Question

If you trace Blue Bell Ice Cream life cycle, what is the following: Where did the product originate/company history? What resources go into its design and manufacture? How is it transported, sold, used, disposed of? Analyze the economic, environmental, and ethical costs and benefits of this product

Answer 1

Where did the product originate/company history?

Blue Bell Creameries is an American food company that manufactures Blue Bell Ice Cream. It was founded (Originated) in 1907 in Brenham, Texas. For much of its early history, the company manufactured both ice cream and butter locally. In the mid-20th century, it abandoned butter production and expanded to the entire state of Texas and soon much of the Southern United States. The company's corporate headquarters are located at the "Little Creamery" in Brenham, Texas. Since 1919, it has been in the hands of the Kruse family. Despite being sold in a limited number of states, as of 2015 Blue Bell is the fourth highest-selling ice cream brand in the United States as a whole.

The parent company was Brenham Creamery Company, which opened in 1907 to purchase excess cream from local dairy farmers and sell butter to people in Brenham, Texas, a town situated approximately 70 miles northwest of Houston. In 1911, the creamery began to produce small quantities of ice cream also.

By the year 1919, the Creamery was in financial trouble and considered closing its doors. The board of directors hired E.F. Kruse, a 23-year-old former schoolteacher, to take over the company on April 1, 1919. Kruse refused to accept a salary for his first few months in the position so that the company would not be placed in further debt. Under his leadership, the company expanded its production of ice cream to the surrounding Brenham area and soon became profitable. At his suggestion, the company was renamed Blue Bell Creameries in 1930 after the Texas Bluebell, a wildflower native to Texas, and which like ice cream thrives during the summer.

Until 1936, the creamery made ice cream by the batch. It could create a 10-US-gallon (38 Liters) batch of ice cream every 20 minutes. That same year, in 1936, the company purchased its first continuous ice cream freezer, which could make 80 US gallons (300 Liters) of ice cream per hour. The ice cream would run through a spigot, allowing it to be poured into any size container.

Kruse was diagnosed with cancer in 1951 and died within 8 weeks. After him his sons Ed and Howard took over leadership of the company. By the 1960s, the company completely abandoned the production of butter and began focusing solely on ice cream. After many years of selling ice cream only in Brenham, the company began selling its ice cream in the Houston area, eventually expanding throughout most of Texas including the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex and the state capital of Austin. By the end of the 1970s, sales had quadrupled, and by 1980 the creamery was producing over 10 million gallons (37,850,000 liters) of ice cream per year, earning $30 million annually.

In 1989, Blue Bell began selling its ice cream in Oklahoma, and throughout the 1990s expansion pushed throughout the South Central and Southern United States, eventually expanding out to New Orleans and Jackson, Mississippi. In 1992, Blue Bell built a new manufacturing facility in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. In 1996, Blue Bell opened a third manufacturing facility in Sylacauga, Alabama, east of Birmingham, and eventually expanded into Atlanta and Miami. Once Blue Bell establishes itself within a market, word-of-mouth usually ensures that consumers in adjacent areas become aware of the brand.

In 2015, Blue Bell issued a series of recalls that eventually shut down production and led to all of its products being recalled on April 20, culminating in job cuts and furloughs (as well as the reduction of its 23-state sales territory) resulting from the shutdown the following May. In conjunction with factory cleanup procedures and agreements with state and federal authorities, the company returned to production three months later on a limited basis, returning its products to the market on August 31 in portions of Texas and Alabama as part of a five-phase plan to return to much of its pre-recall distribution territory, which has been reduced to 20 states based on Blue Bell's limited distribution capabilities in the near term.

What resources go into its design and manufacture?

As of 2015, the company operated three manufacturing facilities, with the largest facility in Brenham, and auxiliary facilities in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and Sylacauga, Alabama. Before the 2015 recalls, there were 50 sales and distribution centers, known as branches, spread throughout its 23-state market. These facilities employed a combined 2,800 employees, with 850 of the employees working out of Brenham. In 2006, annual sales exceeded $400 million.

Blue Bell retains control over all aspects of its business, primarily to ensure quality control and the use of the freshest ingredients available. The Kruses claim "the milk we use is so fresh it was grass only yesterday." The company uses milk from approximately 60,000 cows each day, and the cream used during each day's production run is always less than 24 hours old. All production and packaging takes place within Blue Bell facilities, which are able to produce over 100 pints per minute. Drivers of delivery vehicles personally stock store shelves so they can ensure it is handled properly.

Blue Bell produces over 250 different frozen products. Of these, 66 are flavors of ice cream. Twenty of the flavors are offered year-round, while an additional two to three dozen are offered seasonally. In addition to ice cream, the company produces frozen yogurt, sherbet, and an array of frozen treats on a stick. Unlike competitors which have reduced their standard containers to 48-56 fluid ounces (1.42-1.66 L), Blue Bell continues to sell true half-gallon (64 fl oz/1.89 L) containers, a fact it mentions prominently in its advertising.

Blue Bell introduced its flagship flavor, Homemade Vanilla, in 1969 and was the first company to mass-produce the flavor Cookies 'n Cream. Although the company at one time made Cookies 'n Cream from Nabisco's Oreo cookies, buying ordinary retail packages, today it bakes its own cookies.

Occasionally, when Blue Bell enters a market the company marks the occasion with the introduction of a regional flavor within that market. For example, when it entered Colorado on March 14, 2011, Blue Bell introduced a new flavor exclusive to Colorado, Rocky Mountain Road, made with more premium ingredients (including chocolate-covered nuts and a marshmallow swirl) compared to its year-round Rocky Road.

How is it transported, sold, used, disposed of?

Blue Bell Ice Cream is the third best selling ice cream in America. With its sales region stretching from Arizona up to Kansas City, across to Charlotte, North Carolina, and extending to everything south of that boundary, the 101 year-old company has a lot of ground to cover. In order to do so efficiently, Blue Bell Creameries is committed to evaluating its day-to-day operations.

Zebra Technologies has provided Blue Bell Creameries with a complete solution that enhances the company's operational efficiency while maintaining the all-important ease-of-use ideal. Drivers use Zebra's RW 420™ mobile printers, equipped with updated software and Bluetooth® connectivity technology, while Blue Bell's four production facilities and several of its distribution facilities are outfitted with Zebra Z4Mplus™ industrial/commercial printers. Drivers process transactions via their mobile printers. The Zebra Z4Mplus processes print requests throughout the facilities, thereby improving processes for receiving, identifying and tracking incoming goods.

The RW 420 is an essential tool for drivers and makes it easy for them to load media quickly while servicing their routes. As Gaskamp points out, "A printer is a key part of the driver's life. He prints invoices in every store he enters. At the end of the day when he returns, he will print his load sheets, along with a recap of every sale made that day. During the day, he also can print out a list of inventory left on his truck at any given time. This is what makes the RW 420 printer so important. It facilitates many of the duties that a driver has to do every day. Its Bluetooth capability allows the driver to do his work quickly and efficiently, without repeated trips back and forth between stores and truck."

Zebra customised the mobile printers to meet Blue Bell Creameries' needs. Printers have been outfitted with the Blue Bell logo, as well as a special vehicle mount inside the delivery trucks.

Blue Bell has used Emtec’s ClearCARE hosting and database administration services now for more than 10 years. The consulting firm’s comprehensive hosting and managed services have been bundled with service level commitments throughout the contract.

Blue Bell also has expanded the contract into application functional and development support as needed.

Gemini for OPM has increased Blue Bell’s overall operational efficiency by automating data collection, resulting in improved production lot control and traceability throughout the company’s primary high-volume production and distribution center in Texas.

With Gemini, Blue Bell is now capturing data from more than 2,000 SKUs of raw, intermediate and finished goods with the use of handheld radio-frequency (RF) scanners that record key transactions, such as receiving, inventory movements and returns, in real time on the plant floor. The new Gemini-driven procedure has significantly increased data quality and visibility, and can process transactions in seconds instead of the minutes that previous manual methods required.

ClearOrbit’s real-time supply chain execution and returns management solutions improve the speed, visibility, and control of extended manufacturing and distribution supply chains. Since 1994, Austin, TX-based ClearOrbit has assisted more than 275 clients in automating and controlling process execution within their extended supply networks. ClearOrbit delivers on the promise of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems such as those provided by SAP and Oracle with fully integrated bar code label management & printing, mobile applications, collaboration and returns management solutions that address “last mile functionality” issues while complementing the existing infrastructure. ClearOrbit customers include market leaders such as Alcoa, Canon, Cisco, GE and Motorola.

Blue Bell employees use RFgen to receive ingredient inputs from vendors on the load docks using handheld barcode scanners. They can quickly scan information from purchase orders, enabling them to work more productively and improve information accuracy. On the inventory and production side of the house, the scanners are used to do cycle counts, keep accurate inventory in real-time and keep track of the inputs going into batches of products.

Blue Bell has been slow to expand, company executives say they thoroughly research each new market and ensure that all employees in the new markets are fully trained in Blue Bell practices so that product quality can be upheld. Blue Bell often tends to expand to markets during March each year, expanding to Colorado on March 14, 2011, followed by the Richmond and Hampton Roads areas of Virginia in 2013, and Las Vegas in 2014. These expansions are accompanied with the purchase and/or construction of distribution centers in new markets that serve areas within a 75-mile radius.

Analyze the economic, environmental, and ethical costs and benefits of this product?

Economic benefits of blue bell:

• Is widely accepted as freshly prepared from best ingredients.
• Has lesser market coverage against other competitors (only 20% market coverage against 86% by others)

Environmental benefits:

• Produced from fresh cow milk of over 60,000 cattle
• Healthy food products served to a wide stretch of the country.
• Providing local employment.

Ethical cost:

• Blue Bell after the outbreak and recall, is still in business. Yes the closure of multiple locations was incredibly costly. Yes they likely lost market share to other brands. Yes, some customers might have concerns about the quality of the product moving forward. But, when it’s all said and done, taking the ethical high road (perhaps something they could have done sooner), has numerous advantages.