It's the third best-selling brand of ice cream in the United States and is regularly served to foreign dignitaries visiting President George W. Bush. A standing order is delivered to Camp David every 2 weeks. Yet many Americans have never heard of it. That's because Blue Bell Creameries, with headquarters in Brenham, Texas, sells its ice Cream in only fourteen, mostly southern, state. "That allows us to focus on marking and selling ice cream," says CEO Paul Kruse, the fourth generation of Kruses to run Blue Bell.
The "little creamery in Brenham,"as the company markets itself, doesn't let anyone outside the company touch its product from the plant to the freezer case. Everything from R&D to distribution is handled in-house. The company cannot meet the demand fof its ice cream and it doesn't even try. Blue Bell commands 60 percent of the ice cream market in Texas and Louisiana and 47 percent in Alabama, where it opened a plant in 1997. People outside the region often pay $85 to have four half-gallons packed in dry ice and shipped to them. Despite the demand, management refuses to compromise quality by expanding into regions that cannot be satisfactorily serviced or by growing so fast that it can't adequately train employees in the art of marking ice cream.
Blue Bell's major departments are sales, quality control, production, maintenance, and distribution. There is also an accounting department and a small R&D group. Most employees have been with the company for years and have a wealth of experience in making quality ice cream. The environment is stable. The customer base is well established. The only change has been the increase in demand for Blue Bell Ice Cream.
Blue bell's quality-control department tests all incoming ingredients and ensures that only the best products go into its ice cream. Quality control aslo tests outgoing ice cream products. After years of experience, quality inspectors can taste the slightest deviation from expected quality. Blue Bell owns its owns trucks to make sure the product is handled correctly once it leaves the plant. "If you don't clearly watch the temperature, " Chairmen Howard Kruse explains, "the test can suffer." It's no wonder Blue Bell has successfully maintained the image of a small-town creamery marking homemade ice cream.