History
Stewart's has always been a business of the Dake family, which traces the chain's origins to Percy and Charles V. Dake making Dake's Delicious Ice Cream beginning in 1921 at the family farm in Greenfield, New York.
Fourteen years later, the brothers started Saratoga Dairy in an old barn in Saratoga Springs. This move occurred in the same year that New York began requiring all milk to be pasteurized. Without this new local plant available, many local dairy farmers would have had to go out of business, and they were grateful vendors.
In 1938 they expanded into the city's old water works, and then went into making cheese, powdered whey and casein two years afterward, following another new property purchase, this time in Greenfield. That and the milk this plant produced were sold all over the Northeast, as far south as Maryland.
As the war ended, the brothers bought an ice cream production facility in Ballston Spa from Donald Stewart. Charles S. Dake, newly discharged from the military and looking for something to do, decided to start selling Stewart's Ice Cream to the public fresh off the line. This is considered to be the first Stewart's Shop.
Two others quickly followed, in Saratoga Springs and South Glens Falls. They were popular since ice cream and other sweet foods had been tightly rationed during the war. In 1948 the company introduced the folding paper ice cream carton so customers could bring home fresh ice cream more cheaply. The more notable innovation of the year, however, came from the younger Charles Dake's wife Phyllis, who suggested allowing people to make their own sundaes from a choice of toppings, a practice which continues today and has been widely imitated. The company's Philly Vanilla ice cream was named in her honor.
Saratoga Dairy and Stewart's Ice Cream were formally incorporated with the state in 1950, and ice cream production was moved back to the Greenfield facility, which could handle the increased demand. By 1955 there were over 50 Stewart's Shops.
1957 saw a regulatory battle between the companies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the right to sell the company's own milk in its own stores. It was resolved in Stewart's favor, and as a result of this vertical integration, retail milk prices in the stores dropped by 25%.
The younger Dake took over the company from his uncle in 1959 and the following year brought his brother William in. The holder of a graduate degree in engineering from Cornell University, William was able to solve some production problems at the dairy, and as a result it began running at a profit. Over the course of the 1960s, the new Dake brothers turned the company into one of the East's largest private dairies.
Charles died of cancer in 1978, leaving William to carry on the business for six years until his son Gary could join the company. A decade later, the company built a new dairy facility and bought the Bonfare chain, adding 40 stores at a single stroke. In the late 1990s, it began aggressively expanding out of its base in the Saratoga area, pushing south into the mid-Hudson Valley for the first time.
William retired to become chairman of the board in 2003, and Gary became president of the company.
Read more about this topic: Stewart's Shops
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