Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams: Responding to Competitors in the Nascent Artisanal Ice Cream Market

John Lowe, CEO of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, felt like the company's outsized success had awakened a sleeping giant.

It was a hot summer day in August 2014, and Lowe had just heard that the 144-year-old regional ice cream behemoth, Graeter's Ice Cream, would be opening ice cream shops in Chicago and Nashville, where Jeni's had recently opened stores and almost immediately had been crowned as "Best Ice Cream" of each city. Graeter's would be abandoning its traditional retail format (of a stand-alone, larger ice cream parlor complete with family-style seating) in favor of Jeni's smaller-size, inline retail, single-line scoop shop format. Lowe, along with his business partners, Jeni Britton Bauer, Charly Bauer, and Tom Bauer, and their leadership team, considered whether or how they should respond.

And it wasn't just Graeter's, either. It seemed that competition had noticeably surged over the past couple of years, with Lowe still shocked from the audacity of a company called Steve's Craft Ice Cream, which had originally come to market with orange copycat packaging and nearly identical flavors. Lowe sensed that Jeni's was evolving from the challenges of its start-up days to a new, more exciting, and more complicated time in the artisanal ice cream market.