Buy Rite Ice Cream
When Eileen Rinaldi started Ritual Coffee in our Mission neighborhood in 2005, she started a movement: to remove the anonymity of their coffee growers and celebrate their attention to quality and craft. Which is one of the reasons why the dynamic, complex Ritual Sweet Tooth single origin espresso has exclusively been featured in our Coffee Toffee ice cream since the beginning.
Your ice cream looks amazing! Even though we could go, living not far from SF, it's still nice to know I could make it at home and pick another flavor when I visit the shop! In fact, I am currently dying for the Toffee Sundae. Yum!
Bi-Rite Creamery is an independent ice cream shop located across the street from Bi-Rite Market, near Dolores Park. Its ice cream is made from milk from the Straus Family Creamery, which produces kosher organic dairy. Bi-Rite Creamery has at one point sold a flavor made with coffee from Ritual Coffee Roasters.
Thrifty Ice Cream counters located within Rite Aid stores sell hand-scooped ice cream in single-, double- or triple-scoop servings on sugar, cake, or waffle cones. The ice cream also comes pre-packaged in 1.75-quart (56 oz) "sqrounder" cartons ("kind of square, kind of round")[33] and 1-pint cartons. Thrifty traditionally sold packaged ice cream by the half gallon in simple, waxed-paper boxes formed by folding interlocking flaps; these distinctive brick-like boxes were phased out in early 2008.[33][34]
Like most early-twentieth-century drug stores featuring an in-store grill and soda fountain, Thrifty initially purchased ice cream from local suppliers. However, as Thrifty constantly opened new stores and expanded rapidly throughout Los Angeles, it became increasingly difficult to secure a steady supply of high-quality ice cream at a low price. To meet the demand created by their new stores, the Boruns decided in 1940 to produce their own ice cream by purchasing Borden Ice Cream Company's existing Hollywood factory for $250,000.[35][36]
Thrifty ice cream has won numerous gold medals at the Los Angeles County Fair and California State Fair since 1948. Reporting on Thrifty's thirteenth consecutive gold at both fairs in 1961, the Torrance Herald explained that ice cream at these "two widely acclaimed competitions" is judged on flavor, body, texture, sanitation, color, and packaging.[40] Thrifty has won gold medals at the L.A. County Fair every year since 1952.[36][41][42][43][44] In 1988, Thrifty ice cream received a total of 24 gold medals at the L.A. County Fair, more than any other competitor.[36][45]
For many decades, Thrifty Drug Stores was using the extremely low price that it was charging customers for a single scoop of ice cream that was usually eaten inside the store as a loss leader to entice those customers to bring their entire families into the store on a regular basis to eat ice cream that was sold at or below cost while those same customers browse the aisle (while eating) and usually find other items to purchase before leaving the store.[47]
Since 1995, Bon Suisse, a Poway, California-based company, has held an exclusive license to use the Thrifty brand name and sells 800,000 gallons of Thrifty ice cream in the Southwest US, Mexico, Latin America, and the Middle East.[55] In May 2018, Bon Suisse bought close to 800,000 gallons of Thrifty ice cream a year to redistribute through restaurants, hotels, ice cream dipping stations, grocery stores and a few prisons located in California, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.[53]
In May 2014, Helados Thrifty, the licensed purveyor in Mexico, had 184 locations[56] in the northern and central Mexican states of Baja California, Baja California Sur, Sonora, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Colima, Nayarit, and the State of Mexico.[57] There are plans to expand throughout Mexico via the sale of additional franchises. All Thrifty ice cream sold in Mexico is produced by the El Monte, California, plant.
In October 2015, Walgreens announced that it will acquire Rite Aid, but said that it had not