Jason and Lindsey Eddleston are the new owners of a Royal Oak institution, Ray's Ice Cream. And after six decades and three generations of ownership, the Stevens family weren't going to sell their family business to just anyway.
With Jason's operations background, and Lindsey's sales experience (she's a commercial realtor in her day job), there's now a new local family at the helm of Ray's.
Today, Jason and Lindsey explain how they're modernizing the business while still keeping it true to its roots. They've upped their social media game, established relationships with grocery and restaurant partners, and have even collaborated with local businesses like Franklin Cider Mill, Sugar Spun Cotton Candy, and Cooper Street Cookies. Wait until you hear about these delicious flavors!
They've also begun working in the catering and events spaces, working everywhere from a Food Truck Rally at the Royal Oak Farmers Market - to a private event for Gucci changemakers at MOCAD downtown. They're also partnering with delivery apps and catering smaller events as well.
Now that Jason and Lindsey have taken several months to learn the business, they're ready to expand it even more in 2023...and expand their family as well! They tell us about their little one on the way, and our hosts have some delicious ideas about a gender reveal...
Connect with Ray's and our cohosts:
Ray's Phone Number: 248-549-5256
Ray's Website: https://www.raysicecream.com/
Ray's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/raysicecream
Ray's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/raysicecreamco/
Ray's TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@raysicecreamco
Email Ray's: Contact@RaysIceCream.com
Jon Gay from JAG in Detroit Podcasts - http://www.jagindetroit.com/
Trish Carruth from The Personal Jeweler - https://www.thepersonaljeweler.com/
Lisa Bibbee from Keller Williams - http://soldbylisab.com/
Jon: Welcome to episode one of season two of The Rocc Pod, presented by the Royal Oak Michigan Chamber of Commerce. I am Jon Gay from JAG in Detroit Podcasts.
Lisa: I am Lisa Bibbee, your local neighborhood realtor with Keller Williams Advantage.
Trish: And I'm Trish Carruth, third generation jeweler and owner of Your Personal Jeweler.
Jon: And today we welcome Jason and Lindsey Eddleston, the new-ish owners of Ray's Ice Cream, a name we all know in Royal Oak. Welcome. It's great to have you both.
Jason: Thank you very much for having us today.
Lindsey: We're excited to be here.
Jon: And we're excited to talk ice cream and all things Ray's with you. Everyone in Royal Oak knows about Ray's Ice Cream. It's an institution. Can you sort of walk us through how it came to be that you ended up taking over the business?
Lindsey: Yes, So I actually am a commercial real estate broker in the metro Detroit area with MidAmerica Real Estate Group. And I learned about the opportunity where the founding family of Rays Ice Cream was interested in selling their business, being such an iconic brand and staple in the community.
This was very you know, private dealings with the family and myself and Jason. Met with the family a number of times over the process of a year to work on this potential transition with them. You know, them wanting to keep a family owned and operated business. Us being a young local family who is involved in the community and working together.
To make sure this was the right fit for both parties. So we were very excited with that.
Jason: I think when they heard when the family heard our vision for what we were looking to do with the business and grow the business I think they were very excited about the potential of bringing the business back to the levels the business was at pre pandemic. Pre 5, 10 years ago.
With my background in operations and marketing and my wife's background in sales, they looked at us as a family, as a very good fit to really energize the actual base of the actual company through the community, through social media, through additional sales work, through additional marketing work, and it really interested them to see that was the direction they were hoping would continue on with the Ray's Ice Cream business.
Trish: Nice. So what surprised you the most from a business side? Was it like cost or inventory management?
Jason: There were a lot of things that surprised me from a business side. Our due diligence period, we discovered a lot of different things, especially with costs from nonperishable vendors that looked to be unsustainable.
And through that, in purchasing the business, we've actually changed out most of the non-perishable vendors. We also looked at a lot of the other numbers, really portrayed a story of a business that really needed, some young passion and energy with it to really grow the business because the sales numbers had been declining over the last five years. And the cost of those sales numbers have continually been increasing.
Lisa: Jason, you had mentioned earlier about marketing and social media, and I know in my business I do a ton of it. So can you touch a little bit on what is working for you as far as marketing or social media that you're doing differently? Maybe thinking a little bit out of the box.
Lindsey: So I'll take over the social media part. I have been running that on behalf of Rays Ice Cream since we took over. I feel like we have an extremely strong community around Ray's and just putting up posts, engaging with our community, making sure that our Facebook and our Instagram were constantly active, and creating content that excited our customer base as well.
Let them know about new releases of flavors, collaborations, flavors coming back in stock, and just letting them know more about our product line that hasn't had any visibility. So really just engaging and creating content has been very big for us. I believe everyone is very excited about different collaborations we've done.
So that's something we've seen major success in. Jason and I love following different food bloggers and have all this random knowledge. So for example, with the release of the Vernors black cherry soda pop, we knew about that kind of before, I would say, the general public. We follow these funny things, and Jason worked with our existing grocery partners that we have, who were getting that product to make sure that when they got their first shipment in, we went over there, we were able to purchase the product, and then we did a quick photo shoot and announced it to social media that we'd be offering floats and coolers with the black cherry Vernors.
We had the highest social and media engagement and really went viral with us being one of the first people to have that offering in metro Detroit. But also we had people driving in to Ray's for this, from Monroe, from Muskegon, from so many different parts in Michigan to come to Ray's ice cream to enjoy thisexclusive experience.
Lisa: Are you still serving it?
Jason: We're still serving it today. And when you look at the numbers, our typical social media Facebook post gets somewhere between 50 to 150 likes, five to 15 shares, and it's seen in total audience of three to 5,000 people.
This post was seen in an audience of 80,000 people. It had 2000 likes and it had about 750 shares. So the increase in the audience we saw on social media that post and other posts by Lindsey have helped grown our Facebook followers by about 15% since we took over the business approximately about 75 days ago. And additionally, we've seen our Instagram users almost double in the same timeframe as well.
Lisa: Congrats, Lindsey.
Lindsey: That's awesome. Thank you. And we've also had a TikTok video with over a million views.
Jon: That's amazing. So I mean, it doesn't get much more Royal Oak and much more Detroit than black cherry Vernorsand Ray's ice cream.
I'm curious, you mentioned obviously the black cherry Vernors floats, what kind of unique flavors you guys have had recently, gotten reaction to, and then also how you navigate the waters of,many people having dietary restrictions and having to cater to different taste and different dietary restrictions.
Jason: One of the things we saw when we first were doing our due diligence in the business, Is that the store was really only offering from a dairy free standpoint sorbets. And we thought really the market had changed where vegans had become a lot more higher percentage of ice cream consumers.
Within the first two, three weeks of being at the store seven days a week, 10 plus hours a day. I noticed both phone calls coming in the store as well as customers in the store asking for vegan ice cream. So we, through a distributor, not one we're making currently, have put out a vegan ice cream that we've gotten some very positive feedback on. And later this year we're looking to launch in a testing phase, one to two different types of vegan based ice cream with coconut base. We feel that vegans really control their friend groups of where they go and where they dine and where they dessert. And that's a growing segment of kind of the eating population that we wanted to make sure we were including in kind of the wonderful ice cream and desserts that we serve at Ray's ice cream.
Jon: Any other unique flavors besides the ones that cater to those with different dietary needs?
Jason: Yeah, so outside of the dietary, which we saw was the first, is that one of the things that we've undertook is we're really looking to do collaborations with other Michigan based businesses.
We're currently working on three different collaborations currently. One, which is Cooper Street Cookies. They sell a hard, biscotti type cookie with dehydrated fruit within it, which is great for ice creams that we make in crumbling. So we've looked at their lemon blueberry as well as their brownie white chocolate and of doing different experiments within our kind of testing kitchen. Of make two different flavors of that magnitude.
Also, Franklin Cider Mill has been a customer of ours for quite some time and has another iconic business since around like the early 1900's. And we've been experimenting with their kind of donuts and getting them fresh from Franklin Cider Mill and incorporating them in an ice cream that we're selling both in our store and in Franklin Cider Mill, which is a vanilla base with a caramel s swirl with chunks of donut within it.
Jon: This is a podcast so you can't see it, but Trish, Lisa's and my eyes are all like bugging out of our heads right now, thinking about a combination of Ray's ice cream and Franklin cider mill donuts. We're very intrigued by this and you're talking so much about the business, Jason and Lindsey, which is fantastic, but this is ice cream. This is fun. This is delicious. This is great.
Lisa: Yeah, right. I want it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Lindsey: It's really ridiculously delicious.
Lisa: Yeah, I would just eat this all day long. You guys have just such scrumptilicious flavors.
Lindsey: That's why we feel bad this is a podcast and not in person.
Jon: If there was ever a case for us to record in person and not remotely, guys, I think this would've been it, and hindsight's 20/20, right?
Lisa: Can we redo this on location?
Jason: No problem with that. Another collaboration that we've launched is with Dave's Sweet Tooth. Andrew, who owns Dave's Sweet Tooth, has his corporate office in Washington Township, where they make actually the toffee that is sold on QVC and other different outlets. We took kind of his milk chocolate pieces and have incorporated it into an ice cream with a fudge swirl.
And we think that's also gonna be a big hit as well. And the first collaboration we did, really about like a month opening in the store. I'm a big kid at heart. You know, part of the reason why we got in the ice cream business is because I think I had a dream when I was a little kid about owning an ice cream business.
And luckily I have a beautiful, really kind wife who was like, Let's do it. And...
Lindsey: And make his dreams come true. That's a wife's job, right? Newlyweds over here.
Oh my god, you guys are the cutest .
Jason: And we met a friend of ours, Mandy, who has a cotton candy business called Sugar Spun. Doing some parties that we always usually throw a big Super Bowl party at our house and always look to do some different fun things with it.
And Mandy's been serving cotton candy for a number of years at parties we've had, I had heard about when I took over Ray's that there was a previous ice cream called cotton candy, that was too expensive to bring back that had not only a wonderful, great cotton candy tasting flavor, but had chocolate chips that were rainbow coated within the actual cotton candy.
We decided to relaunch that and make it a public kind of event where we invited Sugar Spun to have their products within store. And when we serve the cotton candy, whether it be kids or big kids at heart, we put a little piece of cotton candy on the top to make it more whimsical. And when we had some really great success with that collaboration that really got us thinking like, what other really cool collaborations can we do with our friends in the food and beverage industry and some of our current customers.
Trish: Do you guys offer catering? And if so, tell me how that works.
Jason: So one of the growth areas that we looked at for the company was doing events. The business before we had taken over had really never done any events in the community. Really it said to different potential customers, "Hey, you can buy a half gallon bucket or a three gallon bucket from us."
What we quickly realized when we were talking to people that were also associated with the Chamber or even people of the city of the Royal Oak, there was a big aspect to do catering. We've done many different events now. We've done events at the Royal Oak Farmer's Market for the food truck rallies they have on a monthly basis.
We've done events at Royal Oak Farmer Markets for neighborhood block party. We've done the Hamtramck Labor Day Festival. We also did an event for the Salvation Army and doing a lot of prepackaged scoops for a different party they had. And one of the events that I know my wife was most proud of is that we had a party planner reach out to us asking to event at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Detroit, the MOCAD, in which after I agreed to do the event, thinking that like, "Hey, I can figure out how to make it happen."
We got an NDA email from Gucci that we had to sign, so we ended up doing a party for Gucci to celebrate their new store in Detroit. Which was a lot of fun and really, you know, exposed us to a whole different new clientele of professional athletes, of artists, of different Gucci change makers that we really hope was a launching pad for us.
Jon: You didn't violate the NDA by just telling us that, did you, Jason ?
Lindsey: No, the event already happened, so we can definitely share that with you.
Jon: Okay. You can talk about it before. Gotcha. Okay.
Lindsey: Correct. Yeah.
Jason: And anything, obviously we'd have to publish, we'd have to get approved by Gucci. So when it comes to our social media, we really haven't put anything on there.
Just in respect for the kind of the Gucci brand and so forth.
Lisa: Nice. Well, it sounds like you guys are just off with a huge launch in changing so many things up about this business. So how was your first summer?
Jason: I like to call it a labor of love. We really went into the business not really knowing any expectations, not really having a much of a game plan or a playbook, and it was really just being there as much as possible.
Kind of really learning the business, overseeing the business, understanding how things would go from an operation standpoint. Increasing production to meet the demands and at the same time trying to figure out how to do events and. You know, we purchased a couple pieces of equipment just to get us through the summer, and those pieces of equipment worked out well, but through a lot of the experiences in trial and error that we had, we're really trying to create a game plan and roadmap of how, starting next spring, we're gonna really attack this spring and summer and early fall next year to really capitalize on a lot of the initial success we've had this summer.
Lindsey: And I think down the road too, we will hire, hopefully someone to run events for and on behalf of events and catering for Ray's ice cream. We think it could be that big for the business.
Jon: Love the growth that we're seeing now. We're getting into the fall now, and you mentioned cider donuts a few minutes ago.
We're recording this on September 26th. There are some folks who think the end of summer means the end of ice cream. There are lots of folks who think, Oh no, I'll eat ice cream year round. I'll eat it if it's, you know, Michigan minus 10 degrees in January, I'm gonna keep going. What are your plans as we get into the fall and winter and the colder months?
Lindsey: So the beautiful thing about Ray's ice cream, while we do have the retail shop up front that people are very familiar with, we also do a very large wholesale business. And are in how many grocery stores? Over 20 grocery stores currently?
Jason: About 30 grocery stores in total. Yeah.
Lindsey: And have expansion plans with new grocery stores, specialty stores.
Getting into more restaurants and bars in the summer. We do a lot of business with country clubs, which quiet down, you know, in the winter. As well as get into additional dessert places. So we have other backdoor business outside of the retail shop, and I think everyone loves ice cream. makes people smile and you can enjoy it year round for sure.
Jon: I'm trying to avoid the "I scream, you scream" joke here. You're setting me up for it, Lindsey.
Lindsey: Go for it.
Jason: Currently right now we're in nine Meijers. We had a really successful meeting in September with the ice cream buyer of Meijer and launched at the beginning of October. The endcap placement on the Meijer on Coolidge between 14 and 15 mile, which is one of the five top performing Meijers in the Midwest.
Additionally, we're planning and working with that buyer to get into nine more Meijers in February of 2023. We're really excited about the growth in especially the supermarket aspect. But you know, the restaurant business, as Lindsey had mentioned, is one where we're moving a little slower on. A lot of more upscale restaurants have put in like four quart ice cream machines and so forth, and are really controlling a lot of the ice cream making within those individual restaurant establishments.
So the restaurant won't be as big of a growth area for us as the grocery store and dessert stores will be for us.
Lindsey: And whenever we eat out for dinner now we say, Do you have ice cream? Who makes it? And try and see if we can get in there. So we're always working. We're always thinking of different ideas and collaborations.
Trish: So, I know that you guys are still in the infancy of your business, but what are your long term plans? I know you mentioned community partnerships?
Jason: When it comes to the Ray's ice cream long term plans, we really took the summer of 2022 to really understand the business. Understanding where our growth area is, especially when it comes to catering and events.
Our long term plans are to put some additional full-time help in place to really handle that growth area as well as with the additional grocery stores, dessert places, and restaurants. We have to bring in some additional full-time help to help with production and help with delivery cuz we distribute all the products ourselves.
Additionally, my wife who's been running the social media also has another full-time job as well in sales and is about to give birth to our very first child.
Jon: Oh, congratulations.
Lisa: Oh my God. Congratulations.
Jason: Thank you. And we're looking to also bring in some help from the social media to manage that for us, ongoing. We feel like in adding some additional people, whether it be full-time or even a part-time capacity to start, will give us the additional strength, to kind of continue the growth area we're looking to do for the business.
Jon: Lindsey, I don't know how far along you are, but I'm picturing like one of those social media baby announcements with blue ice cream and pink ice cream, and doing it that way and trying to go viral!
Lindsey: With that, we ly think there's a growth possibility for gender reveals with using our ice cream molds. Ray's ice cream makes these very cool cordial ice cream molds that are from, I think the original opening of the business and Oh wow. I believe we are one of the last places. In America who maybe makes these still on a pretty consistent basis. So you could do probably a baby or different shapes and colors and do a gender reveal. So we have a lot of fun, creative ideas, but we didn't own the business when we found out what the gender was of our baby. So we didn't get to do that ourselves. But there will be other kids in the future for sure.
Lisa: The public doesn't know though! Use this to your advantage. You can still put it out to this whole social media following that you have. I don't know what the gender of your baby is. Don't tell me yet, cuz I wanna see it in an ice cream.
Jon: And it's way safer than those firecrackers people use on TikTok and pull each other up all the time.
Lindsey: Yeah, definitely have a project on our hands then for the next couple days from now.
Lisa: Yeah, Well, not like you don't have enough on your plate, but we just, we would love to see a gender reveal with ice cream for you guys.
We were wondering, you know, especially with this new business and being Royal Oak Chamber members, how has the Chamber membership helped you guys?
Jason: You know, I've been on the chamber board for the last six years. My other business's corporate office is in Royal Oak on 11 Mile, and I've always been pretty active in going to different openings and lunches and really getting to meet a lot of the other members on the board or other members of the Chamber.
Ever since I started letting them out before it became official and when it became official, we've had nothing but really positive outpourings of support from the Chamber as well as the city. You know, another store manager of the Royal Oak Woodward Commons sits on the board with myself and she was like, Anything I can do to help grow your business? Cuz we love your product, we love your brand, we'd love to do so.
A number of other different chamber board members are coming in the store on an accurate basis. And also setting me up with the individual who runs the Royal Oak Farmer's Market, the individual who runs events for City of Royal Oak, as well as a lot of new other businesses that are opening Royal Oak or other businesses that we think there would be a good synergistic match for us doing work together.
It's been really amazing to see the community rally together around us as new owners of Ray's ice cream, and really helping to put us in a position to succeed in our new business and really keep Ray Ice Cream as an iconic neighborhood gem within the community, hopefully for the next 50 to 75 years under our family's ownership.
Jon: That really is amazing to hear. So last question for the two of you. We always do this with our guests. We ask a fishbowl question of the day where we pull a totally random question. So we're gonna have Trish draw today's question and we'll let you both answer it either individually or together, depending on the question. Trish, would you please pull our fishbowl question of the day?
Trish: Of course. Ah, let's see. This is a good one, especially since you guys are constantly learning something. As new business owners, what is something that you learned in the last week?
Lindsey: First we have to conceptualize one week's time because we just, we just keep going.
Jason: So I honestly, I barely even know what day it is in the morning. You know, like I always have to ask my wife each morning like, Hey, what, what's today's day?
Jon: We'll be flexible. What's something you've learned recently? How about that?
Jason: So when we say learn recently, are we talking in our business?
Lisa: No, this is a fishbowl random fun fact.
Jason: Okay. I'm sorry.
Jon: Business wise, personal wise, random trivia, anything is fair game here.
Jason: So we'll go back to Ray's ice cream. I was very interested to try delivery services when we first took over the business, Unsure of how those would go, especially in summer months when a temperature was 80 and 90 degrees out.
When we launched on DoorDash, we received 53 straight five star reviews, which blew my mind. . Unfortunately I missed a couple nights cuz of events we had going on and kids messed some up orders and we got a one star review because someone got the wrong order two days in a row. Since then we've had nothing but five star reviews as well.
I was very surprised to see coming out of the summer after Labor Day weekend and going in the fall. That delivery is accounting now for somewhere in the magnitude of 15% to 20% of our daily sales of our business. We personally have never ordered from Door
Lindsey: Dash. We don't even have the apps.
Jason: You know, one time when we were traveling and made sure we wanted dinner before our event, we ordered Caviar service in New York to our hotel.
Lindsey: Not the caviar, the food, that's just their delivery service in the city.
Jon: Oh, that's the app. Okay. I was like, Look at you guys. Ballin' with the caviar. Okay.
Lindsey: We're not caviar eaters. We don't like caviar. Not at all. That's just their GrubHub.
Lisa: Just a little bit of advice too on the one bad review that you did have. Every business gets a bad review now and again, but it's how you respond to it. So I'm not sure what you guys did for it, but that's a huge opportunity to really shine and say, Hey look, my apologies, you know, we messed up, but hey, here's a whole like five gallon bucket or whatever. Whatever you guys can do to make up for it. And then people go, Oh wow. Yeah, everybody had a bad day. They made a mistake, but they made it.
Lindsey: Right, exactly. We addressed it immediately. And we also, with that, recognize we need to respond to all the five star reviews as well. You need to respond to all the reviews. People wanna be seen, people wanna be heard. They're taking the time to review. We need to respond.
Jon: Lindsey, what's something you've learned in the last little bit here? .
Lindsey: In the last week, I've learned a lot about infant care and learning what you need in preparation for a baby to come home for the first time and sleep safety for a baby that you can put nothing in its cribs these days. Where I think when we were all kids, you could have pillows and toys and bumpers and all this stuff in your crib with you, but now it's just the baby and the sheet. And a swaddle is a thing, which is basically a word for a blanket that gets wrapped in a burrito type way. New parent things.
Jon: Trish is the mom of two, and new mom fairly recently as well. Any any advice you wanna give Jason and Lindsey, as about to be first time parents?
Trish: Not any good advice cuz I did not listen to the sleeping restrictions. I mean yes, to not putting the stuff in the crib, but I co-slept with both my sons cuz it was easier with breastfeeding.
And they both are safe and happy. Nothing wrong with them, but do what feels most comfortable for you.
Lindsey: Perfect. I think. Perfect advice.
Jason: Right. And I'm very excited with our child. In about 12 years, will be behind the counter scooping ice cream to our customers and learning the family business.
Jon: Excellent . All right, so it's been a lot of fun talking ice cream and new parents to be with you both. Jason and Lindsey Eddelston from Ray's Ice Cream. People wanna find you online, obviously, people know where the store is, but give the address, email, all the socials. Anything you wanna plug. Here is your window to doso.
Lindsey: Yes, we are located at 4233 Coolidge Highway in Royal Oak. Off of Coolidge Highway between 13 and 14. You can find us at www.Raysicecream.com. On Instagram, Raysicecreamco and on Facebook, just type Ray's ice cream and you'll find us. We're also on TikTok as Ray's Ice Cream Co, and our phone number is
Jason: 248 549-5256 for more information about parties. Events.
Lindsey: You could also email us at Contact@Raysicecream.com. Sprinkle kindness.
Lisa: It has been so awesome to have you guys on today. And I wanna talk about ice cream all day right now. My name is Lisa Bibbee, and I'm a realtor with Keller Williams Advantage. I put the real back in realtor.
The market is shifting, yet there are still niche markets. Curious how much your home is worth now? Give me a call. You can find me on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram At SoldByLisaB.
Trish: I'm Trish Carruth, third generation jeweler and owner of Your Personal Jeweler. I specialize in creating custom engagement and wedding bands and fine jewelry.
You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at thepersonaljeweler or our website, www.thepersonaljeweler.com.
Jon: And we'll actually be talking to Trish as our featured guest in our next episode. I'm Jon Gay from Jag in Detroit Podcasts. Nobody knows your story better than you and I can help you tell it. To start a podcast or any questions at all you have about podcasts, you can find me on social at JAGinDetroit or on my website, jagindetroit.com. We wanna thank you for checking out this episode of the ROCC Pod presented by the Royal Oak Michigan Chamber of Commerce. For more information about joining the chamber or how to be on this podcast, you can visit our website at royaloakchamber.com. Thanks everyone.