Creamery grows and helps produce
Ice cream distribution has proven a good business for the Gillette family whose Gillette Creamery, the largest ice cream distributor in eastern New York, must now move into a facility more than twice the size of its current headquarters.
In a pro-agriculture twist, produce grown on Hudson Valley farms could benefit hugely from the space being left behind.
Company president JB Gillette sounded almost rueful as he recounted reasons why the company”™s previous expansion a mere five years ago turned out not to be large enough, although he conceded, “It”™s a good problem to have.”
Gillette Creamery started as Tri-County Ice Cream in Ellenville in 1985 with 4 employees and two trucks. Since then the company has grown to more than 70 employees and 26 trucks, with 3,000 accounts in 19 counties and a secondary depot in Albany. t distributes popular brands including Haagen Dazs, Edy”™s and Good Humor to such outlets as 7-11 and Cumberland Farms stores, Walmart, Stop and Shop, Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid and Blockbuster.
Gillette, who worked with his father to start the company he owns with three brothers, said that many popular name brands that were independent companies seven years ago have been consumed by bigger players, so that Unilever now owns Breyer”™s, Ben and Jerry”™s, Klondike and Good Humor, while Nestle owns, among other brands, Haagen Dazs and Edy”™s.
These ice cream superpowers engage massive distribution efforts, and Gillette noted that in recent years, ice cream has become staples at stores from corner delis and drug stores to big box stores. Walmart, for example, can require delivery seven days a week.
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“We didn”™t see this coming and really no one in our industry saw this coming,” said Gillette.
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The company was pinched by the tight quarters around its 12,000-square-foot facility in Ellenville, so this time it is moving operations to a nine-acre site on Steve”™s Lane in Gardiner, purchasing a 33,000-square-foot facility to be customized to needs, which, in effect, requires construction of a huge freezer.
“It will be all brand new from the ground up inside the building,” said Gillette, with the work requiring installing glycol tubing on the floor, then sand and eight inches of insulation and six inches of concrete, freezer panels, an insulated roof and loading docks, in effect a freezer that is large enough to store 1,600 pallets holding some 300,000 gallons of ice cream.
Gillette Creamery ships product from Yonkers to Lake George and employs 60 people in Ulster County and 12 people in Albany. While considerations of price and location went into the hunt for a new home, one concern was paramount.
“We were primarily looking at maintaining a location that all of our commuters could commute to comfortably,” said Gillette. “That was the No. 1 thing, far surpassing No. 2 or any other item. We are who we are today not because of the four Gillette brothers, it is the people who are out there representing us ”“ that is the reason we are successful.”
He praised County Executive Mike Hein and his staff, saying that the switch to a county executive form of government that Ulster County initiated in 2009 proved key. “You had one office to go to; the process leapfrogged almost at warp speed to get this done,” said Gillette. “You didn”™t have to wait for a board meeting next month and next month and next month.”
Town of Gardiner officials were also “excellent to deal with,” he said. “It really made our decision to stay in Ulster County really simple.”
Work is expected to begin in June, proceed through fall and the move is planned to be completed in the week between Christmas and New Year”™s Day, when it will be least disruptive to the demand for ice cream.
The company owns its current facility in Ellenville, but plans now call for it to be occupied by groups connected with the Hudson Valley Agribusiness Development Corp. to house produce grown in the Hudson Valley, as well as to accept frozen vegetables from a facility opening soon at Tech City, outside Kingston.
Gillette, a fourth-generation native of Ellenville, sees great opportunity in the plan. He estimated farmers discard about 20 percent of their harvest because of lack of long-term storage and outlets and suggested local agriculture officials could profitably connect the dots. “I believe in what they”™re doing,” he said.