History
The Brenham Creamery Company opened for business in 1907 to purchase excess cream from local dairy farmers and sell butter to people in the Brenham, Texas, area. Beginning in 1911, the creamery began to also produce small quantities of ice cream.
By 1919, the creamery was in financial trouble and considered closing its doors. The board of directors hired E.F. Kruse, a 23-year-old former schoolteacher, to take over the company on April 1, 1919. Kruse refused to accept a salary for his first few months in the position so that the company would not be placed in further debt. Under his leadership, the company expanded its production of ice cream to the local area and soon became profitable. At his suggestion, the company was renamed Blue Bell Creameries in 1930 after the Texas Bluebell, a wildflower that is native to Texas, which, like ice cream, thrives in summer.
Until 1936, the creamery made ice cream by the batch. It could create a 10-US-gallon (38 L) batch of ice cream every 20 minutes. In 1936 the company purchased its first continuous ice cream freezer, which could make 80 US gallons (300 L) of ice cream per hour. The ice cream would run through a spigot, allowing it to be poured into any size container.
Kruse was diagnosed with cancer in 1951 and died within 8 weeks. His sons Ed and Howard took over leadership of the company. By the 1960s, the company completely abandoned the production of butter and began focusing solely on ice cream. After many years of selling ice cream only in Brenham, the company began selling in Houston, then in Dallas, and throughout most of Texas. By the end of the 1970s, sales had quadrupled, and by 1980 the creamery was producing over 10 million US gallons (38,000,000 L) of ice cream per year, earning $30 million annually.
In 1989, sales began in Oklahoma, and throughout the 1990s expansion pushed throughout the South Central and Southern United States. In 1992, Blue Bell built a new manufacturing facility in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Once Blue Bell establishes itself within a market, word-of-mouth usually ensures that consumers in adjacent areas become aware of the brand. Blue Bell has been slow to expand: company executives say they thoroughly research each new market and ensure that all employees in the new markets are fully trained in Blue Bell practices so that product quality can be upheld.
Blue Bell introduced its flagship flavor, Homemade Vanilla, in 1969 and was the first company to mass produce the flavor Cookies 'n Cream. Although the company at one time made Cookies 'n Cream from Nabisco's Oreo cookies, buying ordinary retail packages, today it bakes its own cookies. As of 1997, Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla was the best-selling single flavor of ice cream in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Blue Bell Creameries
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