By Ian Miller
As the years have passed since the founding of The Golden Scoop, we’ve built up a wide and supportive community of businesses who are eager to cater from our company! Providing catering to organizations has become a regular part of our operations, allowing The Golden Scoop to extend our services to the wider public. Wholesaling manager Bob Asaro and catering manager Jenna Sutter-Brown agreed to be interviewed about our expanding catering operations.
“[Jenna] is the expert on catering,” said Bob, “. . . and I’m glad we have a catering manager, because there’s no way one person could handle all that, both catering and wholesale, with the explosive expansion that’s happened. So, from the wholesale side . . . we were getting ready to meet the vice president and regional director for Hy-Vee, which turned into three locations [that we’re] delivering to. One in Lee’s Summit, one in Overland Park, over on 95th Street, and the third one is on Black Bob in Olathe. So, we’re on the cusp of picking up two more [Hy-Vee locations], probably in the next thirty days . . . there’s one in Overland Park on 135th Street, and there’s one in Fairway, Kansas.” [Between all three Hy-Vees, we deliver over 1000 products for sale in-store each week.]
“It’s about process, people . . . referrals, and delivering a product they expect us to deliver,” said Bob. “We’ve had no quality issues, I’m very happy with the direction we’re headed.”
I asked Bob what he thought our operations would look like over the next five years, and he said, “Well, the biggest challenge we have is production right now . . . We’re already taking orders, and right now, we already need to either seven or eight hundred cups of ice cream in the next 48 hours. Fortunately, our Super Scoopers do an amazing job, and our shift managers do an amazing job of managing and all that. So, I would say next year, at this point and time, instead of doing a thousand a week, we’ll be doing two thousand, and it will go from there if we can figure out how to mass-produce our product without losing the mission and/or the quality [of the product].”
Jenna was just as enthusiastic about the catering side of our operations. “Since I started as the new catering manager last July, we have really streamlined our process to where we offer multiple types of catering opportunities. We offer pick-up opportunities, where people can place orders and come to the store and grab what they need, we can deliver to anywhere in the Kansas City Metro area, and we also have the option of leaving coolers with folks if they need those for their event.”
Jenna also discussed our Golden Connection school program facilitated between The Golden Scoop and several special education programs in local schools, where students can run before-school stores serving our ice cream. Jenna said, “…there are school districts here in Kansas City [Shawnee Mission, Blue Valley, and Olathe] where they’re taking our products into their special education classrooms, and their special education classrooms are running the sale of our products at their schools, so they’re buying from us but then [are] able to make a profit for their programs and give their students meaningful opportunities to work within their school day.”
Whether through catering or wholesaling or giving kids the ability to grab a tasty snack before school, The Golden Scoop keeps growing our community and the mission behind it. Whether you stop by our store or we stop by you, maybe in our upcoming new food truck, that friendly community is waiting with a scoop and a smile.
Find the Golden Scoop at these locations:
9540 Nall Avenue
Overland Park, Kansas 66207
913-284-804410460 W 103rd Street
Overland Park, Kansas 66214
913-232-9639Hours:
Monday – Closed
Tuesday-Saturday: 8am-7pm
Sunday @103rd: 9am-5pm
Sunday @ 95th: 1pm-5pm
