History
Marble Slab, which began as a single unit operation called Cones & Cream, was founded in Houston by chefs Penn and LaPage in 1983. They were inspired by Steve Herrel of Herrell’s Ice Cream in Boston, who pioneered the mixin approach to ice cream toppings. In 1986, Marble Slab became the first ice cream treatery to use a frozen granite slab to blend mix-in toppings into the ice cream. Later that year, Marble Slab was bought by Ronnie Hankamer of Texas, who laid the groundwork for the brand's franchising concept.
In the past few years, Marble Slab has expanded beyond its southeastern presence and has become a fast-growing franchise. In 2007 it was ranked in Entrepreneur Magazine's Franchise 500 (#93), Fastest-Growing Franchises (#72), and America's Top Global Franchises (#75).
Read more about this topic: Marble Slab Creamery
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)