Great comment

This one was a comment on the blog. I get so few and this one was so great that I decided to share it:

Hi. Our family owns the play and freeze ice cream ball. We purchased it through ERAC. Their website is www.erac.us. The cost was $24.95. I just wanted to say that I love the ice cream ball and the possibilities of what you can make with it are endless. I love to experiment with it. I made "rootbeer" float ice cream yesterday. It tasted just like the root beer floats that my dad use to make for me when I was a kid. I am planning on taking the ball with me for the 4th of July. My neices and nephews will have a ball!!! Well, great product and looking forward to what future products your company comes up with.

Disneyesque

A funny little review of the ball from kitchencontraptions.com...

Interesting little kitchen contraption that makes ice cream in what appears to be the dome from Epcot. No - seriously the Play & Freeze is shapped like a football and has a metal cylinder in side where you add your ingredients to make ice cream.

Exceptional customer service

Here's an impressive story. Steve helped a customer whose first note to us started with "We do plan to give our new ice cream maker one more chance before throwing it in the nearest garbage can." He turned them into a happy customer. So happy, in fact, that they left the following on Amazon along with a 5-star service rating: "A fun product to make yummy ice cream. Extremely helpful seller to promptly answer questions about the ball. Order arrived very promptly."

The whole exchange follows...

From the customer:

We do plan to give our new ice cream maker one more chance before throwing it in the nearest garbage can. We used it once last week-end and were all excited to try it. The ice cream mix froze solid to the cylinder hard as a brick for about 3/8 inch, leaving the inside soupy. We gave up after 45 minutes, let it all melt in the sink and then threw it away without ever having eaten any ice cream. Maybe our ice was in too big of pieces? (small cubes). We added 1/2 cup rock salt, stirred it after 10 minutes of shakingthe ball, added ice and another 1/2 cup rock salt and shook it some more. If we try it again, we'll use finely crushed ice and open up the ball and stir it about every 5 minutes and see what that does. Any suggestions?

Steve's response:

Thanks for your note and I'm sorry it didn't work for you the first time...I can offer a few suggestions based on my experience making ice cream. First of all, the small cubes and rock salt approach you are using sound fine...I would not switch to crushed ice...you might not need a full half cup of rock salt for the second fill...about a 1/4 cup more. (3/4 cups total)
1) After about 10 minutes of mixing, when you open it up, you need to have a hard plastic spoon/spatula or a wooden spoon to scrape that hard ice cream away from the sides. You're not just mixing the soupy part but removing the hard ice cream from the sides. By mixing that hard stuff forming with the soupy stuff, you are allowing a more uniform mixture to form (when you play with the ball for another 7-10 minutes)
2) Just a thought that half n half or cream make a less hard mix...I have heard that when people substitute milk, it can take longer to freeze and be more bricklike around the can.
I hope this helps and am willing to answer any more questions you have....it really does work well...you can't expect ice cream with the perfect consistency of a $250 Cuisinart, but I've managed to get many a batch of good gourmet soft serve. It freezes harder if you remove it from the can and put it in the freezer.
Call me during the day if you have any questions.
Steve1-888-297-6062

Customer:

Thanks for the prompt reply - we'll try it again. I was using half & half.

Steve:

Please tell me how it goes...do you need me to send you a hard plastic spoon (its the size of a wooden spoon but plastic)?

Customer:

A hard plastic spoon would be wonderful - part of the problem is you can't use metal and a wooden spoon just doesn't work that well. Can you getting billing and address information from our order number or do you need me to send that? Thanks for your help!

Steve:

Yes, I am sending it today to your address in IA. I use an up and down motion to scrape it away from the sides followed by a more conventional mixing motion. Good luck.

Customer:

We just successfully made ice cream with the Play & Freeze Ice Cream maker! Thank you so much for your helpful tips and information - and for the spoon you sent which was a huge help (and the ice cream was delicious). Thanks again!

Steve (in a note to me):

Keith, This was the "We do plan to give our new ice cream maker one more chance before throwing it in the nearest garbage can." customer that we turned around. Steve

And, giving myself the last word:

I have to admit: that's a damn fine piece of customer service right there.

What is that thing???

Michael writes:

I just bought a Play and Freeze Ice Cream Maker which is very cool. But the supplied scraper doesn't seem right -- it's as if the end of it somehow got inverted in the manufacturing process because the scraper, as it stands, doesn't scrape well at all. Is this a known problem and do you have a new scraper? Or am I missing something obvious? Feel free to email or call me to discuss.

I wrote back:

Hello Michael,
I suspect that what you are calling the "scraper" is what we call the "wrench". It's designed to fit into the lid to allow the lid to be removed even when it's frozen in place. (Don't use the wrench for tightening, just for loosening.) We don't supply a scraper with the ball. We recommend using a wooden spoon or a stiff plastic spoon for best results.

You can visit our website at http://icecreamrevolution.com/ucocream.htm for instructions, recipes, etc.

I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if you still need any assistance.

Good luck!

Keith

Letter from a fan

From our website feedback form...

it all started when my mom got a magazine in the mail. we looked through the magazine that night. we wanted to go camping so we thought this looked good. we all agreed to buy " The Camper's Dream". we got it in the mail a couple days later. then we found out that my step sis and bro were coming to visit us in MN. we opened the box and the ingrediants told us to fill the outside with ice. my mom is on the watkins diet so we had to use watkins vanilla.(that's why it doesn't taste perfect) haha...Later on we got everything in s different bowl and stirred it up. We then put it in the middle part of the ball. We then decided to go outside because it was hard to do in the house. Next we decided to have a fire so we got the stuff for that. We lit the fire and a bug flew on my mom. We decided that we have to let it go and not throw it in the fire (the bug- not the ball) haha...
The buzzer went off so then we had to dump the water out and put new ice in and stir the partial ice cream. We went back outside and did it for another 10 minutes and then we decided it was done, and the bugs were getting bad. We had to go in the house. It made so little we had to use baby spoons and Dixie cups, but it was good. If you want to send me something for free, that would be cool because I like your Camper's Dream. my age is 10 The End.

Sex in the Great Outdoors

I like this one from away.com. It's from their article on "Sex in the Great Outdoors":

Uco Candlelier ($33.95): No question, a few well-placed candles can set the mood so that sparks fly later. To bring ambiance to the woods, try the Uco Candlelier: a clever three-candle lantern that's amazingly bright, and at just over one pound, pretty easy on the back. It’s all you need to put the right light on a late-night dinner under the stars. If you’ve really got your stuff together, try arranging wildflowers around the Candlelier to kick your romance quotient up a notch.

Newsweek Japan - lost in translation

The ball appeared last week in Newsweek Japan, in an article written in Japanese. Here are the results of putting the text through Google's translation engine:

Makes the ice cream ball
The ball family of the magic which makes the ice cream being even, when it does sunlight bath with such as summer and the park where the opportunity which goes out increases it becomes desired the ice cream. When so it keeps running to the stand, the line of the long snake being possible, doing to reach. If is, it probably will change into play which rather can enjoy the ice cream making in the family. The UCO corporation of the outdoor supplies (Washington) as for ice-cream freezer " playing & freezing ", seeing, sort ball condition. The ice and the rock salt are inserted fully in the part the bottom, the element of the ice cream (, the basis the raw cream and the sugar and the vanilla essence) inserting, does the plug in the central cylinder. After turning and/or rolling the ball, the thing approximately 15 minutes which play. The plug should have been opened and the ice cream of feeling does. If setting the favorite, adding the ice, furthermore about 5 minutes the interest should in ball play. However do not use in the soccer and the like.

Now that's some fun reading!

Thanks, GMA!

I still haven't seen it, but if our Amazon store is any measure, the appearance of the ball on Good Morning America has generated a tremendous amount of sales. The day's not over, but we've already blown past our one-day sales record (for Amazon) set a few days after the Consumer Reports article came out.

A company consisting of 70 stores contacted us today wanting to stock the ball. We are in the unfortunate situation of telling them no (for now) because we are not able to meet the demand we've already got! I think we'll be in better shape in 8 weeks, but it's hard to be sure.

GOOD Good Morning America!

The ice cream maker was shown on Good Morning America's Watercooler segment this morning. I don't yet have a link to video, but here's a blurb. Amazon orders are spiking. We've moved from #48 on the Kitchen and Housewares list to #13, and that's just this morning!

Here's the blurb:

Tuesday, June 21

On Tuesday's "Around the Watercooler," "Good Morning America" anchors talked about an ice cream maker that requires no electricity. The Play & Freeze Ice Cream Maker looks like a blue soccer ball and costs $34.95. Just by shaking, you can make about a pint of soft-serve ice cream in as little as 10 minutes. For more information, visit www.icecreamrevolution.com.

Gizmo Girl weighs in

Gizmo Girl in England had a good time playing with the ice cream ball.

Be sure to click on the bottom of the page to add your rating to the ice cream ball. With just a few dozen votes I managed to raise the score from 5.5 to 9.2! Vote early and vote often.

Star Gazette article

Check out a flattering article on the ball here at the Star Gazette site.

Despite all our "don't kick it" warnings, Atlanta Sports and Fitness says, four times, that the ice cream ball is a soccer ball!

Ice Cream Ball on TV!

A very nice TV spot featuring the ice cream ball appeared in Fresno, CA last night. Unfortunately, there's just nowhere in Fresno to get one! Be sure to click on the VIDEO button to see the piece.

Web site traffic

We still haven't put our new web sites out in public (it will be a few more weeks). Despite that, the publicity we're getting is driving a huge amount of traffic to our site. Our home page was seeing 45 visitors a day. In the last 10 days that's gone up to 183. The ice cream ball home page similarly jumped from 25 to 170.

Ever increasing demand

A note from one of our big customers:

Like I said...They're selling very well.

Repeat after me: "It's a good problem to have. It's a good problem to have..."

Are there any additional units available on upcoming deliveries?

Ben Cohen sucks

Ben and Jerry, kings of ice cream. Smart Money magazine asked them to review five different ice cream makers for their "Smart Spending" section. Apparently "Smart Spending" means "Big Spending" because the only two models that seem to pass muster go for $179 and $250.

If you can't tell from my attitude, they did not approve of the Play and Freeze ($29). Jerry made some nice comments, but Ben seems to be a grouch. Here's the relevant section:

We move on to the Uco Ice Cream Ball ($29). Made for L.L.Bean, this unit looks like a neon soccer ball and actually makes the ice cream that way: You fill one end with the ingredients, the other end with rock salt and ice, and toss or roll it around the yard for 20 minutes until the mixture freezes. "I love it," Jerry says at first, punting it across the room. "It looks like a space capsule." But the novelty quickly wears off. In addition to making only a pint, half as much ice cream as the next-smallest models, it has no blades inside to churn the mixture. L.L.Bean product developer Chris Gailey says because it is mixed manually by the shaking, the Ice Cream Ball can't produce the same consistency as other machines. But he points out its travel advantages. "I'd challenge anyone to take one of the traditional ice cream makers on a canoe trip," he says. Ben, the blunter of the duo, doesn't really care about canoeing. "This ice cream sucks," he says.

Not much of a valiant defense by the L.L.Bean guy, huh? A canoe trip? Very lame.

In summary, bite me, Ben.

Smart Money page 101

Smart Money page 100

Smart Money Page 99

Smart Money cover.

Inefficient markets

The internet is, among other things, supposed to provide total transparency on pricing. In other words, it should be quite easy to find the lowest cost for a given item. Right.

Check out this ebay auction for an ice cream ball. As of this writing the bidding is at $41.00 and that comes with a tidy $12.55 shipping charge (at least to get it to my zip code). Since most sites are offering the ball for about $30 with about $6 for shipping, whoever "wins" this particular auction won't really be winning.

Port Arthur news

In the June 8th edition, Darragh Doiron, Life editor of the Port Arthur News, reviewed the ice cream ball very favorably. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find an electronic version.

It looks like a blue biosphere and makes you work for your treat. Industrial Revolution's new Play & Freeze Ice Cream Maker is as much fun as promised, and you can get a bit of exercise to justify the calories. Fill the bottom with ice and rock salt and fill the top with half and half cream, sugar and vanilla. Roll it around for about 10 minutes, stir and roll it some more. My daughter got the ball ready and we took turns shaking it up while watching the original "Star Wars." We paused it to gobble up a cool, sweet gourmet treat.
This will work even better by rolling it on the grass outside. I can't wait to try recipes with hot chocolate powder mix and berries. Visit www.industrialrev.com for "the scoop."

She got the company name and web site right!

Press Release

Read our latest press release (which, yes, looks like the last one).

Jungle Life

My favorite part of this post on Jungle Life is that it's categorized as "Retail Therapy."

Lightweight, portable, and easy to clean, the Play and Freeze Ice Cream Maker is a fun toy for picnics, barbeques, camping trips or wherever ice cream is to be had and people are gathering to eat it.

The concept is simple; fill the ball with the necessary ingredients: sugar, cream, vanilla, and other goodies. Then, add rock salt and ice. Next, roll and shake the ball for 20 minutes until you've got deliciously tasting home-made ice cream!

The Play and Freeze Ice Cream Maker was reviewed in the latest issue of Consumer Reports magazine and was rated highly for fun, function, and taste. Summer is here and this looks like a fun addition to weekend festivities.

Constructive criticism

From today's mailbag...

Your products look interesting, but why do you have such a crappy Web site?

While I don't plan to respond to this person, I actually agree with them. We've already hired professional web designers and they're busy beavering away at our new site. I expect it will be another month or so before we go live.

The ice cream ball in Baton Rouge Parents. Click on the picture to enlarge.

Notice the eerie similarity between some of the text of this article and our PR firm's press release. Just when you thought writers used only their own words.

Coffee can ice cream

The ice cream maker was developed before I purchased UCO. However, there seem to be many different ways to make ice cream without an ice cream machine. Here's a note we received today:

We used to make ice cream using 2 coffee cans. One 1# with ice cream ingredients, put inside a 3# can with ice & rock salt. "Women Involved in Farm Economics" would do it on Ag day in the some Eastern Washington Grade Schools. Did the idea for making ice cream in a ball come from any of the students or teachers?

Campfire girls use the same concept. A parent of one of the girls brought the idea to UCO. And what an idea! A little searching on the Internet has also shown people using frozen juice concentrate cans inside coffee cans and even small ziplocs inside large ziplocs. People are endlessly clever.

Canadian customers

For all Canadian readers of my blog...

We received the following note (the latest of many notes and phone calls from our northern friends):

Can you tell me if your Play & Freeze Ice Cream Maker is available in Canada? I tried to order one from Amazon.com, but apparently they won't ship it to Canada for some reason. I live in Vancouver and would really like to get one. Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

Steve responded, helpfully:

2 ideas....REI should ship to Canada and they can be contacted at 800-426-4840. They are also rei.com LLBean at llbean.com does ship to Canada but they are temporarily out....they will have more in about 2 weeks, regardless of the date their website quotes....

Tell me if you still have problems after trying these.

Happy customer!

Thank you so much for the prompt and useful information. I just ordered one from the REI website.

Watching Amazon

We've bounced around the topmost region of the Amazon Top Sellers in Kitchen and Housewares. We've been as high as #8 although we're at #10 right now. If you like Calphalon, this is the time to buy. They have a bunch of different pots and pans with sale prices of 82% to 87% off regular price. That's unbeatable!

It's interesting to note that most of the items ahead of us on the list are massively discounted.

Legal challenges

I'm not having quite so much fun this week. Although business is booming, we're having a dispute. We came to an agreement a couple of weeks ago with a potential business partner. Within a few days we realized that we had made a serious mistake and we tried to back out. We immediately received a long letter from their attorney. Now our attorney is involved and it's lawyer versus lawyer. Just the fact that this ended up in the hands of our lawyers so quickly indicates to me that this is a business relationship I want to end as soon as possible. However, we didn't realize the problem immediately and so it's going to take some time, effort, and money to extract ourselves from the situation (if it's possible). Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Bad review avoided!

Here are the comments of someone who received a sample ball from us. They were planning to do an editorial review of the product for their magazine. Frankly, I'm delighted that they passed on the idea.

I've looked at the Play & Freeze and do not plan to review it for a couple of reasons. First, as my coworkers saw it sitting in the office, every single one of them had the impulse to kick the ball. If that's how a bunch of occasionally responsible adults react, I'm sure children will have the same - and worse - thoughts.

Also, the price point seems high to me. I've seen "do it yourself" versions where people put a small frozen juice concentrate-size can inside a coffee can and have effectively the same product.

Finally, and this is a personal bias, the quantity of ice cream produced is barely enough to offer a taste to all the people who are involved in the 20 or so minutes of rolling or shaking. Two children can hardly be expected to keep it going long enough to produce results.

In this case, no review is far better than the bad review that was probably going to emerge.

Marguaritas

I enjoy these notes from our customers...

I love the ice cream maker! Read about the fun thing in Consumer Reports and immediately went to the closest REI store and bought all they had--3.

You might want to check the spelling of 'Marguaritas' on your web site.

Amazon.com update

About a week ago I posted about our ranking on Amazon.com. We had moved from 12,000th in Kitchen and Housewares up to 7,152st. Well, we've been getting a huge amount of activity the last few days and that's driven us up to 16th! The ball is the only item in the top 25 carried by someone other than Amazon.com themselves. And it's one of the few items that's not deeply discounted.

Good Press (not scary press like the last post)

Our PR firm put out a press release a couple of weeks ago. I didn't expect much to come of it, but Springs Home and Garden published a very nice article as a direct result. With total disregard to copyright law, here's what they had to say...

June 1, 2005
You can have a ball with newfangled ice cream maker
By Teresa J. Farney, Staff food columnist

When a press release for the Play & Freeze Ice Cream Maker came across my desk, I couldn't help but chuckle. It reminded me of an incident several years ago that involved a similar contraption known as the "Kick-The-Can Ice Cream Maker."

But first, the Play & Freeze. It's a hard plastic sphere that looks a lot like a soccer ball, with the advertising tag line: "The first and only ice cream maker in which fun is the main ingredient."

To start, you'll need a few friends and the right ice cream ingredients for the action to begin.

Here's how it works: Remove the lid from one end of the ball and fill the ball with as much ice as possible. Then add rock salt and replace the lid. Next, mix the ice cream ingredients in another container, remove the lid from the other end of the ball, pour in the ingredients, and replace the lid.

Finally, put your friends to work. Give the ball to them so they can shake it, pass it and roll it around - for about 15 minutes.

"While shakin', rattlin' and rollin', kids and adults can sing songs, tell jokes or play imaginative games until the ice cream is ready for serving," says the press release.

Now that you have the idea, let's rewind to the 1980s, when I attended a food conference. Dian Thomas, a Utah-based cookbook author known for her crazy-sounding cooking ideas, was on a panel discussing food story ideas.

Thomas was big on novelty cooking techniques, like strapping foil-wrapped burgers on car tailpipes to cook them on the way to a picnic, and making grilled cheese sandwiches on an ironing board, using foil to cover the sandwich and a hot iron to "grill" the cheese. You know - goofy stuff.

On this particular day, she was demonstrating how to make ice cream using a clean gallon-size paint can filled with ice and another, smaller can to hold the ice cream ingredients. The smaller can was nestled inside the larger, ice-filled one. Both cans had lids. Then she got someone from the audience to help her lightly kick the can back and forth across the floor. Because it would take about 20 minutes for the cream to get cold enough to serve and Thomas had other wild stuff to show us, she asked another member of the panel to give her a hand: none other than Martha Stewart.

Now, Stewart had arrived for the panel surrounded by her "handlers," all dressed New York-style in trench coats - kind of like a bunch of presidential bodyguards. But Stewart's "people" were clustered at a table in the back of the room. So when Thomas hollered, "Hey, Martha, come on down here and give me a hand making this ice cream," there was nothing they could do to help her.

Stewart's jaw dropped - it was not a good thing to "kick" a can to make ice cream - and she sort of turned pale. But she gamely went to help roll the can while Thomas demonstrated her backpack grilledchicken recipe.

As Thomas finished the chicken project, Stewart and another helper finished the ice cream. The creamy mixture in the small can had gotten chilled enough to make ice cream, and even Stewart gave a nod of satisfaction when she tasted it. As I remembered this incident, I couldn't help but wonder whether Stewart shared the experience - and gave advice on how to make ice cream in kitchen equipmentchallenged places - with her recent roommates.

If you'd like to turn ice cream-making into a group activity and don't feel like messing with paint cans, you can get the Play & Freeze Ice Cream maker at http://www.icecreamrevolution.com. It costs about $35.

The press in question.

Safety

The thing that scares me the most about owning a manufacturing company is that someone I employ will get hurt in a serious way. I'm not talking about a cut, I'm talking about a broken bone or a missing extremity as a direct result of working in the shop. Yesterday I did something to reduce the chances of an incident.

On one of my several-times-per-day shop walks I watched one of the shop guys operate a press. This press punches the window out of the side of body of the original candle lantern. You can imagine that to remove a rectangle of aluminum from a larger part in a single movement, the machine must be pretty powerful. A human body part in the machine when it's operating would certainly be crushed or worse.

Now I'm not the first person to worry about safety. Others before me have developed some simple and effective methods of preventing injuries. One of these methods (which I suspect is law, not just a good idea) is that to get the machine to go the operator must press two buttons simultaneously. If the buttons are 18" apart, there's really no way to both run the machine and still have a hand inside the mechanism. Clever and almost foolproof.

I say almost because at some time in the past the two-buttom mechanism on this particular press had been changed. The operator could make the machine go by pressing a single button rather than two. To make matters worse, the button that made the machine go was labeled "Emergency Stop" and was front and center. The front-and-center aspect made it easy to use for someone who would be running the machine all day. Too easy. Too easy. Too easy! Although the operator I watched was using both hands to press the single button (probably a good idea), something else happened during the changeover. His left hand would loiter near the button while his right hand reached into the press to remove the punched part and add a new one. To me this was a very scary thing to watch. One wrong move and the machine would punch a hole in the man instead of the machine.

I wasn't inclined to make a big fuss, so I found the production manager and asked him to fix the problem when he got a chance. Then I left. However, a few minutes later I realized that this deserved a fuss. I went back and told him I wanted it fixed immediately. We stopped the operation of the machine and he made the change. He also fixed another press that had been similarly modified.

I don't like making peoples' jobs harder (and pressing two buttons all day is clearly harder than pressing one) but this was the right decision and I'm glad I found the problem and got it fixed. I hope I also "sent a message" that safety is important.

Lawyerly threats

First the bad news. Today we had two disasters. It's to-be-determined how serious they are. First, one of our machines broke down in a big way. After several hours of repair work, the machine is still in the process of disassembly. The fact that it was built in 1948 might have some link to the problem (no offense intented to my more elderly readers).

Second, the lawyer letter. We entered into an agreement just 10 days ago but immediately had reservations about the whole deal. Today we received a very long letter from an attorney telling us how we're already violating the agreement and we can't get out of it for a year. Our attorney is now working on it. I'm sure we'll find a solution but it's a stinky situation right now.

On the upside, yesterday's publication of the very favorable article in Consumer Reports has directed perhaps hundreds of people to our website and that has led more than a dozen to place an order on Amazon. In one day we've roughly doubled the total number of orders shipped from our Amazon store.

We also had a new potential employee start today (on a probationary consulting basis). We need a lot of help in her area of expertise so I think she may end up making a great contribution to the team.

more customer feedback

Here are a couple of great notes from our customers...

We just received the balls and made a "test run". Absolutely delicious.
I fully expect that you will be receiving many more orders than usual from the Chicago area after this Friday!

THANK YOU!!!!

That customer ordered 10 balls for a big company party.

and another (from one of our new sales reps)...

I love the ice cream ball! We made ice cream at our sales meeting 2 weeks
ago and it was AWESOME!!!!

Thanks again!

Whew.

This cute boy, son of a friend, wasn't willing to play or participate . . . until he discovered his own method of moving the ball.

Great pics from our "candid" session in the park!

Consumer Reports

Check out the article below from July's Consumer Reports magazine. It's tremendous! (Click on the image to zoom in). It's very flattering in many ways, complimenting the fun, the quality of the ice cream, and so on. "One of the most entertaining products we've tested in a while," they say! This is fantastic!

Consumer Reports 1/4 page report on the ice cream ball.

UPS and technology

We've been rapidly upgrading the technology level at the factory. Instead of one email address for the company (jammed with spam), we've now got individual accounts (with spam filters). Several of us (rather than one) have access to the accounting system, allowing us to each do our jobs, from paying bills to processing orders to maintaining proper inventory levels.

Next on the hit parade is shipping. The UPS guy told me yesterday that of the 65 companies he supports, we're the last one to be using the hand-written book for shipping. The sales rep for their computing system will be out today.

Everything is going very well. April far exceeded my expectations. May was better than April.