Buy Nice or Buy Twice…

Ifraz Iqubal and his brother chose their new location in a residential area of Luton as there was little else around and their new concept could easily become the captive heart of the community. This approach may not be the obvious choice for most operators as people tend to usually look for busy high street locations thinking they’ll have the most custom. Opening close to where people live, makes Dessert Island accessible to everyone, attracting customer throughout the day from the ‘coffee clientele’, to children on their way home from school, right through to teenagers and families socialising in the evenings.

When it came time to deciding on the equipment they would need for their parlour, Ifraz found Taylor UK, one of the UK’s leading suppliers of specialist catering equipment to dessert parlours. A meeting was arranged with Paul Richards, their local sales adviser, where they discussed the plans which they had for Dessert Island. Paul advised that ice cream blended thick shakes using a Taylor soft serve machine would be a great addition to their concept – using soft ice cream as a base, they would be able to make endless combinations of shakes blending sweets, cookies, chocolate bars into the soft ice cream which is dispensed on demand from the stand alone soft serve freezer.

Ifraz and his brother were completely sold on the blended shakes idea, however with costs adding up they decided to take the idea and opted to buy a cheaper, inferior machine from China with limited warranty and support which was less than half the price of the Taylor machine.

Taylor C708 Soft Serve Freezer

Dessert Island opened in the spring of 2015. On the opening day, the cheap Chinese soft serve machine couldn’t keep up with the demand, being unable to produce ice cream in the quantity and quality which they needed to produce their shakes. This led to slower production times for the staff members and longer waiting times for their customers. Not a great situation when the idea was supposed to speed up the process…

Lesson – You get what you pay for…

The investment had been made and they decided to persevere with the Chinese machine until they could save up enough money to buy the Taylor C708 soft serve machine which Paul originally advised was the tool they needed for the job. Saving up took a few months, over these months the Chinese machine had a number mechanical issues, consistently under-performed and produced an inferior soft ice cream.

Ifraz commented; “We were under a tight budget when we opened so the cheaper machine fitted our financial situation at the time. This has turned out to be a false economy as the old machine is now sitting in my garage at home, redundant”. He continued “The Taylor C708 has been amazing for the business. It never lets us down, producing great ice cream for our shakes. The service from Taylor UK is great, we recently had it serviced by one of their engineers who are always helpful and explain things in great detail”.

Dessert Island’s Taylor C708 high volume, 14 day clean soft serve freezer was installed in September 2015. Dessert Island have never looked back…

The Taylor C708 can produce over 51 litres of soft ice cream every hour which is the highest output of any single flavour soft ice cream machine in the UK market. It uses a pump system to control mix/air ratio from the hopper to the freezing barrel, this ensures high output whilst adding the correct level of overrun (air) needed for the product. The C708 is part of Taylor heat treatment range meaning that it only required strip-down-cleaning once every fourteen days, this reduces wastage and cuts labour times on cleaning.

Following the success of Dessert Island in Luton, Ifraz and his brother have opened a second store in Bedford where another C708 installed right from the start along with a ISA Millennium 24 gelato display. The new store is going from strength to strength with another store planned for Milton Keynes in the close future…

Why don’t you visit Dessert Island for yourself and try one of their amazing desserts and shakes, they can be found at:

Dessert Island, 229 Biscott Road, Luton, LU3 1AR

Website: www.dessert-island.co.uk

For more information on Taylor Soft Serve Machines

call the Taylor UK Sales Office FREE – 0800 838 896

or fill in the enquiry form and we’ll call you back.