Simply Scoops

“My name is Alicia Brownell and my business is Simply Scoops. It all started in the spring of 2023. I love ice cream and I lived in Hays, KS for a long time— Dairy Queen was a couple blocks down [the road] so my husband and I got ice cream a lot. When I moved to Clay Center, KS there was no place to get ice cream so we went to Clyde, KS to Big City Scoops every weekend. We thought that [the drive] was stupid so we figured ‘why don't we just open our own ice cream shop?’ We started looking and we got a retail license for food because we were going to be a food establishment.

We did lots of online research. We had to find a company that makes ice cream that is willing to wholesale it for distribution. [We use] The Ice Cream Factory out of Missouri. They are a young couple who started right before COVID. I liked that it was just a young couple because it is similar to [my husband] Josh and I. I was trying to come up with different business names so I asked the kids in my class and they helped me narrow it down to Simply Scoops.

There are a lot of empty buildings in Clay Center, or should I say they appear empty, but they are owned by people. We didn’t want to get a loan, we just wanted to do it on our own. By the time we gave up, Michael, my brother-in-law, was using a building for his business and decided that he didn’t need it anymore. He told us to talk to the owners so we could take over, and that’s what we did. I love the location. I love that it's so close to the Courthouse Square because that's where we do all of our community events. I do wish it was bigger so we could have indoor seating.

Facebook is a big advertisement for us; we need to be better at that. During the summer, we posted because we were open every day, but now we are just open on the weekends so it's a little bit harder. Garfield [Elementary] gives out coupons [to Simply Scoops] for kids being leaders. They post that on Facebook and the people who follow Garfield's Facebook see that the child gets the ticket. Obviously the families are going to bring them in to get ice cream.

Friday nights typically are our busiest nights because people come after Football and Basketball games to get ice cream. Then during the summer it turned into Saturday nights being the busiest. We will sometimes have lines out the door.”