Nibbles Ice Cream, Roscommon, Michigan Wins Promotion of the Year Award

This year six promotions were received for the Promotion of the Year Contest. They included: Vernon Wright, Cold Cow Ice Cream, St. Clair Shores, MI; Karen Morell, Dairy Grove, North Ridgeville, OH; Joel Dejong, Heights Ice Cream Shop, Grand Rapids, MI; Kristy Magaro, Kristy’s Whistle Stop, Enola, PA; Brian Trupp. Little Cottage Ice Cream, Roscommon, MI; and D. Aaron Ephlin and Marlene Cohen, Nibbles Ice Cream, Roscommon, MI.

The winner of this year’s contest is: Nibbles Ice Cream, Roscommon, MI. Summaries of all promotions are included.

Nibbles Ice Cream

Nibbles is a small family, locally owned ice cream shop located at the south end of Higgins Lake in midMichigan. D. Aaron Ephlin and Marlene Cohen said, “We are a seasonal business and operate between May – mid-September.”

Being part of a small community, supported primarily by vacationers and tourists, our business community is often called upon to get involved and support local organizations and/or causes during the off-season.

At Nibbles, our primary effort is directed towards supporting the local animal shelter. Over the last two years,

we have led different community promotions to help raise food, supplies or funds for the shelter and another animal rescue group. With so many businesses struggling, we focused on what we could do that could be easily implemented and managed.

Over the previous two seasons, Nibbles has partnered with Wade, the Higgins Lake local celebrity dog. Wade highlights our beautiful commu-

nity, events, and local businesses on Facebook. Building on that foundation, we created Wade’s Pup Cup. $1.00 Pup Cup: Ice Cream & Dog Biscuit $1.25 Wade’s Pup Cup: Ice Cream, PB topping & Dog Biscuit

Donate $.25 for every Wade’s Pup Cup sold to the Roscommon County Animal Shelter.

GOAL: $250

Goal Met: $282 Raised through the sale of Wade’s Pup Cup and customer donations.

Key Results 24% increase in total pup cups sold from 1,409 in 2020 to 1,755 in 2021. 860 Wade’s Pup Cups sold representing nearly a 90% increase in PB pup cups sold from the 456 in 2020. $215 from the sale of the Wade’s Cups $67 In Customer Donations

Nibbles also sold “Team Wade” T-shirts for an additional $140.00 for the Roscommon Animal Shelter this season.

Cold Cow Ice Cream

Cold Cow Ice Cream is owned by Vernon Wright and located in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. They created a series of specialty sundaes and drinks.

Cidermill Donut Sundae! - With the changing of the seasons everybody

loves to visit the Cidermill. Several times a week I make a trip out to my favorite Cidermill and pick up the donuts. We cut the donut in half, warm it up for just a couple seconds and then make an ice cream sundae with caramel and real whip cream. It is our fall classic.

Cinco de Mayo Sundae - We created this for the celebration of May 5. I

more. I went back to the Mexican bakery and picked up three more dozen. At the end of the day we sold 65 churro Sundaes. It was a specialty item for the day and came out great!

The Ombré slushy’s and freezers! - It’s not so much ice cream but we

serve so many each day. We use a kiddy cup to prepare each flavor and then layer each flavor into a clear 16 oz. cup to produce a very pretty effect of flavors. Ice cream added for a freeze.

The Superman Freeze! - Classic cherry or Blue Raspberry Slush with a

heaping scoop of Superman ice cream on top!

Shark Week items - Our objective was to have fun, since it is shark week and we all have watched Jaws. Lots of items with gummy sharks!

The Olympic Banana Split!! - It’s huge, average weight was 2.5 lbs. plus. Since the Olympics started this summer why not create something of Olympic proportions. Hence the birth of the Olympic banana split! It takes more than the average ice cream eater to knock this one down. The banana split is made in a quart container layer-

ing ice creams and toppings with two bananas split and added to the sides. Topped off with chocolate syrup on top!

Karen’s Dairy Grove

Karen Morell is the owner of Karen’s Dairy Grove, a seasonal ice cream stand in North Ridgeville, OH.

Our town has been growing rapidly over the past ten years, so a roadwidening project was begun in 2014. It was supposed to be complete by 2018, but they finally finished most of it this year. Meanwhile, it was a challenge with construction and barrels impeding the front of our store for the past 7 years!

So, after staring at orange barrels season after season, I figured if we couldn’t beat ‘em, we would join ‘em, which is how the Dairy Grove Construction Barrel float was devised.

In a clear plastic cup, we layer orange slush and vanilla ice cream and top it with “road rubble” (chocolate candy rocks) and “”snow” (whipped cream). We donate 25¢ from each

dessert to our local North Ridgeville Police Safetyville, a traffic safety program for children. This season we raised $315.00 and are rounding up our donation to $350.00.

The desserts became very popular, our customers loved them and they were written about in 2 of our local newspapers, The Chronicle-Telegram and Westlife. Most of all, they made my customers laugh and smile and were a pleasant conversation starter. I know that all of us deal with construction woes at some time or another, and I hope that others may benefit from this simple, fun idea.

Heights Ice Cream

Joel DeJong owns Heights Ice Cream, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’m submitting our Name This Flurry promotion for promotion

of the year. We periodically come up with special flurries, and in this case we couldn’t think of a good name. The flurry was made with cheesecake bites, pecans and fudge. To boost engagement on our social media channels we opened it up to the customers to name it.

We saw a measurable increase in social media traffic and engagement, increased traffic to the shop (and many orders of this specific flurry), and a general appreciation for the ability to have a say in what our menu looks like.

It’s a really easy way for shops to help boost their online engagement and make their profile visible to more people. And all it took was thinking of a flurry and scheduling 2 social media posts.

The name? Cheesecake McFudge Face.

Kristy’s Whistle Stop

Kristy’s Whistle Stop is owned by Kristy Magaro and located in Enola, Pennsylvania. One of the most fun promos this year was a community wide Easter Egg Hunt. We took 50 plastic eggs and stuffed them with wooden nickels, good for one kids cone. We

painted them white so we would know they came back to us.

Then my staff and I took them late the night before Easter and hid them around town. We went to all the local parks, schools and public areas and hid them around.

Then we posted on Facebook that the Easter Bunny was out. We had a good response from the community and other businesses. We had so much fun driving around hiding them and the community had fun looking for them.

We are definitely going to do it again next Easter. It was cheap, easy and lots of fun.

Little Cottage Ice Cream

Brian Trupp, owner of Little Cottage Ice Cream in Roscommon, MI, said, “After a tumultuous 2020 navigating and battling through COVID-19, the spring of 2021 brought with it much hope and optimism for a return to normal life and routine.” Fully engaged in that optimism, Little Cottage Ice Cream welcomed the opportunity to contribute.

In July and August 2021, Little Cottage Ice Cream sponsored and promoted two (2) free admission, public events for the community.

On Saturday July 17, 2021, Little Cottage Ice Cream presented “Music in The Park”, an open-air concert featuring the “Ready to Play” band, a professional, easy listening rock/pop group.

Saturday, August 14, 2021, Little Cottage Ice Cream presented “Magic in The Park”, the same open air, free admission performance by “Amazing Mike”, a professional magician with over 50 years of experience.

Little Cottage Ice Cream rented the pavilion at Markey Township Memorial Park, developed, and printed promotional posters for display and exposure throughout both the Higgins Lake and Houghton Lake areas, obtained newspaper advertisements and radio airtime mentions for the upcoming events. During the events, there was excellent public safety and security with the Roscommon County Sheriff auxiliary present. Little Cottage also had pre-packaged ice cream novelties available and presented discount coupons for future ice cream treats that were provided to every attendee at the event. All ice cream related issues were reviewed and approved by the Central Michigan District Health Department.

A great time was had by all. Both events were an overwhelming success.

The result for Little Cottage Ice Cream: Increased and solidified name recognition and exposure, excellent financial return, public and customer appreciation, goodwill, and a committed increase to our customer base.

The result for the community: The beautiful weather allowed for all attendees to relax and enjoy, have some ice cream and fun, regenerate, be swept away in music and magic, and for a short time if not permanently, to forget about the negatives recently bombarding all of us. v