Abstract
Laura Hindulak, director of marketing for Pierre's Ice Cream in Cleveland's Midtown Corridor, discusses the history of the company in Cleveland. She discusses the company's creation, its multiple locations within the city, its owners, name changes, and marketing strategies. Other topics include the interior of the factory, the production process, and the flavor creation process.
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Interviewee
Hindulak, Laura (interviewee)
Interviewer
Souther, Mark (interviewer)
Project
Midtown Cleveland
Date
8-8-2007
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
35 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Laura Hindulak Interview, 8 August 2007" (2007). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 910011.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/307
Transcript
Mark Souther [00:00:01] Today is August 8. Today is August 8, 2007. My name is Mark Souther, and I’m interviewing Laura Hindulak from Pierre’s Ice Cream in Midtown Cleveland. Thank you for being here today.
Laura Hindulak [00:00:17] Thank you.
Mark Souther [00:00:18] If you could introduce yourself for the tape.
Laura Hindulak [00:00:21] Okay. I’m Laura Hindulak. I’m the director of marketing for Pierre’s Ice Cream Company, and I’m participating in the oral interview today.
Mark Souther [00:00:30] Great. I wanted to start with a little bit of personal background and then move toward a history of Pierre’s and then finally end up talking about the manufacturing process and the products and maybe plans for the future. Where did you grow up?
Laura Hindulak [00:00:44] I grew up in Parma. I’m a Cleveland native. Grew up in Parma, Ohio. Went to school at Cleveland State University, where I earned my business degree. I used to take RTA buses every day back and forth to get to class and home, and came to Pierre’s in 1989. So I’ve been with the company for over 16 years. I started in sales, and from there, there was a position in marketing that was open, so I decided that I wanted to try that and have worked in the marketing department for 15 years.
Mark Souther [00:01:19] Great. Do you recall as a child, if you ate Pierre’s Ice Cream or did you have the opportunity?
Laura Hindulak [00:01:24] We did. We grew up on Pierre’s Ice Cream. It was always in the freezer. Favorite flavor was always chocolate almond or we would always have the butter pecan. Just had it for birthday parties and special treats. And it was always our very favorite ice cream.
Mark Souther [00:01:40] Did you buy it from the supermarket or elsewhere?
Laura Hindulak [00:01:44] We bought it from the supermarket, and then also a lot of the local dip shops would have it. So if we would go out for a birthday to celebrate, they always would serve the Pierre’s Ice Cream.
Mark Souther [00:01:54] So it was a very common brand in various ice cream shops around the city?
Laura Hindulak [00:01:59] It was. It was the most popular and everybody’s favorite.
Mark Souther [00:02:04] They didn’t have their own stores?
Laura Hindulak [00:02:07] No, they’ve only just sold in stores. They’ve never had their own dip shops themselves.
Mark Souther [00:02:15] So how did you come to work at Pierre’s? You mentioned this on the phone. I wondered if you could tell me how you came to work there.
Laura Hindulak [00:02:21] With the business degree. I wanted to do something in sales, and having grown up on Pierre’s Ice Cream, I thought it would be exciting to work for a fun company because ice cream is so much fun. And there happened to be a position open in sales, so I started doing that. And business wise, I was always interested in marketing. So when the position opened in the marketing department, I wanted to do something like that.
Mark Souther [00:02:48] When you arrived - I guess I’ll go ahead with this - when you arrived at Pierre’s, was the marketing already aimed at a regional market, or was it still mainly Northeast Ohio, and regional as in the larger Midwest and maybe Pennsylvania? Had it already spread to that level, or did it move to that level after you arrived?
Laura Hindulak [00:03:09] It had moved. Pierre’s distribution was mostly in Northeast Ohio when I began with the company. And as the years went by, they introduced many different new products, and they tried to gain added distribution, western Pennsylvania, southern Michigan, northern Kentucky. So I’ve been able to be a part of their growth and see how their distribution has spread.
Mark Souther [00:03:32] What’s the best thing about working at Pierre’s?
Laura Hindulak [00:03:34] Pierre’s is family-owned. It’s a very friendly atmosphere, and one of the best things is that it’s small. There aren’t many layers of management, so there’s a few people in each department, and that enables you to have opportunity to do many different jobs. You wear many different hats every day, and it’s just exciting. You don’t know what the next day is gonna bring. You might be doing something totally different.
Mark Souther [00:03:58] Is it safe to say that you get to try a lot of ice cream?
Laura Hindulak [00:04:02] We do. We do taste testing. They manufacture ice cream Monday through Friday. They have a full shift of manufacturing, and then they do a full shift of cleanup. So whatever’s made that day, we have taste testers, and I happen to be on the taste test panel, so we get to check it to make sure that it tastes right and that there’s plenty of inclusions, like nuts and pieces of chocolate or fruit. And then they also do, you know, scientific testing to make sure that it’s clear for quality. But we do participate in that. It’s a lot of fun.
Mark Souther [00:04:31] Let’s go on to the history of Pierre’s. When and where was Pierre’s founded?
Laura Hindulak [00:04:37] Pierre’s began back in 1932 on the corner of East 82nd and Euclid Avenue. It started in the back of a little hamburger shop. They used to make the ice cream fresh every day, and they would hand pack it in cones or cups or containers to take home, and it became very popular, and they began selling it to country clubs and restaurants and gourmet shops. It was started- Pierre’s founder is Alexander Pierre Bassett, and his dream was to market the very best ice cream. He wanted to have the best, freshest ice cream using the best ingredients and- Let me think for a minute. Okay, Pierre, Alexander Pierre Bassett, began Pierre’s, and his dream was to market one of the best, highest quality ice creams. And the recipe called for pasteurized egg yolks. Egg yolks make the ice cream very rich and creamy, almost like a custard-like taste. And we use that same basic recipe in our Pierre’s today, pasteurized egg yolks, to make it very rich and creamy. And back when they started, they only had three flavors. They sold in little, round, familiar pints. They had french vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.
Mark Souther [00:06:08] Did they ever combine these in the Neapolitan, or do you know?
Laura Hindulak [00:06:11] No, I think probably later they did but.
Mark Souther [00:06:13] You mentioned it was initially in the back of a burger shop. Do you happen to know the name of the burger shop?
Laura Hindulak [00:06:20] I don’t know. I don’t think anyone- I don’t think anyone knows the name.
Mark Souther [00:06:24] Of that did it. So it started in the back of a burger shop at Euclid and East 82nd. Did that ultimately turn into just a completely a Pierre’s ice cream shop that had burgers, or do you know, before it moved?
Laura Hindulak [00:06:40] No, I think they were just selling to the area restaurants and gourmet stores. But they eventually outgrew their facility because it was such a small little shop, they needed more space, and Pierre’s had moved several times. They moved to St. Clair, then they moved to East 60th and Hough in 1960. And when Pierre’s moved to the Hough Avenue plant, they shared that factory with another small ice cream manufacturer, the Royal Ice Cream Company. Royal was owned by Sol Roth. Sol Roth was a retired World War Two veteran who had worked as a dairy milk delivery truck driver, and in 1947, he heard that Royal Ice Cream was for sale. So he had saved up money, and he was able to purchase Royal Ice Cream in, I have to go back on these dates. I’m not exactly sure what year. It’s 1947, I think. Should I say that again?
Mark Souther [00:07:48] No, no. It’s okay. We can always go back and record something if that proves crucial later. Quite all right. I wanted to back up for a second to Alexander Bassett. Do you know what his background was?
Laura Hindulak [00:08:04] I don’t.
Mark Souther [00:08:04] Or how he got into the ice cream business?
Laura Hindulak [00:08:06] I don’t.
Mark Souther [00:08:07] Okay. And you mentioned Sol Roth. He was a World War Two veteran? So he did this after the war. Was he- What was his occupation other than that? Do you know?
Laura Hindulak [00:08:20] He just drove the milk truck. He was a dairy truck driver delivering milk.
Mark Souther [00:08:30] And so that turned into his ownership of Pierre’s then, correct? I mean, I’m sorry-
Laura Hindulak [00:08:39] Of Royal. Right. He was a milk delivery- Sol Roth was a milk delivery driver. And, you know, working in the dairy industry, he always had his eye on the ice cream company. And in 1947, after having saved up his money, he was able to purchase Royal Ice Cream Company.
Mark Souther [00:08:57] I see. Did Pierre’s always have a single location for say, well, not for, I know it sold ice cream through a lot of different businesses, but did it always have just a single location where it was made and where the offices were? I mean, it’s single at any one time. I know it moved different places.
Laura Hindulak [00:09:21] Right. We moved several places, but we always had just one manufacturing facility. And when Pierre’s and Royal shared the same manufacturing facility on Hough. And in 1960, Sol Roth bought Pierre’s Ice Cream from the Bassett family.
Mark Souther [00:09:39] Do you know why he sold to Roth? Is there anything that suggests why?
Laura Hindulak [00:09:49] I don’t know. I don’t know that history.
Mark Souther [00:10:01] Was he interested in getting out of the ice cream business? I wonder if was sort of like a competition and he- I read something to that effect that he sold because he saw that Pierre’s was better or something like that. Have you heard that story that he wanted to sell because he saw that Pierre’s was really doing a better job and wanted to sell?
Laura Hindulak [00:10:13] I don’t know. I think I have heard something like that, but I don’t know how, so I don’t know if I should say that.
Mark Souther [00:10:18] It’s okay. I think I read that Plain Dealer article actually, in the packet, but I should look back at that. When did Pierre’s start retailing ice cream through supermarkets, or has it always been, I mean, all the way back to the founding, I guess it may have marketed to smaller versions of today’s supermarkets. But has it always done that-
Laura Hindulak [00:10:39] Yeah, well-
Mark Souther [00:10:40] Or was there a time when it started?
Laura Hindulak [00:10:41] Sol Roth bought Pierre’s in 1960, and it was at that time that he recognized the equity in the Pierre’s name, so he chose to market his ice cream under the Pierre’s name for the grocery stores.
Mark Souther [00:10:54] So that name had really caught on, I guess, more than Royal over the years-
Laura Hindulak [00:10:57] Right.
Mark Souther [00:10:58] So that’s why they chose to go with Pierre’s?
Laura Hindulak [00:11:00] Right. He recognized the equity in that name, and he chose to go with the Pierre’s name. And at that time, they developed many more flavors because they were starting to sell to the larger grocery stores. And it was also at that time that they started packaging the ice cream in the familiar red round half gallons.
Mark Souther [00:11:19] So this is in the late 1940s that we’re talking about?
Laura Hindulak [00:11:21] [crosstalk] No, this would be in the sixties. It was in 1947 that he, that Sol Roth purchased Royal Ice Cream, but it was in the sixties that he purchased Pierre’s.
Mark Souther [00:11:33] I see. And did- One second. I lost my train of thought. I’ll come back to that if I think of it. When did Bassett- When did Pierre’s, I mean. Wait, let me back up. I remember now. When you look at the cartons of Pierre’s ice cream today, it says Pierre’s French Ice Cream. Or is that-
Laura Hindulak [00:12:01] It doesn’t anymore. It’s Premium.
Mark Souther [00:12:05] Oh, I didn’t know that. I haven’t looked lately, I guess. I haven’t bought ice cream recently enough. I’m overdue for some Pierre’s. We buy Pierre’s-
Laura Hindulak [00:12:11] [crosstalk] It used to, yeah. Oh, good.
Mark Souther [00:12:14] But not exclusively, but. So it was called that for a while, though?
Laura Hindulak [00:12:19] It was.
Mark Souther [00:12:19] Or was that just a portion of the brand?
Laura Hindulak [00:12:24] French Ice Cream is, I mean, not that we would want to say this, but it’s a category of ice cream. You have to have so much percentage of egg yolks in your recipe. And a lot of people didn’t really know what it was. So instead of promoting French ice cream, we thought we should promote Premium ice cream, which is, you know, the same thing, but it’s maybe more, a little bit more understandable for consumers.
Mark Souther [00:12:44] I always wondered why French ice cream, or if it was- It just made me wonder if that was a different-
Laura Hindulak [00:12:50] Yeah. Technical term or it is very technical and people weren’t understanding it. We still have the pasteurized egg yolks in the recipe, but we just call it premium ice cream. Right.
Mark Souther [00:13:01] So I’ll go back to my, my question. I started to ask, which is when did Pierre’s become consolidated at East 65th Street between Carnegie and Euclid?
Laura Hindulak [00:13:13] In 1967, Sol Roth consolidated the operations at East 65th and Carnegie into the Harwell Ice Cream plant and the three companies operated out of that one facility.
Mark Souther [00:13:27] When did it actually assume control over all of those and become its own entity? Was that a gradual process?
Laura Hindulak [00:13:36] I don’t know much about that. I’m not sure what. Maybe he just purchased Harwell. I know we’re still, we still go by, we are still Royal Ice Cream and we do business as Pierre’s. But I’m not sure how Harwell ever dropped out of there. It could have been in 1967 when he purchased the facility. He may have just bought Harwell and just never used that name.
Mark Souther [00:13:56] We say we are Royal. Does that mean that explain that a little.
Laura Hindulak [00:14:00] I think we’re incorporated as Royal Ice cream Company, but we do business as Pierre’s Ice cream company.
Mark Souther [00:14:06] Oh, okay. I understand that Shelley Roth, it was her father, Sol Roth was her father, and she had a brother as well, who maybe didn’t want to go into the business.
Laura Hindulak [00:14:19] Is that correct? That’s correct. Sol Roth always figured that his son Alan would take over the family business one day. But it actually was his daughter Shelley Roth. She had worked at Pierre’s through the summers in sales and marketing, and she was very familiar with the business. But she was a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, and she was already in New York City working at an exciting marketing job. And she got the call from her dad that he wanted her to return home. And her first feeling was that she didn’t want anything to do with the family business. She was enjoying New York City, and her desire was to remain there. And then she thought about it, and she knew how much it would mean to her dad if she did return home. So she ultimately made the decision to come back and work side by side with him. And they worked for many, many years together under his wing. And in 1991, Shelley took over the business as president and CEO. And at that time, her dad stepped away from his day to day operations with the company. And over the next few years, his health declined. He had Parkinson’s, and Sol Roth passed away in 2005.
Mark Souther [00:15:35] I’m going to stop the tape and then resume it.
Laura Hindulak [00:15:38] Okay.
Mark Souther [00:15:39] I want to check it, as I said. [recording stops and resumes]
Mark Souther [00:15:43] Okay, we’re back with Laura Hindulak. I wanted to turn to the time when Pierre’s was considering whether to stay in the city or move to the suburbs. Could you tell me a little bit about that? And probably when that was and maybe where they considered going and why they ultimately decided to stay on Euclid Avenue?
Laura Hindulak [00:16:06] Pierre’s was outgrowing their offices at the East 65th and Carnegie location, so in the early nineties, they were doing research to see what they wanted to do, whether we should remain in Cleveland, purchase a building that was already existing, new construction perhaps. We even looked into moving to the suburbs. But it was our owner’s choice to remain in Cleveland. And we were able to purchase a vacant area at East 65th and Euclid, where we built a brand new headquarter office and state-of-the-art distribution facility. The product is actually still manufactured at the plant on Carnegie. It’s one large campus that straddles Carnegie to Euclid. But we moved into our new facility in 1995.
Mark Souther [00:16:53] When you say it was vacant, had it been long vacant, or do you remember anything that was there before?
Laura Hindulak [00:16:58] I don’t remember. I don’t know any part of that.
Mark Souther [00:17:02] Do you remember any particular- Were any particular suburbs discussed? Or was it just sort of a general sense of, well, maybe we should at least look into going to the suburbs.
Laura Hindulak [00:17:11] That’s all. It was just a general, general mention.
Mark Souther [00:17:16] Uh huh. When the- That was right around the time that the new headquarters was designed? Right?
Laura Hindulak [00:17:20] Right. That’s what happened. I mean, that’s- They decided to remain in Cleveland, and that’s when they started to build the new facility.
Mark Souther [00:17:28] How did they- You know the building, of course, for anyone who’s ever walked or driven past, there’s a very colorful, interesting building and the grounds look very nice and not necessarily what you expect to find in the middle of a city and in a manufacturing area. Whose idea was that for, you know, to have sort of a fanciful, playful design? And how did that come to be?
Laura Hindulak [00:17:54] It was Shelley Roth and her team at the company who were all planning the new facility. Her desire was to have the headquarter offices be built- She wanted a beautiful building that would be architecturally interesting, but functional and comfortable for the employees. And it has beautiful, beautiful green grass. And especially for that area, that’s- You don’t really see too much of that. So we kind of consider ourselves a diamond in the rough.
Mark Souther [00:18:24] What about the Pierre’s logo and various other things that suggest this is an ice cream place? What are some of the things, visually, that you can see, if you were to walk around the perimeter of the place or around the buildings, that would tell you that you’re in an ice cream factory.
Laura Hindulak [00:18:42] We have beautiful green grass, a wrought iron fence. We have a big Pierre’s Ice Cream logo. That’s very fun. Outfit front glass awning. We have the cement for the red brick building, which red for Pierre’s, has a little inscripted ice cream cone on it. I don’t know. I don’t know what else.
Mark Souther [00:19:05] I’ve driven by and seen what looks like, I think it’s a Pierre’s container?
Laura Hindulak [00:19:11] That’s on the- Yeah, on the old side, where Carnegie is with the plant. There’s a carton. I don’t even know if it’s still up there. It was up there.
Mark Souther [00:19:19] I think it is. I’ll have to look again, and I drive that way a lot going out to the Heights from CSU. Could you describe what I might see if I looked inside Pierre’s at the operation? What’s an ice cream factory like?
Laura Hindulak [00:19:36] The Pierre’s facility is relatively small, but it’s very efficient. Stainless-steel flavor tanks, mixing tanks. The packaging moves along conveyors. Everything is automated. Lids are scrambled, unscrambled, so that they can be fed into the machine and plopped down onto the container as soon as it’s filled. Shrink-wrap machines, and then a conveyor that carries it right into our cold storage warehouse, where everything is stacked and palletized, and it’s held in that freezer for 48 hours while we do quality checks and taste tests. And then once it’s cleared, they load the pallets of ice cream onto a semi truck, and they bring it over to our new distribution facility.
Mark Souther [00:20:23] Do you have separate areas where you make things like sherbet and sorbet, or does it all go through the same line and it’s maybe a question of changing the temperature. How would you describe the differences between making ice cream or, say, sorbet or sherbet or [inaudible]?
Laura Hindulak [00:20:38] Yeah, they have to decide that they have a full production schedule, so they know the night before what they’re going to be making in the morning. And at night, they make mix. It has to sit in the tanks overnight to start to cure for the next day. I don’t know if cure’s the right word. So they decide if they’re making vanilla or chocolate base or if they’re making sherbet or yogurt. They have to make separate mixes for that. And they have separate lines. There’s four lines that run. They can change the machinery around. They run everything from pints to quarts to 56-ounce containers. We do the big three-gallon bulk containers. So they just move the machinery around and make things on different lines.
Mark Souther [00:21:19] When you’re deciding about new flavors, I mean, I guess over the years, I’ve read that Pierre’s has 235, approximately - it may be higher than that now - 235 or so different kinds of ice cream, I guess flavors plus different version, different things, because I guess some flavors come in sorbet and ice cream, et cetera. But when new flavors are being considered, what kind of process does that flavor go through before it becomes reality or becomes a product?
Laura Hindulak [00:21:50] Anyone can suggest a flavor. Sometimes we look to consumers who either call us on the phone or they’ll contact us through the Internet with flavor ideas. We’ll look to our employees for flavor ideas, and it’s just a brainstorming of, well, maybe we should add this, and maybe we should try that piece. And we just have a creative think tank of some. Anybody, whoever has ideas can share them. And we’ve often done market research to test those flavors or a particular product line before we bring it to market. We do small batches of test runs to make sure that it- If we chose a particular cocoa, that that cocoa tastes okay. Once it’s put in the mix, we want to make sure we’re 100% satisfied before we do a mass production run. Yeah.
Mark Souther [00:22:38] Have you ever suggested a flavor that’s been adopted [inaudible]?
Laura Hindulak [00:22:41] I did. One time I suggested a flavor, peanut brittle, that we made in our custard line, and that they liked that idea, and it actually became a flavor that we sold at retail. So do you remember the Pierre’s Custard? It was in pints.
Mark Souther [00:22:57] When was this?
Laura Hindulak [00:22:58] Maybe 2000, 2001. [crosstalk] Oh, okay.
Mark Souther [00:23:02] I was in New Orleans at the time.
Laura Hindulak [00:23:03] Okay. Yeah.
Mark Souther [00:23:04] So I don’t know about that for that reason. What about- So these really go through quite a process before they’re adopted. What’s the most unusual flavor, if you can think of one that got suggested maybe by an employee or by someone outside that maybe something that- Give me an example of one that’s the most unusual thing that got adopted, and maybe the most unusual one that didn’t get- That didn’t-
Laura Hindulak [00:23:32] Shelley Roth came up with “Everything But the Kitchen Sink.” It was her desire. She loves chocolate, and she thought it would be fun to come up with a flavor that had a bunch of different mix ins. So Everything But the Kitchen Sink is chocolate ice cream. It has marshmallow swirl. There’s pieces of heath toffee candy, brownies, pecans. It’s just all the good mix ins she put into one flavor, and it’s very popular. We’ve had it for several years now, and it’s one of the most popular flavors. One of the ones that, and I think it may have been Shelley’s old flavor, is Carrot Cake. We had that. It was delicious. It tasted so good. But it just was one of those flavors the consumers just never caught on to. So we just continued that one.
Mark Souther [00:24:15] I can see how that would be kind of-
Laura Hindulak [00:24:17] Kinda niche.
Mark Souther [00:24:18] I’m not sure. I’m not sure I want to spend my money on it to try a whole thing of it.
Laura Hindulak [00:24:22] Yeah. Yeah. So that’s what happened. But, yeah, we’ve come a long way from three flavors to, like you said, 235 flavors that bear the Pierre’s name.
Mark Souther [00:24:30] Do you know how many were around when you started in 1989 to give me an idea of the change over time?
Laura Hindulak [00:24:37] Yeah, we were up- We were up there. See, what happened is we keep, you know, you come out with low fat and fat-free ice cream, and then as that phased out, then we came out with light ice cream. And so I would say it was close to that. It’s not like it stopped, you know, over the last ten years or something, so I don’t. It was probably around 200.
Mark Souther [00:24:56] So it just changes. I mean you-
Laura Hindulak [00:24:57] Trade out.
Mark Souther [00:24:58] You’re not necessarily going up, up, up, and you just change with the time.
Laura Hindulak [00:25:01] Right. Mm hm.
Mark Souther [00:25:02] What about the most unusual [inaudible] if you can think of another example from maybe from consumers? Was there an unusual one that stands out in your mind that didn’t get adopted that might be kind of fun for people?
Laura Hindulak [00:25:16] I have to think on that. I can’t. I can’t. I don’t know. Yeah. Nothing sticks out in my memory.
Mark Souther [00:25:25] I’m sure that there have been some that people were saying, “What were they thinking?”
Laura Hindulak [00:25:28] Whoa!
Mark Souther [00:25:30] Okay, well, what happened, if you can sort of trace some of the major changes over the years, at least from your experience or from things you’ve been told from before you were at Pierre’s in terms of the product lines, things that came and went based on changing consumer tastes beyond just like, individual flavors?
Laura Hindulak [00:25:52] We saw where consumers were very consumed- Consumers were very conscious of how many carbs they were consuming. So at that time, maybe about three, four years ago, we came out with a product called Carb Success, and it was something that just- We rode the wave, and then once that trend was over, we just discontinued that product.
Mark Souther [00:26:13] That was the main one that comes to mind?
Laura Hindulak [00:26:14] Yeah, Carb Success is the one that I remember the most.
Mark Souther [00:26:17] Would you say today that are things like sorbet and sherbet more popular, the same or less popular than they were, I don’t know, 20 years ago?
Laura Hindulak [00:26:26] I would say sherbet and sorbet have become more popular, especially as of late. Pierre’s has a brand-new product called ¡Hola Fruta! and it’s almost reinvented the sherbet category because typically people would think of sherbet for punches, you know, something to use around the holidays. You know, they would buy it maybe infrequently throughout the year. We introduced ¡Hola Fruta! It’s a super-premium sherbet. It has unique flavors, like pomegranate, blueberry. There’s piña colada, margarita. It’s a real dense, rich type of sherbet, and people are catching on to it. It’s offered in all of the Kroger stores nationally, and it just reinvented sherbet.
Mark Souther [00:27:11] Is it offered in Cleveland yet?
Laura Hindulak [00:27:14] It is offered in Cleveland at all the major chains and also Kroger nationally.
Mark Souther [00:27:21] Why the name ¡Hola Fruta!?
Laura Hindulak [00:27:23] ¡Hola Fruta! means “Hello Fruit!” and we just thought that it was perfect for a sherbet line because people typically think, when they think of sherbet, they think of fruit flavors. So it was just a very welcoming name that helped to describe the product.
Mark Souther [00:27:35] Does it have anything to do also with- I know there’s a large Latino population in the United States. It grows all the time. But is it marketed in any way consciously to get sort of a bilingual market, or is that not even a consideration?
Laura Hindulak [00:27:51] No, there is- We’re marketing ¡Hola Fruta! not only to mainstream consumers, but also to the large Hispanic population. We have, it’s dual labeled for- It has English and Spanish on the package. The name ¡Hola Fruta! is very welcoming to them. And I don’t want to talk about something else, the jingle, I’m not going to mention that because we also had it, but it’s over. It’s okay.
Mark Souther [00:28:17] Okay. Is it? I would think that it might- I’m guessing that it probably is highly popular not just in Cleveland but maybe in particularly in some faraway places, like, I don’t know, maybe southern California, places where it’s warm and you have large Hispanic populations. I wonder if there’s anything, any phenomenon like that where you have just a really stunning success in large Latino communities or you really didn’t notice.
Laura Hindulak [00:28:48] Right. We have noticed our most successful markets so far for ¡Hola Fruta! outside of Ohio would be California, Texas, Chicago, Miami, which have very large Spanish populations, Hispanic populations.
Mark Souther [00:29:03] I read, too, that there was a spot on YouTube, which I haven’t had a chance to look at. Is it still on there or-
Laura Hindulak [00:29:09] It’s not. You know what? That’s the jingle, and we’re redoing it a little bit. So we took it off of YouTube. So we won’t even talk about that because we wanted to redo it. [crosstalk] We did- We had a radio campaign that was for national. We did 16 major markets across the country, and the ¡Hola Fruta! jingle was on there. And at that time, we posted it on YouTube. But we’re coming up with a new jingle, so we took the old one off of YouTube, and we’re gonna reintroduce our new one later. Probably with-
Mark Souther [00:29:36] Will it be on YouTube?
Laura Hindulak [00:29:37] We will probably post it again. Yeah.
Mark Souther [00:29:38] So it’s really aimed at a young market, I would think.
Laura Hindulak [00:29:42] It is, because we think sherbet is fun, it’s exciting, and it’s totally different than traffic brand sherbets that are out there. And we wanted to encourage younger people to try it.
Mark Souther [00:29:56] Have you ever made, or are there any plans in the future that may not be practical, but to make gelato?
Laura Hindulak [00:30:03] No, we’ve tasted it before. ¡Hola Fruta! is probably the closest to gelato that people would taste in this market.
Mark Souther [00:30:14] Is it made- I know that different types of ice cream, like products are made- They’re kept at different temperatures, and it affects the consistency and taste. I know gelato is different from sorbet, which is different from sherbet, which is different from ice cream.
Laura Hindulak [00:30:29] Yeah.
Mark Souther [00:30:30] How are they different? If you think about the major differences, are there any things that you can point to, just offhand, that define one from another?
Laura Hindulak [00:30:44] In terms of how they manufacture?
Mark Souther [00:30:46] Well, if someone was wondering about how ice cream differs from sherbet and how, I mean, we know how, obviously, we’ve all tasted them, and we know that there’s something about them that’s different. But is there anything about the, technically, about the temperature that each one is ideally kept at?
Laura Hindulak [00:31:05] I think for those, all ice cream, sherbet and sorbet are all made at the same temperature. The difference between sorbet and sherbet is sorbet does not have dairy where sherbet does, it’s a little creamier. We do make a smooth churned, light ice cream, and that has a special process where it’s made a little bit slower. The freezing takes a little bit longer, which means there’s less ice crystals. So that’s why it’s smooth churned. It’s easier to dip. It’s very scoopable. So that would be the only one.
Mark Souther [00:31:40] I’ve sort of come to the end of the questions that I had planned to ask. I wonder if there’s anything that you would like to add or anything that we haven’t covered perhaps.
Laura Hindulak [00:31:51] Pierre’s had moved so many times from Euclid to St. Clair to East 60th and Hough, and then eventually to East 65th and Carnegie, and then to the new facility in 1995 on Euclid Avenue. But we remain three miles from our original location at East 82nd and Euclid. So, we’re right in the downtown, right in the heart of Cleveland. So it’s kind of interesting that for all those times that we moved, we’re right there where we started.
Mark Souther [00:32:22] Anything else?
Laura Hindulak [00:32:36] Um… Our distribution center- It’s state-of-the-art distribution center. It holds over 3,200 slots for pallets. And we keep it at a constant 25 degrees below zero. Never goes on defrost, and it holds the equivalent of 36 million scoops of ice cream. It’s kind of interesting.
Mark Souther [00:32:58] Wow.
Laura Hindulak [00:32:58] Yeah.
Mark Souther [00:33:03] That’s a lot of ice cream. Well, I think that’s all that I have. I’ll probably think of more questions when I go home tonight [crosstalk] but I think for right now I think that’s all the questions I had.
Laura Hindulak [00:33:14] Good. Okay. [crosstalk] Thank you for having us. Thank you. I also brought a disc with images. There’s just some. Oh, like, old. Where they were filling the ice cream. I think there’s a picture of the building, maybe one of the old trucks. So it might be useful. I don’t know if you could, if you want to take a look, you can keep that.
Mark Souther [00:33:36] I will. Thank you. I had one further question about Pierre’s. You had mentioned earlier that there’s a freezer that’s very, very cold and I wonder if you could describe that just a little bit more.
Laura Hindulak [00:33:50] The Pierre’s warehouse freezer is kept at a constant 25 degrees below zero. It is absolutely cold when you walk in there. The employees who do load the product in and out of that freezer are required to wear special uniforms. They have a full insulated freezer suit that they wear, a hard hat. They have to have a hood and face mask, insulated gloves, and special steel-toed insulated boots. They’re only allowed to work in the freezer for a short period of time, say 45 minutes, and then they have to come out and warm up for 15 minutes, and then they’re allowed to go back in.
Mark Souther [00:34:30] Wow. Well, thank you very much.
Laura Hindulak [00:34:31] Thank you.
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