Bruster's Founder Launches New Curbside Franchise

Even with a menu that boasts 140 flavors, you won't find the founder of Bruster's Real Ice Cream indulging in the sweet treat his business sells in 210 shops up and down the East Coast.

"I'm a meat-and-potatoes person," says Bruce Reed, 50, who launched Bruster's in 1989 and now spends much of his time riding his motorcycle and working on the 400-acre Beaver Falls ranch where he raises cattle, mules, horses and pigs. Reed might take time for a meal at his newest venture, though. He's launched a franchise network for Jerry's Curb Service, the drive-in hamburger joint his father founded 58 years ago in Bridgewater and the place where Reed got his start in the food business.

Two Jerry's franchises have been sold to date: one in Virginia and one in South Carolina. Reed is also eyeing Georgia, which has been a lucrative location for Bruster's.

The original Jerry's still operates like a 1950s drive-up eatery where carhops serve burgers, fries, shakes -- and in recent years, salads -- to customers who don't have to leave their cars. The franchise version isn't going to stray from that concept, said Reed. "It's a real exciting diner look," and the servers will be equipped with handheld computer technology to place orders quickly, Reed said. "Customers will have only a four- to six-minute wait." If Jerry's Curb Service can find the audience Bruster's did outside of its hometown, Reed will have another winning franchise on his hands.

The privately held ice cream business generated sales of $39 million last year, according to Hoover's Online, a database owned by Dun & Bradstreet. The company owns eight of the stores; 202 are franchises. Another 80 Bruster's are under construction, said Reed.

Reed's idea to make money from sweets rather than eat them dates back to his childhood in Chippewa, when he sold his Halloween candy to friends for pocket money.

By 14, Reed was running his first real business: selling used Army clothes to friends. Reed knew a guy who bought unclaimed luggage from the Pittsburgh airport and purchased duffel bags full of the soldier garments from him. When he was old enough for a work permit, Reed started pumping gas at a Chippewa Esso station and by age 17 had saved enough money for a new Corvette. But his father's friend, whom he considered a close mentor, urged him to spend the savings on an old apartment building in New Brighton instead.

Reed bought the place, renovated it himself and began collecting rents from three units. He made enough income on the deal to buy the Corvette with a monthly payment of $203. By then, his head was in business rather than academics. So when Reed was thrown out of high school in his junior year, his father, who owned Jerry's, offered him $125 a week to develop a lunch-time crowd for the place that previously was open just in the evenings.

Within months, his father stepped aside to let him run Jerry's. Reed continued to dabble in real estate and other small businesses until 1989, when he opened the first Bruster's next to Jerry's. After four successful Bruster's were up and running, Reed began selling them as franchises "because it was no longer my strategy to own them all. I figured franchise owners would get their money in and care about the business." He also likes limited ownership by the parent company because he believes it keeps Bruster's focused on what customers want. While ice cream shops conjure up images of Little League teams and grandparents licking cones on hot summer nights, "our customer profile is 25- to 50-year-old women," Reed said.

Even though Bruster's can barely "give the stuff away from Thanksgiving to Valentine's Day," Reed said, it's more cost effective to keep the stores open in the off season and lure customers by running promotions for free cones for babies and free sundaes for dogs. "Some people eat ice cream four times a week, year round," he said.

To keep them coming back, all Bruster's ice cream is produced fresh at each store, and besides the basic cones, sundaes, splits and smoothies, offers reduced-carb flavors such as coffee, vanilla and caramel swirl and fat-free varieties, including chocolate fudge ripple. Reed isn't involved in day-to-day management any longer and has a chief executive at both Bruster's and Jerry's to run the businesses. He doesn't have a title, either. "I'm in charge of fun," he said.

But Reed said he maintains a deep connection to the operations because of the employees, many of whom were there when he began working at Jerry's and when he launched Bruster's.

"I want to make sure the people who started with me are still with me," Reed said. That's one reason he never permitted his own children, now 17 and 20, to work at either business: "I didn't want my managers to be the babysitters," Reed said. "I didn't allow [my kids] to scoop cones; they can work on the [ranch]."

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