Keeping your Ice Cream Safe with Kim Bukowski of Cornell University

And, um, I, uh, i had been to a dairy meeting because i did a lot of work in dairy with my job at cornell in las vegas where i'd seen my first gelato case in the bellagio hotel and i remember seeing that gelato case and saying when i have my own ice cream store that is what i want right so my concept was high-end high premium ice cream i also did chocolates fine chocolates And so I bought a gelato case and a candy case, and it had a little bit of indoor seating.

I had a viewing window into my plant, so I bought the mix, but I made my own ice cream flavors and designed the whole store.

So I opened the first store.

And the town is small.

There's about 7000 people.

So I quickly learned that.

And my goal was to be open year round.

That's why I did the chocolates.

But I found that in the wintertime, I used to make the joke I sell ice cream to Eskimos because it was a struggle.

So all the money I'd make in the summer would go into payroll in the winter.

And because I was leasing the building, I couldn't really just shut it down in the winter.

So that was a struggle.

So about three years in, I was approached by a guy who was going to be building a plaza closer to Syracuse because Casanova is about 40 minutes from Syracuse.

So halfway between there and Syracuse is a town called Manlius, which is really high end.

All the doctors and lawyers and people that have pretty good income live in that town.

They were building a plaza and he had done a survey.

He was a gas station guy.

And the number one request was for an ice cream shop because the history of the property had been a farm where they had opened up a farm stand ice cream store originally.

And so I was the first one to sign a lease in the plaza that he built on the end for a second store.

And when he first approached me, I thought he was crazy.

I was like, I don't want to do a second store.

But then when I started looking at the numbers, I was like, yeah, this maybe makes sense.

So I opened the second store in that plaza.

And that store was way more successful than the first one because it was closer to Syracuse in a bigger town and everything.

So when the lease was getting ready to end on the first store, it was around Thanksgiving time, I can remember.