How ice cream businesses crush it on Hotplate
Would you believe that you can make $10k a week just selling ice cream without a storefront? It’s true! Hundreds of ice cream businesses have used Hotplate to offer pint pre-orders and many of them sell out of hundreds of pints in just a few minutes.
In short, here’s what works for ice cream businesses:
Starting small and scaling inventory as your production capacity increases
Rotating flavors and offering them only for a limited time
Keeping a consistent schedule for drops and pickups
Why the Hotplate drop model works for ice cream businesses
Pints of ice cream or frozen novelties are an ideal menu item for drop businesses because they can be made in advance and kept frozen ahead of pickup day.
Selling ice cream through drops rather than a physical shop is also an ideal way to increase your margins on each pint sold. The consistent timing, sizing, and ingredient pricing means you can easily anticipate your costs and price items in a way that actually keeps your business healthy.
Additionally, ice cream is an ideal item for rotating flavors and switching up the menu seasonally. Chefs tend to use a singular base recipe and swap flavorings and mix ins so customers can always be excited and delighted by whats new. Ice cream businesses on Hotplate see a much higher rate of returning customers each week because they keep their menu interesting!
How ice cream businesses scale with Hotplate
Many of the ice cream businesses that use Hotplate started with our preorder system from day one, some before they ever sold their first pint! Chefs just starting their businesses or still test churning flavors from home set up Hotplate storefronts so they could start collecting subscribers ahead of their first drop. Like with any Hotplate business, the key to more sales is growing your SMS subscriber list, so capturing every potential customer from day one is crucial.
A great example of a chef doing this is hotplate.com/niccooks who set up her Hotplate storefront before she even had a name picked out for her business! She created hype for her upcoming business through sharing about her recipe development process on Instagram, then selling the 4-6 pints she churns each week through Hotplate. Having a storefront set up allowed her to turn any interested follower into a potential customer by instructing them to subscribe.
As chefs like Nicole scale from 4 pints to 400 and beyond, they can keep the exact same Hotplate set up and simply expand inventory as their capacity increases!
How our ice cream businesses typically operate
While many ice cream chefs start from home with a small countertop machine, droppers churning out larger batches of ice cream usually work out a shared or private commercial kitchen. Some of the biggest considerations when evaluating a kitchen to churn out of are:
Space and electrical capacity for an industrial ice cream machine
Freezer and blast chiller space
Proximity to pickup locations, or the ability to offer pickups on site
The typical ice cream dropper schedule
Most successful ice cream businesses using Hotplate do a regular drop every week. They typically announce the flavors early in the week (Mon/Tues), open orders around midweek (Wed/Thurs) and offer pickups over the weekend (Sat/Sun). That usually means that Thursday and Friday are production days.
Examples to inspire you
Betty Jo’s drops 1 flavor a month in New York City
Betty Jo’s is a pop up ice cream concept founded by Erin and Maddie specializing in pastry inspired pints. Both founders were working a full time job when they first started, so they decided on a schedule of 1 drop a month with a single seasonal flavor that they’d churn out of their apartment. They prepped in small batches and focused a lot of attention on creating a beautiful top to their ice cream so that customers had a delightful experience before even taking a bite. To accommodate their New York customer base, they offered deliver directly to homes and offices.
Within a month of launching, a few TikToks about their ice cream went viral and they were motivated to scale operations quickly, moving into a commissary commercial kitchen space and expanding their capacity with a bigger machine and freezer space.
Rather than expanding their schedule to weekly drops, they kept the format of one flavor and one drop a month but added more inventory and multiple pickup dates and locations throughout New York so they could accommodate a wider audience.
Their schedule:
Betty Jo’s posts a reel announcing the flavor at the start of the month, then open orders a few days later. Currently, they’re selling about 600 pints in under 15 minutes but it takes them about a week to churn all the pints in batches. They’ve partnered with several shops and their own kitchen space to offer pickups for customers about 2 weeks after they first drop!
Sadboy Creamery sells out of hundreds of pints in seconds in Denver
Michael has always loved ice cream! He launched Sadboy Creamery after going to culinary school and developing his ideal recipe: a unique combination of ice cream, gelato, and custard techniques. He curates a new menu every week, often with a theme but always with a sad twist for each of his flavors.
What’s different and special about Sadboy’s ice cream is that he hard scoops his pints rather than fill them directly with soft mix from the ice cream machine. He churns the base, layers it into containers with fillings and mix ins, freezes each tray until it reaches a solid state, then uses a paddle to pack each pint by hand. This process is much more labor intensive, but allows him to achieve a dense texture and topping dispersion that Sadboy has become known for.
He churns out of a commissary kitchen space and offers pickups from a private pickup location a few miles away. The kitchen space at the edge of town allows him to produce and store the hundreds of pints while the pickup space is more centrally located and designed to make customer pick-ups fun!
His schedule:
The menu is announced on Instagram through photos or videos and the drop goes live on Mondays. He can always count on selling out in seconds! Michael and his team churn and package throughout the week, then offer pickups in their pop up location on Thursday through Saturday.
Underground Creamery drops a pint lineup every week in Houston
🔗 hotplate.com/undergroundcreamery
Josh from Underground Creamery in Houston, Texas has been using Hotplate for almost as long as we’ve been around. Though he has a subscriber list of several thousand people, he never intends to open a scoop shop and loves the flexibility of the pre-order model. He’s able to adjust inventory and flavors based on his team’s capacity that week or customer demand.
Every week, he offers a lineup of fan favorites and new seasonal flavors, available to pre-order and pickup. Because he has such a strong and loyal customer base, he does minimal promotion of each drop and instead posts simple carousels with top down photos of each pint.
His schedule:
The week’s menu drops on Friday or Saturday and pints are available for pickup Saturday evenings as well as Sunday or Monday. Josh also partners with a local bakery called Pudgy’s to stock a few flavors that are available for walk up ordering. Because he can count on a sell out every week, he produces his maximum capacity of pints even before his sale goes live!
Thinking of starting a ice cream business? Your first steps
Create your Hotplate storefront: hotplate.com/sign-up
Set your drop schedule (when do orders open, when do you churn, and when/where are pick ups?)
Pick a menu rotation (how often do offer new flavors?)
Understand your inventory capacity at your churning location (even if that starts at just 4 pints)
With those key details figured out, you can schedule your first drop!
