Columnists
What price for your craving?
That’s the question a village full of ice cream enthusiasts will shortly have to ask itself. The Nice Ice Baby premium ice cream outlet in Wellington is threatening to close its doors—unless the owners can raise $200,000 (or more).
The Nice Ice Baby people—who now call themselves The Urban Collective, bringing a catering service, a café and a banquet hall under the ‘Urban’ umbrella—have discovered they have been falling afoul of Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs rules. Their ice cream is all currently made at their mother ship café (The Urban Bistro) on Victoria Avenue in downtown Belleville. The ice cream contains milk, and the milk is not transported from a creamery. In that event, selling ice cream from anywhere but where it was made is not permissible.
Needless to say, the owners were not pleased to discover their business plan rested on a false assumption of compliance. But they have put on a brave face.
They say they have two alternatives: contract, and close the Wellington store; or expand to create a creamery to supply Wellington, Belleville and a whole new range of potential locations. Their preferred option is to expand. They have already selected premises in Corbyville and are itching to get started. But they need to raise the $200,000 (or more) first,
They are going about it using a relatively new technique— a crowdfunding campaign. I Iearned about it a few days ago (using a very old technique: seeing a poster on the wall in the post office). A campaign on social media, where the real action will take place, is just getting underway.
it’s an efficient way to ask a lot of people for money at the same time, and all grownups should know how to say “no.” However, the campaign is a little light on the detailed business plan. It doesn’t say how the $200,000 figure has been arrived at, nor does it refer to efforts to obtain loans and grants. It does not offer any ownership interest in the company in exchange for a donation. And, of course, it cannot guarantee that the store in Wellington will still be around in 10 years. But a crowdfunding pitch of this sort isn’t made for the analytical mind. It’s made for the imaginative mind, the ‘what if’ mind, the mind that feels the excitement—the dopamine rush—of doing something out of left field. The pitch is not directed at your charitable giving budget; it’s directed at your mad money budget.
What will you get for your contribution? Give $25 and you will get a postcard and a button. Fifty dollars will get your name inscribed in the Founders Wall at the new Urban Creamery, along with an invite to the opening reception. For $100, they will also throw in three free pints of ice cream. The rewards keep going up with the donation levels. At the top level of $5,000, you get a visit from an ice cream truck to serve 100 people; an ice cream making lesson with free ice cream and baseball hats, lunch at the Urban Bistro and reception tickets, all for four people; and your name on the Founders Wall.
On the day I write this column, the campaign—which has not been formally launched—has raised $1,125 from some 14 donors, after 10 days online. Still $198,875 to go, but it’s a start. We’ve all heard of crowdfunding campaigns that overshoot their targets.
So now to the question I asked in the headline. What price for your craving for premium ice cream? Can you live without it being available in Wellington? If not, how much would you be willing to part with for continued access? The cost of one ice cream cone for every summer week? The gas and time cost of a triip to Belleville? Time to ante up.
A campaign kickoff party is to be held in Belleville on March 24. A similar event is planned for the County at a later date. I’m watching the bulletin board at the post office for more details.
Bruce P. – Just did your magic Google search and I only got a list of ice cream companies, not a detailed explanation on all the regulations of operating an ice cream manufacturing facility in the Province of Ontario. Could it be that you don’t know as much as you profess? Who are all the folks in the business community who think Sharon and Tim are “a joke”? Perhaps you can enlightened us all.
One-sided? Negative? Must have read a different article.
This is journalism, and the County needs more of it, vs pet project Facebook groups “admin’d” by people who like to think they’re actually in journalism at all, or wannabe weather people who think they’re meteorologists because they figured out how to turn on a computer and read an actual weather report and broadcast it.
In Sharon’s response to the article she admits they have a failing business model, and that their debt to- value ratio is not viable for traditional lending institutions to find any value in expanding their current business. Later she states that she never though that ice cream making would fall under OMAFRA, however a quick google search on ice cream manufacturing will bring up all the regulations that she had no idea about. This leads me to think that the urban collective owners (as well intentioned as they may be) don’t have a viable business model, no real plan, and do not do the research required to be successful in any business. Furthermore, if one cannot afford something, one doesn’t ask their neighbors to buy it..
Urban collective should work on strengthening their current businesses before expanding. Crowdfunding should be for people in need not for the uninformed. Businesses that need to crowd-fund obviously are not sustainable and will eventually fail due to the mismanagement of debt. Despite their few supporters, I wish (for this duo’s sake) that they finally realize what a joke they are amongst the business community.
You are right John. She continues to say how nice she is… NOT! When I had my business downtown, she treated me like garbage, and tarnished my good reputation for no reason what so ever. She publically bad mouthed me on MY facebook page and then like you said, she blocked me. If you do not agree with this lady you are at her mercy. I saw a PUBLIC argument she had on some site that rates businesses and their services simple because this fellow didnt give her a favorable rating. She was down right rude and out of line. I feel if your going to beg the public for their hard earned money, shouldnt you be good to the public???
I have been a friend of Sharon Huckle‘s for 32 years. Your article is nothing short of negativity. How could you sit down at your laptop and write such a assumed piece of writing not considering that you’re writing about a family who is struggling about the worst thing ever have in their lives in a time of great turmoil in their lives of both family and business?? Why would you choose to take your authorship to add just such a time to bring them down? Why would you not want to lift up people who contribute to the community who have been born and raised in Belleville and to have given every inch of their lives by raising their children as good humans and taking great risks in their businesses to be successful? Why would you join the train of haters when you could’ve had the choice of lifting things up and being a better human being? In this day of social media it’s people like you and the commenters who are making a huge negative impact on our communities all over the world. Be a better human being be kind and have empathy! It’s easy to hide behind your laptop and to write the things you write but if you actually spent the time to have interviewed my friend and her family and to walk in their shoes as a compassionate journalist would, then and only then you would earn the respect of other compassionate human beings. I ask you to interview this family and spend some time with them and to turn your story around. Be better.
Sent from my iPhone
What flavour is that Kool-Aid you are drinking?
Hello David, It’s Sharon Huckle here. I am part-owner (with my husband Tim Hennig) of Urban Collective, Nice Ice Baby Ice Cream and The Cat’ s Meow Salon and Spa. It’s a lot, we know, but as I said in the video on our Go Fund Me campaign, we are serial entrepreneurs. I was at my mom and dad’s for dinner in Northport this evening (which we were late for because when we passed by Urban Bistro in Belleville, we noticed a family was wanting ice cream after our closing hours, so I stopped to let them come in and pick something), when my mom told us we had made the Wellington Times (the old-fashioned paper version, which they had since recycled). At first I was excited, but they said some of seemed a bit unsavoury, so of course, we proceeded to look up the online version (on 3G on Tim’s phone, because the internet at my parents house is spotty at best). Tim read the article online and we tried to find the positive in it, as we are inclined to do. Now that it is 1am and I should be sleeping, of course it is keeping me awake, as the worrying does, when you have so much at stake, and I began to answer your article in my head. So now, I’m on the big computer, reading the unsavoury comments below that my proud parents (who know how hard we work) never got to see, and I am inviting you to get the whole story (that we barely have together ourselves, as it keeps changing constantly). I would love it if you would contact me for a complete interview. In a world where peoples’ attention span is extremely short and they rarely bother to get “the rest of the story” (I used to love Paul Harvey’s radio program), we have had to limit our output of information to small sound bites. Even in the salon (where I put 40 hours in behind the chair), people do not get to hear every gory detail. I try to spare my clients the daily struggle of keeping our businesses going, with increasing costs, decreasing foot traffic, the pitfalls of owning second hand equipment and 200 year old buildings (which, by the way, actually belong to the bank for the next 25 years, except we’re on the hook for everything that goes wrong, and a lot does). Both of the comments below, try to dispel us a shady organization. People who actually know us, know that is the furthest thing from the truth. We are not the kind of owners that show up for an ice cream cone and trot off to our mansion somewhere. We are at it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even during a rare dinner over at my folks’ place. At some point you have to go to sleep (hence the exhausted and exasperated private message I sent at 12:30 am to the gentleman, John, I told I had to go to bed because I was tired of defending myself to a complete stranger (literally). That one blew up on Facebook after he posted it, and merely out of self-preservation (and to spare my clients me crying during their appointments in the salon) I had to delete the whole post, because yes, we said some things we regret. We are human and we were down-trodden. Did I erase them from Facebook? Yes. From my mind? Obviously not. We thought crowd-funding would be a fun, modern way to engage our community and offer cool rewards to those who believed in us. It was a last-ditch effort to carry on, after we weren’t getting very far with government and traditional banks as funding options and the sense of urgency was closing in. I had no idea the negative backlash it would produce. It was devastating to me…almost, because we’re not quitters, we’re entrepreneurs. As far as the comparison to Slickers, that is only natural, I suppose, but no need to be so harsh. We also enjoy Slickers ice cream and have for many years. We knew Pat and Marie, the original owners, very well and had used their ice cream in our restaurant Urban Herb more than 15 years ago (before the new owners ever built their dairy plant, which now we know is a no-no to OMAFRA). Slickers inspired us; we are not trying to compete with them or put them out of business. We have different products, sold in different towns. We like to change up our flavours, offer vegan options, bake our own stuff, offer it to our catering clients and be at local community events with our cart and truck. We wanted to provide jobs for our 2 teenage boys and a whole bunch of other people too. All noble pursuits. We are not trying to fight the government, and were never trying to sneak around rules. Rules change, some are out-dated, many seem to be set up to put small business, out of business. Rules are different for different businesses and there are so many obscure levels of government. We never imagined we would be under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agricultural and Rural Affairs. None of our other food businesses have in the last 20 years. It wasn’t mentioned during the building of our current ice cream production kitchen, that has never had a health infraction during all of it’s inspections in the last 2 years. Believe me, now that I’ve heard of them, I have contacted every government official and office I could think of and plenty I couldn’t (that’s a lot of acronyms!). It would’ve made almost as much sense to me to look up the Ministry of Magic. We are being mandated to buy a $40,000 pasteurizer to re-pasteurize the already pasteurized milk and cream we purchase from Reid’s Dairy (?). This is just one piece of the $200k puzzle we are sorting through. We are not anti-establishment or anti-government. We are all for compliance. Believe me, as a mom (the other half of two indebted self-employed people), I am extremely grateful for the government (and tax payers) who graciously covered the 6 surgeries our oldest son needed between June and January, and the cancer treatments both my mom and Tim’s dad have undergone this past year. Without OHIP, that would have caused us to bankrupt everything. No, we have not mentioned all the details of our lives in our campaign. We are adding to it all the time, as things unfold and seem relevant. In our 2 minute campaign video we wanted to come off as positive and capable and excited about this immense hurdle. Truthfully, it has been one scary ride and it’s not over yet. Once again, I am losing sleep, defending my integrity and that of our businesses to complete strangers, but the truth is we are really nice people who work really hard and all we wanted to do was make great ice cream and try to make people a little happier. If you can’t do that with ice cream (and yes, we have dairy-free, sugar-free, gluten-free options) then that’s pretty sad. I invite you to get the rest of the story (it’s actually riveting) by contacting me through The Cat’s Meow Salon and Spa, where I am Wednesday to Saturday (and where I’ll be putting in a 10 hour day tomorrow, so I should really get to bed, now that is 2am). Thank you again for your article, your thought-provoking insight and your unbiased opinion. That is excellent journalism. I look forward to speaking with you in person or over the phone, (the old-fashioned way, at a reasonable hour) to share our side of the story. Stay tuned to our websites, Facebook pages, our campaign page and post-office bulletin boards (all of which are also my job to keep updated). We have lots of exciting news (hopefully more good than bad) to share in the coming months.
Thank you for your “rest of the story” – I did not see the WT article, thankfully – not very responsible journalism in my eyes…. very one-sided. I support your endeavor and hope that you are successful – having had you cater our daughter’s wedding, I know the degree of your professionalism and do not doubt your sincerity in serving the public. My heart goes out to Sharon, dealing with traumatic personal issues while having at the same time defend your livelihood that is Nice Ice Baby. Wishing you only the best!
Not only is their campaign very lacking in details, but the owners also delete posts and block posters to their Facebook page when legitimate questions are asked, or suggestions and advice on resources for funding and business training are given.
Prior to blocking those asking questions or giving advice the owners send a nasty private message to the poster which ends in begging for donations.
There is a very suspicious element to this crowdfunding campaign, and several people feel the owners are being very misleading about the whole thing.
I think I will keep my ” Mad Money ” budget , not drive to Belleville and stay in Prince Edward County and drive to Bloomfield or Picton . There I can buy an ice cream from a responsible artisian ice cream maker at a place called Slickers. Have you never heard of them Dave? For 20 years they have made hand crafted ice cream in small batches using local ingredients all in a licensed dairy !
Not only that they have THE BEST ICE CREAM IN THE WORLD!
I once liked Slickers, but it has changed over the years. I don’t enjoy it as much.