Shop in Plaza del Mar keeps a mom-and-pop flavor even with owners as guardians of booming industry
Rich and Heather Draper sample their product from behind the counter of the Ice Cream Club shop in Manalapan's Plaza del Mar. Rich opened the store in 1982, and Heather is financial director. Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By John Pacenti
It’s been happening now for nearly five decades. Customers come from all over to the Ice Cream Club in Manalapan’s Plaza del Mar.
Why??? Have you tasted the ice cream?
“I love it,” said Sammilia Wells, a home health care provider who had been introduced to the store from a client on Palm Beach.
“And even though she passed on, I still would take my husband, my kids, and would try to introduce them, because it’s just really good ice cream,” she said.
Adam and Donna Goldstein got a taste of the Ice Cream Club’s offering at the Palm Beach Food and Wine Festival in December and just had to have more. Adam is an ice cream aficionado and even went on an ice cream diet (he swears he lost weight).
“I love that it’s a mom-and-pop space, and they started years ago and they’re still here,” Donna Goldstein said.
The storefront that Rich Draper started in 1982 with two buddies turned into an ice cream wholesaler with a plant in Boynton Beach that supplies independent shops throughout the eastern seaboard and the Bahamas. You won’t find Ice Cream Club at your local grocery store. You have to find a boutique parlor that carries it.
“We made ice cream in the store for the first, I don’t know, seven or eight years,” Draper said. “It was in the back of the store and people would come in, you know, from different parts of the country.”
Heather Draper, his spouse of 18 years, is a former regional bank president who is the Ice Cream Club’s financial director. If you don’t appreciate ice cream, you will after talking to Heather.
A town institution
“It’s not just getting the ice cream, it’s an experience,” she said outside of the Manalapan store on a sunny afternoon. “I have so many people telling me about how they came here with their grandparents or their parents. There’s a lot of good stories behind it.”
The Ice Cream Club is renowned for its flavor profiles (more than 125), plus hard-packed yogurts, no-sugar or non-dairy desserts, and soft serve. The store has the flavor Garbage Can with seven different brand name candy bars, but also Butterscotch Bomb that keeps up with it, Blueberry Cheesecake and Harry’s Brew (with a wizardly treat). And the classics, of course, the velvety chocolate and the buttery vanilla.
The ice cream is made in a plant in Boynton Beach.
The Ice Cream Club couldn’t be in a better place. The store was the first to inhabit the Plaza del Mar shopping center in 1982. It is across the road from the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa and nestled in a sweet spot for people who live along State Road A1A in several municipalities.
When the store opened, it was across from the Eau’s predecessor, the private La Coquille Club. The members were some of the first dedicated customers.
The backstory
Rich Draper grew up in Springfield, Illinois, went to college in Champaign and migrated to Chicago — but as a young man he wanted to get down to the Sunbelt. He made $12,000 on a real estate commission and that was the seed money for the Ice Cream Club’s shop.
He opened the store with Tom Jackson and Mike Scott, the latter a friend he had known since kindergarten. Both are still with the company. Jackson is senior vice president and Scott is vice president.
The three amigos did find trouble getting ice cream to stock in the store. Then Rich Draper went to a restaurant show in Chicago and met a guy selling ice cream makers and the rest is history.
Members of La Coquille Club, down from the Northeast on vacation, would tell Draper about ice creams they enjoyed. “So we just tried a lot of different flavors,” he said.
A scoop on the business
Heather Draper said ice cream is a pretty good business, proving to be “recession-proof, Amazon-proof and pandemic-proof.”
The store can offer more than 100 flavors, whether you buy a 3-gallon bucket or a sugar cone with sprinkles.
“Overall, with the cost of everything today, it’s still an inexpensive treat. And so you see people yearn for that experience,” she said. “We’re providing them with a unique product, they can’t get anywhere else.”
And it’s not just the business proper into which the Drapers put their effort. Food safety is a big priority. They are on multiple committees, helped develop websites, and do all sorts of speaking engagements on the subject.
“Food safety is job number one, right?” Rich Draper said. “It’s the foundation. Everything else is nothing without that.”
The Ice Cream Club is involved in www.safeicecream.org, a group of industry and education experts that was brought together by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.
“These smaller companies, mom and pops, they don’t have a team of 75 people in quality control,” Heather Draper said. “How do we make food safety pre-competitive? How do we give them every tool to be physically compliant and to make sure it’s safe for their customers to do it?”
And helping these boutique ice cream shops succeed is seen as a winning strategy for the wholesaler. It comes as a service when the clients sign up to buy the ice cream.
“We help them with store layout, help them with equipment selection, training, we do all these things just to help them get started,” Rich Draper said.
He also stressed that the company values its employees, now up to 70 with an average tenure of 23 years. He said many are “diamonds in the rough.”
“Maybe young men and women that hadn’t really had a good start in life, but end up being like super smart and can do a lot of great things,” he said. “And we’ve seen them come along. You’ll see someone be able to buy their first house for their family.”
Lantana residents (l-r) Joe Sweat and his wife, Vell Sweat, share a banana split with Keri Sweat, Joe’s sister, at the Ice Cream Club in Manalapan.
Boynton plant churns on
The Ice Cream Club’s 18,000-square-foot plant is in Boynton Beach and it has a storage and distribution facility, opened in 2021, in Riviera Beach that holds up to 1,000 pallets of ice cream.
The Drapers, who live in Palm Beach, often drop in at the Manalapan store just to people-watch. They observe the grandparents or the parents come in with their kids, watching them get excited, and talking about what flavors they are going to get.
“This is probably their only outing of the day, if not the week, but they’ve chosen to come to us and relax,” Rich Draper said.
“We take a lot of pride that we’re bringing joy.”
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