Greetings and a late "Happy New Year" from the gang at Mad Maggie's Ice Cream!

It's been quite a while since I sent out a news update. Judging from the lack of complaints, it doesn't seem that there are *too* many of you pining for my words of wisdom though! Still, there are a few items that I'd like to get the word out about, so here goes.

We've been busy catching up on all of those little household tasks that seem to get neglected during the summer season. Each year I seem to get a little more organized in regards to the bookkeeping that needs to be done for the business, and this year I'm sure my accountant is going to be happy to hear that I'm just about up to date on all of my data entry tasks.

My home, on the other hand, is a mess! With four kids doing their best to break things, and with the amount of time we spend at the shop in the summer, it seems like a losing battle to try to keep up with the normal maintenance around the house. I did manage to replace my badly leaking roof in the fall, and I have one small section to finish up, but that'll probably wait until the fall. Hopefully, by the time we open in April, I'll be close to caught up, but probably not!

It's hard to believe that we have just a handful or so more weekends before we start cleaning and setting up the shop for the spring. This recent blast of warm weather sure has me itching for Spring!

Conferences

We attended the New England Ice Cream Retailers Association conference, in Mystic, CT in October. The highlight of the event was the conference kick off dinner, which was held at the Mystic Aquarium. It was interesting to eat dinner while big sharks, rays, and other assorted fish swam by our table!

It wasn't all fun though, as we attended many presentations to help us make our business better. We picked up a lot of new ideas here, and are brainstorming on which of these we'll be able to put to use this year.

We also attended the National Ice Cream Restaurant Association's annual convention, in Scottsdale, Arizona in November. This is a much larger conference than the New England group, and we learned a lot more here. Hopefully, all of these learning exercises will pay off with a better product at our little store.

I've got one more learning trip scheduled, a trip to the University of Wisconsin in March where I'll be working with several others who run similar stores to ours, learning better techniques for making great Sorbets and Sherbets. Here's hoping that you notice a big improvement in the quality of our fruit based flavors.

Walk in the Woods

One of my hobbies in the offseason is to hike the trails around my home. Andover has a wonderful group -- Andover Village Improvement Society -- that maintains a collection of reservations around the town, and there's an amazing network of trails.

My home is alongside a connection between the Hammond and Skug River reservations, which also happens to be a part of the Bay Circuit Trail, which is a connection of trails that circle greater Boston. I decided last summer that I wanted to try to hike the portion of the BCT from my home to the northern boundary of Andover at the Tewksbury line, which is about an 11 mile hike.

I tried this twice this fall -- once starting at River Road heading south, and once starting from my home and hiking north. Both times, I got about 80% of the way there before giving up.

On my first attempt, son David joined me, and neglected to mention beforehand that he had taken a tumble off his skateboard the previous day, and was limping pretty badly. We managed to make it home, but just barely, as we lost the trail at Phillips Academy, and ended up walking the streets to get back home.

On the second attempt, I started from my house and hiked north, and did great until I reached the Rafton reservation, where I took a wrong turn and ended up walking backwards for a mile or so. I finally gave up when it started raining and called for a ride home (just in time to catch the start of the Patriot's game that day...)

Our little dog, Gizmo, hung right in with me on both hikes. His little pug-legs had twice as much work keeping up, but he managed. He *did* sleep just about all of the next day each time, so he was a one pooped pug! Of course, since he sleeps just about all day *every* day, maybe it didn't affect him at all.

I'll plan to tackle this again, either this spring or next fall. Hopefully, I'm a little more familiar with the trail now, and can make the whole hike.

If you're into hiking, I highly suggest that you stop in at Moor and Mountain, in Dundee Park in Andover, and pick up a trail guide. Lots of really interesting things to discover in these reservations!

Tourists

While we were in Arizona, we did a little siteseeing. One day, we were walking along a riverbank and met up with a sweet woman who told was from California. She was looking for her friend, whom she had become separated from while wandering around.

When she described her friend to me, I pointed out someone on the opposite side of the river, and asked "Is that her?" Sure enough it was. The woman yelled across the river "How do I get to the other side?". Her friend yelled back "You *are* on the other side!".

California blondes -- both of them.

New Web Site

One of the reasons I've been slow in sending out news this winter is that I've been pretty busy reworking our website. I write website software for a living, and taking stock of our existing site this fall, I was a little embarrassed to see how disorganized everything was. It's a side effect of the way the site was designed -- basically, it wasn't! I just started adding things as needed, and never took a step back to try to set things up professionally.

Well, things are a-changing! I've got the brunt of a site rework completed, and I'm busily trying to polish up the final pieces. I've added a new online guestbook, to allow people to add their comments to our site, a more automated mailing list, which should make it easier for me to keep up with subscription updates and birthday notices, a better feedback page, and an automated news update system.

One of the last items I need to fix is the addition of our existing photo galleries. I might just bring those over just the way they are, and leave the bigger project of making these easier to manage for next winter.

All in all, I think the changes will make for a better site -- not that huge difference to the dozen or so visitors we get each day, but rather in helping me to keep on top of it.

If you want to get a sneak peek at the new site, feel free to look at it at http://mason.madmaggies.com/ Beware that there are still a lot of rough edges though, so don't be surprised if everything doesn't work exactly right though!

Flavor Awards

At the national convention, we again entered the competition for best ice cream. This year's judging was for Vanilla and for Strawberry, and we submitted samples of our Vanilla Bean and Strawberry ice creams.

We had the highest score of all applicants in the Strawberry category -- a 31.2 on a scale of 35. Unfortunately, even though we scored the highest, we only received a Red Ribbon (second place), as the judges decided that this year no score of less than 32.0 was eligible for a blue ribbon. This was disappointing, especially since the judges deducted a point from our entry for "inconsistent color". They apparently want a consistent, pink, homogenized ice cream, and I purposely make ours with a streak of strawberries left in the finished product. I think this makes it both look and taste better, so I'll continue to make ours this way, but it bugs me that we got penalized for what I consider a better quality product.

We also had disappointing results with our Vanilla Bean -- I think I made the worst batch of ice cream of our entire season when I made that batch. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but I can remember having a lot of things going on when I made that batch, so possibly I added the Vanilla Bean speck twice, as the color of the product was just not right. We did take a White Ribbon for our entry, but that pretty much amounts to a "thanks for entering" award, so I don't consider it anything to boast about.

And just to complete the hat trick, I chose NOT to submit our sample of "Triple Brownie Fudge" to the "Best New Baked Goods Flavor" competition -- I decided that it wasn't exceptionally different enough to submit. After we tried the other entrants, I kicked myself, as just about all of the others were variations on vanilla cake batter, and I'm pretty certain that had we submitted this, we would have stood out as one of the only chocolate based ones. The winning entry was "Desert Silk Cake", which so far as I could tell, was just Cake Batter with a different name.

All in all, I really did a lousy job in submitting our entries this year, and I'm disappointed with the results. I'll just have to try a little harder to make sure our product gets a fair shake next year.

Flavor News

My latest trial was a Mimosa Sorbet -- champagne and orange juice. It's not bad, though I think I still need to tweak it a little bit. I'm working with a new stabilizer, which is the ingredient that helps make sorbets "scoopable" when they're frozen. The new brand I'm using is actually formulated for making gelato, and it produces a very fine, smooth texture, hopefully you'll notice that our sorbets are a lot less icy tasting. I'm still working on getting the recipes right on this, so I'll keep playing with it, and hopefully will have things pretty well worked out by our April opening.

I've also got plans to try a Honey Cashew, and have been gathering Butter Pecan flavorings from four or five flavor companies. I want to try to find a better Butter Pecan recipe than the one we've been using, so I plan to have a "bake off" between the flavor companies to see which one works out best. If any of you newsletter readers want to help me choose, send me an email and I'll tell you when I'll be making the batches. I'll be happy to give you a pint of each in exchange for your rankings of the best ones.

I also want to try making a "Penuchi Pecan", which is Butter Pecan with brown sugar. This is one of my favorite flavors at Four Seas Ice Cream in Centerville on Cape Cod. Four Seas is legendary for having great ice cream, and I'd really love to get this flavor on our board as a small tribute to one of my mentors, Dick Warren.

SoftServe!

One of the items on my "To Do" list this offseason has been to figure out what we want to do about soft serve. When we originally opened, I was dead set against ever offering soft serve.

Why? Well softserve is normally a low-quality product, usually offered by places that are only concerned with making the highest profit possible. It's typically made with a cheap, low quality cream -- the mix is normally either 5 or 8% butterfat, which is why they can't legally call it "ice cream" (the FDA requirement for ice cream is 10% or better butterfat.) This is completely contrary to our core business -- making the BEST tasting ice cream we can, regardless of the ingredient costs.

Well, in the three years we've been open, I've come to realize that my snobbish attitude towards soft serve is somewhat foolish. There are some people who just plain *want* soft serve, either for the lower fat, or just because it's what they like. I've grown frustrated over the years watching groups leave after coming to the window and finding out that we don't have softserve.

So this year a friend of mine who runs a shop up in Maine has offered to sell me a soft serve machine that he no longer needs. We'll be playing around with this in the next month, and hopefully will have it up and running in time for our opening. I'm planning to use a 10% ice cream mix in it, which should keep in line with our desire for great quality. But there's also a vendor who sells a frozen custard mix, which is a very high end product, and we may well try offering that for the first month to see if our customers prefer that.

Oh, and the machine also has a "FlavorBurst" attachment, which is a unit that allows us to inject bright, colorful streaks of flavors into the soft serve -- something that should really appeal to the kids.

We've still got a lot to learn on this, but hopefully we'll have the kinks worked out in time to have a great product to offer this spring.

Team Profile

We really don't *have* a team at this point, as although we'd love to have most of last year's team back for this summer, we know that we're likely to lose at least a few of them to better opportunities that are more in line with their career goals. (Not too many kids aspire to scoop ice cream for a living!)

So I thought I'd just use this space to talk about how we go about hiring our team. We put a HUGE focus on hiring kids who are friendly, polite, hard working, and just plain fun to be around, and hopefully you see that when you come to our store.

For our first couple of years, we took alot of applications, and reviewed them and picked out the best few for interviews. I quickly realized that this is a difficult process -- it's hard to schedule a bunch of interviews, especially since many of the kids don't drive and rely on their parents for rides.

And once we interview someone, it's really hard to tell a 15 year old that you don't think they're going to work out well -- they all assume that being called for an interview means that they have a job!

So last year, we started something new by basically trusting our existing team to bring in new team members. I think that the great kids that we have understand that bringing in someone who's going to goof off or just not work hard is a bad idea, as it means more work for those that *are* working hard, so they take their role of "referrers" very seriously. At the tail end of last season, I asked new team leader Katie to recruit another North Reading kid for the team, and she came through with two exceptional recommendations, and even though I really only wanted to hire one, I ended up hiring both. So we now have "Rachel and Rachel", two very pleasant young ladies, both of whom jumped right in, fit in well with the rest of the team, and did a wonderful job for us at the tail end of the season.

I'm pretty sure that we'll continue to lean heavily on our existing kids to bring in any new hires we need this year. I do maintain final "veto" power though, and I try to allocate the hires so that we keep somewhat of a balance between "North Reading kids" and "Andover kids" on the team.

If you know of a kid who's looking for a job this summer though, don't be afraid to have them send me an application. I'm sure I'll hire one or two who don't have ties to the existing team -- it's always nice to get some "fresh blood" in to keep a good mix of personalities. The few openings we do have are likely to be filled by April though, so early applicants have a big advantage.

The other hard part of hiring is politely rejecting the sons and daughters of acquaintances. We've had a lot of parents come up to us over the years and ask us to give a job to their kid. This immediately bugs me -- why isn't the kid asking, rather than the parent? It's sometimes hard to look at a young kid and know whether they'll be a good worker, but if they are counting on their parents to find them a job it's usually a bad sign. And then there's the problem of "what if it doesn't work out?" Not everyone finds the job of scooping ice cream a ton of fun, and the few times I've had to let someone go have all been tough, gut-wrenching decisions. Having to worry about how the parents are going to react to it makes it even tougher!

All in all, the hiring process is tough. We try our best to be fair and honest with those who do apply, but it's a difficult job.

See you in the spring!

That's about it for this newsletter. We sure hope that the rest of the winter is mild, and that we have a nice, sunny, early spring for our opening. Look for activity at the store around the middle of March, with our opening on Saturday, April 1st. If you see the lights on in the store, don't be afraid to drop and and say hi -- we might even be able to unload some of our winter stash of ice cream on you!