Rexburg business going national
REXBURG, Idaho (KIFI)- A Rexburg business with a twist on soft serve will soon be going national.
Crispy Cones started out as a tent on the side of the road in Rexburg in 2018, says founder Jeremy Carlson.
"I had absolutely nothing. I had no money and even less experience," Carlson said. "And I opened on the side of the road and we went from a tent selling these gourmet pastries to a trailer and then from a trailer to now multiple storefronts. And we have a storefront in Logan, Utah, and here in Rexburg, Idaho."
The shop is changing how people enjoy soft-serve ice cream.
The pastries come from the Czech Republic, where Carlson served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
"We make this dough fresh every day and throughout the day, and we roll it out onto wooden dowels and we let the cones rise and then we grill the cones rotisserie style," Carlson said. "And then we put cinnamon sugar or oreo powder on top of the cones, and then we put a spread on the inside like cookie butter or Nutella, and then we fill it with soft serve, gourmet ice cream."
Carlson says the thing that keeps people coming back is every week they have a new specialty flavor.
"We have an ever-changing menu of different specialty flavors every week, and so people are allowed to come and get their cones and decide how they want to fill it. What specialty flavor, or if they just want gourmet chocolate or vanilla, we have that option," Carlson said.
The new Rexburg location will have its grand opening on Feb. 18, and Carlson says people are excited about it.
"Just this year alone, we received a ton of emails, a ton of investor emails who want to push this company forward into states like Arizona, Washington, Oregon, and so they want to franchise it," Carlson said. "So we've set up our company to be franchise viable by March 1 and by March 1, they should be able to apply on our website and run through interviews. And so we yeah, we have roughly 24 different people who are ready to buy in a franchise and claim a territory and grow it."
Carlson says the journey has been humbling.
"The journey of being in a tent in Rexburg, you're holding down the tent during the windstorms. And that was a very humbling beginning," Carlson said. "So that was a hard year. And then the next year we were in a trailer and were able to grow quite a bit out of that. But then the year after that, we hit the pandemic and we thought we were going to lose everything as a business and we thought we should shut down. What should we do? Of course, like other businesses, we decided to push through it and to keep going, keep selling cones, keep selling ice cream, keep selling our pastries."
Carlson says they did better during the pandemic than previous years.
"Even though BYU-I was out for school that year, we did better that year than the year previous. And so we've been really blessed that every year we keep doing better and sales keep going up and we've just focused on our marketing. We've focused on social media. We really focused on our target audience and we were able to reach them. So we were able to conquer the days of being in a tent and the days of being in a trailer and those humbling beginnings and the days of going through a pandemic to now multiple storefronts and in the future, multiple franchises."
And they're proud to call Idaho home.
"I love Idaho. I love that we were born here as a company in Rexburg, Idaho," Carlson said. "A lot of people say you can't really start a business in Rexburg because businesses go out pretty fast and things happen. And we're lucky to be able to prove that kind of thought wrong. And we're lucky to be here. I want people to see our company's story as a company that literally started from nothing. You don't need a lot of money to start your business. And we were able to grow it now to multiple states and storefronts. So anything is possible even in Rexburg, Idaho, and we're proud to be from Rexburg as a company."
Crispy Cones is located at 163 W Main Street Suite 102 in Rexburg.
