost by virtue of its prominent inclusion in the new Pixar movie, "Up." Two years ago, Whidden opened a second Fentons Creamery at the Nut Tree on Interstate 80 in Vacaville.
But even smaller parlors like San Francisco's Mitchell's Ice Cream have prospered by using their on-site production to tailor their treats to local tastes.
Co-founder Larry Mitchell said when he started in 1953, the parlor sold lots of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry scoops to the Irish, German and Italian families who lived nearby.
In time, as Filipino, Mexican and Central American families came to predominate, the shop started making flavors like mango, macapuno and buko - both variants of coconut - and ube, based on a purple yam.
Today the shop employs 30 people, including seven ice cream-makers, and while sales to local restaurants and groceries are a little soft owing to the recession, customers still visit the parlor for scoops, especially on hot, sunny days.
"The neighborhood changed, the flavors changed, we're still here," Mitchell said.
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