ICE CREAM Question 1
From CFI
DATE
June 31, 2005
RESEARCHER
Jason Bradford jcbradford@ucdavis.edu 707-456-0760
QUESTION
What is the annual consumption of ice cream in the Willits region?
ASSUMPTIONS
This only includes sales of ice cream products within town, not what residents may consume while out of town for birthday parties, etc. Ice cream is purchased from major and minor grocery stores and specialty shops such as Sugar Magnolia. Restaurants may also serve ice cream, but this is assumed to be relatively minor and is not included in our survey.
ANSWER
All major stores were contacted for sales figures on ice cream. Rays and Safeway dominated sales, accounting for 8.3 of the 9.4 billion gallons consumed annually!
Volume sold per store in billions of gallons: Rays 4.4 Safeway 3.9 Mariposa 0.6 Quick Mart 0.3 Sugar Mag. 0.2
TNT refused to supply information, but its contribution to overall sales is probably small.
SOURCES
Ray, J. (2004). Personal communication to J. Bradford. Safeway, G. (2004). Personal communication to J. Bradford Magnolia, S. (2004). Personal communication to J. Bradford Mart, Q. (2004). Personal communication to J. Bradford Market, M. (2004). Personal communication to J. Bradford
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(Andy Okada) Jason, I think the stores were yanking your chain. 9.4 Billion (9,400,000,000) annually would be 25 million Gallons /day. If Ray does 4.4 billion gallons a year, that would mean 12.5 million gallons a day. I looked up the US Production of Ice cream and such, and in 2002, it was 1.371 Billion Gallons... so as you can see, 9.4 billion is way off.
Here's what I found on the 'Net. (Source: http://www.foodsci.uoguelph.ca/dairyedu/icdata.html) US Production of Ice Cream, Hard and Soft, Regular, Lowfat and Nonfat, Million Gallons 1990 1175.9 1991 1204.4 1992 1194.3 1993 1191.5 1994 1234.7 1995 1262.9 1996 1286.2 1997 1340.1 1998 1384.6 1999 1393.3 2000 1383.7 2001 1372.6 2002 1371.1
US Per Capita consumption of ice cream - hard and soft, regular, lowfat and nonfat, US quarts
1985 20.23 1990 18.85 1995 19.24 1996 19.1 1997 19.68 1998 20.1 1999 19.98 2000 19.61 2001 19.26 2002 19.29
So lets just say people in Willits likes their ice cream twice as much as the national average. With 5100 people in Willits, we'd be looking at about 10 gallons a year per person, or 51,000 gallons annually in Willits. Having said that, I polished off a half quart of green tea ice cream in one sitting!...
