Carvel (restaurant)

Carvel

Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Ice cream
Founded	1929
Headquarters	Farmington, Connecticut, United States
Products	Ice cream, ice cream cakes
Number of employees	1,000
Parent	Focus Brands
Website	www.carvel.com

Carvel is an ice cream franchise owned by Focus Brands. Carvel is best known for their soft serve ice cream and ice cream cakes, which feature a layer of distinctive 'crunchies'. It also sells a variety of novelty ice cream bars and ice cream sandwiches.

Carvel was founded and run by Tom Carvel for its first 60 years. In 1929, Carvel borrowed $15 ($200 today) from his future wife Agnes and used it to build and begin operating an ice cream truck. Over Memorial Day weekend of 1934, Carvel's truck suffered a flat tire in Hartsdale, New York, and Carvel started selling his custard at the site of the breakdown, the parking lot of a pottery store. Within two days Carvel had sold his entire stock, much of it partly melted, and 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 $3,500. 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 $6,000. The original Hartsdale store was closed on Sunday, October 5, 2008.

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 $2,900 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.

Carvel popularized various ice cream "novelty" items, such as the "Flying Saucer", a circular ice cream sandwich, the "Icy Wycy," a paper cone of sherbet on a stick, "Brown Bonnet" and "Cherry Bonnet," frozen vanilla ice cream on a sugar cone dipped in a sweet, waxy confection, the "Tortoni," a cup of vanilla ice cream covered with toasted coconut and topped with a maraschino cherry, and the "Lollapalooza," cylindrical ice cream on a stick covered with colored sprinkles, as well as the "Mamapalooza" and "Papapalooza."