Italian Ice Testimonials

Back in March, Maria and I bought a cargo trailer, hooked it up, and drove to NJ to start our new Italian Ice business! After following the Little Jimmy business for about 8 years I decided to just go for it! We bought two carts, 35 cans of ice, and enough Supplies to get started! We were excited, anxious, and nervous all at once! WELL FOLKS, in only 5 months we have added 2 additional carts and supplies ( paid for from profit made from the business),are in three malls with 4 carts, and am hoping to add one more cart before the season is over! Next season we are hoping to double our fleet!

I have long been searching for a business with little risk but huge profit that would be the answer to my retirement! IVE FOUND IT!! The potential income one can make from selling Italian ice from a small push cart is insane!! Hopefully in a couple more years Maria and I will be able to live half the year here and the other half in the Philippines, then bringing this business there with us to employ her entire family!

THANK YOU Mike Sr. and George Maglione, your wives, Mike Jr., and all of the rest of this true Italian Maglione family owned and operating business for making the best Italian Ice on the planet! Little Jimmy’s may be our brand but Maglione is the name! A family I’m proud to be a part of from now until my last breath!

– Dan Ham, NC, 2016

In starting a business, you increase your chances for success by offering something that others don’t. 5 years later, choosing Little Jimmy’s has proven to be a great decision. My area has plenty of Snow-Cones, Snow Balls, Shaved Ice and Slushies offered all over the place, but no Italian Ice so I decided to bring it to the people. It’s great not having to be inspected by Health Departments as it is a prepackaged product which is wonderful new to the ears of event organizers as I don’t require Temporary Food Establishment permits. Not having to acquire the permits also saves me money.

The Little Jimmy’s carts fit inside all doorways and on elevators making me accessible to everyone wherever they want to me to be. This has been a huge boost for business, especially when bad weather happens and events get moved in doors. Food Trucks can’t go inside, but I can. I’m often setting up inside schools in the cafeteria or close to the gym areas to get sales as people don’t want to go outside for food in bad weather.

The health benefits are a great sales driver. Parents approach and let me know their kids dietary and/or allergy restrictions and I’m often the only dessert there that their kids enjoy. The kids and parents light up like Christmas Tree’s with joy when I say it’s Dairy Free, Egg Free, Cholesterol Free, No High Fructose Corn Syrup, Fat Free, etc. Sales, Sales, Sales:)

The fitness enthusiasts love me when I say it is only 15 calories per scoop. I worked a prepaid College event in my area along side another popular dessert vendor in my area. We both were paid by the school to serve the students and it was both of our 1st time being there. 95% of the students hopped in my line and didn’t leave. It was 2 hours of straight scooping. It got so bad the event organizer stood up and announced that the other vendor was beside me with their product if anyone wanted to not wait in line and not a single person moved. Once no one moved she told the other vendor “Ok, I tried” Word spread quickly how good the product was and the kids had to have it.

There is no downside to Little Jimmy’s business model. Great Product, Great Carts with Great Service makes an excellent business opportunity.

– Jay Jones, NC, Started 2014

Hi Nancy,
So, I finally did my first event! It was a small 2 day art festival down in Coral Gables. We didn’t do very well because on both days it was unusually cold. Day 1 was in the 50s with chilly wind and day 2 was even colder in the 40s. Everyone was in their winter clothes! Despite the weather, I was surprised to find that we still had quite a few sales. Mostly kids pulling their parents over to the cart but we would have had a lot more had the weather been warmer. A lot of people were simply not in the mood due to the cold weather. Looking forward to my next event.

– Tom, Boca Raton, FL, Started 2015

We had our first event this Saturday! I unfortunately couldn’t be there because my work schedule wouldn’t allow it, but my business partner and my neighbor were able to participate. This was a 1 day event celebrating earth day this past Saturday (April 24th). We wanted to start with a 1 day event to get our feet wet and see how things would go and to see how well the ice would do. I know you guys are always getting that same old question…..will the ice melt if there isn’t a cold plate? I will be the first to say that I was one of those people. The ice did awesome! We took it out about 4 hours before the event and it scraped perfectly! I don’t know how many people across the nation are familiar with Oregon’s weather, but it rains here A lot, especially in the late winter to late spring months and Earth day wasn’t any exception.

My business partner started at 10:00 in the morning for this event. (Event was 10-7) I called around 1:30pm and she said that she had only sold 7 smalls and was really worried. I told her not to worry, the guys at Little Jimmy’s says that they (people) will come. I called again at 3:30 and didn’t get an answer. I finally got a call back a little later and was told there isn’t any time to talk, that they had lines. Unfortunately we weren’t able to get any video because there were only two of them, one scooping and one taking money. When I got to the event at 6:30 to help close up they told me that they were busy from 2:00pm until 6:00pm.

On our first event we took in $843!!! That’s about $200 an hour for the 4 hours that they were busy!!! My business partner told me that she had a ton of people walk buy saying that if it was warmer and not raining they would buy some. She told me that we will need more people to help when it get hots, because if there were lines of people in the rain waiting to buy Little Jimmy’s she can’t even imagine what it will be like when it’s summer time! We did almost a $1000 in the rain! I’m so excited!!! Our next event is on May 8th at a street fair. I’m hoping for good weather I would love to see what is going to happen on a hot day! Thanks again guys for all of your help and support.

– Blakely, Portland, Oregon

We thought our first event would be next week in San Diego, but at the last minute we were able to get into the festival on Saturday celebrating the 1st year of city hood for our home town. It was a free event with no entrance, permit, or insurance fee. There was a limited number of food vendors, with only one other vendor selling ice cones. The organizers estimated attendance would be about 1,000-2,000 people. In reality, it was more like 4,000-5,000. The festival started at 4:00, so we arrived about 2:30 to set up. We no sooner got our Little Jimmy’s banner in place when other vendors and volunteers asked if we were open for business yet. It was just the beginning of a great night. People kept coming until the fireworks began at 8:30. One lady told us our Italian Ice was even better than the one she had this past summer while in Italy. Our sales were $1,010.00, and we used a total of only 2 ½ cans of product. Giving away free samples was the key to our success. Not a bad way to start our new business!

– Mike, CA

What a day we had yesterday! The festival began at 10:00, but by 11:30 we made only 15-20 sales. Then the sun came out and the barrage of people began. We had both carts set up, but we couldn’t handle the crowd. For a period of almost 3 hours there were 40-50 people on line waiting to buy a Little Jimmy’s Ice. The line of people completely blocked access to 3-4 booths next to us. When one man tried to get in front of the line, a lady told him to get to the back, as she waited 40 minutes to purchase her Italian Ice. We wanted to do a video, but we couldn’t leave the booth. The local TV station did a shot of us with the crowd, and we’re hoping to get a copy of the footage. I was reluctant to bring the amount of product we did, but we came home with only 1 unopened can.

For next week’s Italian Festival, the organizer asked us if we want to set up a cart outside the booth on a grassy area, in the middle of a walkway that people will use to navigate thru the park. The crowd will not be as large as San Diego (140,000-150,000 people), but having 2 locations will be great. Looking forward to another big day.

– Mike, CA

Dear Little Jimmy’s Italian Ices,

I am a new dealer for Little Jimmy’s Italian Ice and worked my first event on June 27th & 28th of 2009. I wanted to let you know how pleased I am with your product, service, and most importantly, our customer satisfaction.

The event I worked was in Nashville, TN where most people are not familiar with Italian Ice, but we still served over 800 customers even though the weather was not favorable. I was amazed at how many people we had who previously lived on the East Coast who were familiar with both New Jersey Ice and Little Jimmy’s quality products. We had another Italian Ice competitor about 45 yards from us in this event, and we had customers who bought from both of us. I received several unsolicited comments that our product was far superior to the product served by our competitor. We had 2 vendors who walked all the way back to our booth in the hot sun after purchasing our competitor’s product. They asked us to throw their purchase from our competitor in our trash, and placed a replacement order with us. That blew my mind!I had fun with our customers and would always ask them to taste the product to see if they liked it before leaving our booth. All responses were overwhelmingly positive that produced huge smiles. I usually asked them if they liked it as well as ice cream, and without exception the response I received was: “Better!” I was also amazed over how many requests I had for Chocolate that I had not included in my initial order.

I could not be more pleased with the superior quality of your product. We had numerous repeat sales, especially from other vendors working the show. This allowed us to outsell the competition by a minimum of 4 to 1. Most of the time our competitor’s booth was completely empty while we still had people lined up. Quality does matter, and our experience proves people will line up for high quality foods!Thanks for such a great product and for doing such a great job!

– Jim Nobles, TN

Our event started a little slow because we had a terrible thunder storm right as the event started at 4pm. It got very busy around 7pm and stayed busy till 10pm even through the fireworks.There was a snow cone stand beside us selling for $1 and we were a little concerned, but the guy from that stand came over and said we were much more busy than he was. We did a total of $700 most of it from 7-10.There were many inquiries about us doing events and we had one woman wanting it for her son who is Autistic and is not allowed any dairy or high fructose corn syrup. We were also approached by a gentleman wanting to know if we would be interested in a kiosk on Sebastian inlet as they are building the site right now. We were all excited and considering the short hours I think we accomplished a lot. I already have two events booked, an air show in Nov. and Seafood festival in Sept. I am also following all suggestions you sent me and will keep you informed of our progress. I apologize for bad video but we forgot our camera and had to use my husbands dive camera which is hard to hold still. I will send a video from my next events.

We loved it and had a lot of fun. My husband liked it so much he is planning on quitting diving and doing Little Jimmy’s full time. His goal is 1 more yr of diving. Could you also send me your list of events in my area 60 mile radius. I will be calling you in a week about ordering more helmets and Chocolate. We had 15 requests for chocolate. Thanks so much, I know I made the right decision in starting this business.

– Carol Mahood, Florida

Good morning guys,

Yesterday was a blast, it was our first event and and we had lines before we could set up properly. The event was the National Jr. track and field try outs with all the various track clubs and teams trying to qualify to make The Bahamas Team for international competition. We fed kids, athletes, parents, spectators, the coaches who were concerned about their athletes eating syrup, the clean up and set up crews alike, and yes even rival venders. Guys, we were the envy of he event from the start. My wife and I got there at 3:00 pm and we ran until 10:30 pm., it was UNBELIEVABLE…As we were setting up, one vendor in particular was a little upset. The moment we got there, before knowing our product fully, or even coming over and investigating it, she yelled from across the area in full Bahamian Dialect, “How much ya’ll selling dem for?” We kinda of knew right a way that this vender would be watching everything. Our set up consisted of just of the two carts that we have, and the lines were consistent literally all day… and night too!! As we were selling, it rained for say 30 mins, so to get out of the rain we had to go in the concession area next to our first arch-rival, the lady from the set of the day. Our line was running though hers and even around.

Oh, as the rain ceased, they secretly told the officials to have us removed from the area which was directly adjacent to her set up. Even though we sold another product which was totally different from hers, she did not like us being there. As excited as my wife and I were, we couldn’t understand or figure out why she was being so competitive until we realized that they were selling ordinary ice cream. We had no problem moving to our original spot because the nice clean white A-Frame sign helped direct traffic to us. The free sample was working because as people tested Little Jimmy’s ice, it was like an automatic sale for us. We followed all advice given to us from your emails and took every cue from the testimonials we read from your site. It was like we were in business for years with a ton of experience. I was extremely impressed with my wife as she worked the lines mainly by herself.

Guys, on our very first event we had to replenish a full can of cherry which ran out first, followed by the blueberry. We made a total of $1,572 our very first event. Sweet!!! Thanks guys, and you we be hearing from us again shortly.

– Sean, Bahamas

Just wanted to let you all know that the girls and I went out on Saturday, Memorial Day weekend to the farmers market and set up our carts. I put the carts together so we could offer eight flavors of ice. We did extremely well, made $617 in 5 hours. We went their again this past Saturday, the crowd was not as big and we were in a different location, and we made $475 in 5 hours. So for 10 hours of work we made almost $1100!!! People loved the ice, commented about how colorful and attractive the carts were, and we sold our small 5 oz. for $3 and the large 12 oz. for $5. I bought some of my own cups for the large size as people down here don’t appear to be into the baseball caps so much, so we are saving those to work local baseball games, etc. Enjoying making lots of money in little amount of time. The first container we emptied was the Strawberry, of course I only had 1 of those! The Grape appears very strong, and have not sold much of that, but the other flavors are great. I never heard back from the racetrack, but am waiting to hear this week from the Blue Crabs Ball Stadium in our area. That is a 7 night a week happening, and I would have to buy some more carts and hire some people. Yeah baby!!!

– Patty McKinney, NC

Well, we did a couple of events a few weeks ago but the weather and locations were not that great. However, they were good practice for us to get used to setting up and getting organized. This past weekend we got a great location at the Abby Road on the River Beatles Festival. It lasted 5 days but we were only able to work the last 3. The weather was good and the crowds were great, and there were a lot of kids there. We sold about $1200 of ice at $2 for a small and $4 for the helmets. We sold out of the helmets and need to order more. Let me know how much they are and what teams we can get and how to order, etc.

I want you to know that EVERYTHING you told me, or anything I saw on your website videos was true. If we got a lull in traffic, I would have my 8 year old daughter, complete with blue lips, hold up the free sample sign and we would start getting busy again. I wish we would have started doing this more on the first 2 days, but now we know. At one point we had a line of about 25 people for 45 minutes. We ran about 75% on samplers that bought. We probably could have charged more, but we were the least expensive item there and offered the best value, which was greatly appreciated by the parents with 3 or 4 kids in tow. We also had a number of people who were there each day and some of them bought 5-6 times each day. This festival drew a lot of people from the northeast and they were very unsure about buying Italian Ice in Kentucky, but after they tasted they bought over and over. Thanks for your help, this is the perfect thing for may wife to do while school is out for the summer.

– Eric, Kentucky

I wanted to let you know about the great day we had on Saturday, May 2 at Town Day in Davidson, NC. We didn’t know what to expect since it was only our 3rd time out. It was a local event with about 5,000 people expected. What a great surprise!! We had long lines all day long – people loving the helmets and a few remembering Little Jimmy’s from NY/NJ. Parents wanted the kids to experience real Italian Ice and most would only let them buy the Yankees helmets. We even had one kid tell us it was better than ‘Ben & Jerry’s’ who has a store on the corner, about 50 feet from where we were set up.The best was that the event was scheduled from 10 to 3. At 4:00 a police officer came over and said we needed to be off the street by 4:15 because they had to open the road. When we looked around, we were the only vendor left on the street!!! What a great business, we can’t wait for this Saturday – a turtle race and triathlon event.

– Carol Bernstein, NC

Since I was a late starter last year, I did two shows. 1 was at a church fall festival and the 2nd was at the Ft.Worth Alliance Air show. Sales last year $2000.00 What I found out is that a lot of people never heard of Italian Ices. We sample the Ices and boom it was easy sales. We landed the FC Little League Baseball team for the spring/summer 2008. We figured if we do that every Saturday, I would need another cart to do other festivals or special events. So far, the promoters are pretty easy to work with, I send in a picture of the cart and I have only paid $50 for the space instead of $300 for a 10 X 10 space. Thanks for the great ideas. They will come in handy. I volunteer in my neighborhood association and school functions. I also contacted friends to let them know about my business and they have referred me to church functions, business social events. I am waiting to hear from Mayfest and Arts Festival.

– Bea Pruett, Texas

I can’t believe it is true! Everything your web site says is true. The customers who have transplanted here from the Northeast are thrilled to find “real Italian Ice” in Florida. I had 1 customer actually call her mother in N.Y. while she was on line to tell her that Ocala finally has Italian ice. And the people who have never had an ice before fall in love after we give them a sample. A win-win situation! We opened Sept. 11th and we will have to place another order in 3 to 4 weeks.Thanks for a great business!

– Bob Lloret, Florida

We had our best weekend ever this past weekend. We did the Pecan Street Festival in Austin TX with 2 carts at one location. There was some rain on Saturday, but we sold $1,200 worth. On Sunday we had lines and everyone was raving about how delicious the product was. Other vendors said we were doing great and that people were all over the festival with our cups and were talking about the Little Jimmy’s stand. We sold $1,600 the second day for a total of $2,800 for the weekend!Thanks for all your help!

– Anita Mancini, Texas

Just a note to tell you about our Labor Day. We were too late to get into the main city festival on Labor Day weekend, but we were able to go to a Mud Races side event in the afternoon. We were basically the only Ice or Refreshment type vendor there so we had a monopoly. In three hours we made over $800. Things were so crazy for a couple of hours that we had to get a second person scooping from a cooler to keep up with the line, while two others handled order taking and money changing duties. Our first two events have been very successful.Our next event is a Women’s Expo this weekend.

– Trent Armstrong, Utah

Just wanted to tell you about my event last weekend. It was the City Fair and I really didn’t know what to expect. After reading all the positive testimonials from everyone I didn’t want to mess up the streak! Well, long story short it exceeded my expectations. Over the course of the weekend I may have had a 10 minute break between customers at the most. The response was overwhelming and everyone commented on how great the ice was. Also, a few people asked where would I be opening a storefront? If business is consistent that may not be too far off! You guys have been great and Anthony was a huge assist in me passing the Health Dept. requirements for the fair. I’m also doing the City’s International Day on the 28th of this month and everyone is excited!Only complaint was I didn’t have baseball helmets for our area.Now that the fair was a success I’ve been told by the committee organizers that they want me back next year to provide more of Little Jimmy’s Italian Ice! The business you’ve provided me is the best decision I’ve made in years and I look forward to continued growth, Thank you!

– Donovan Williams, Maryland

Little Jimmy Ice Family,

I was caught off guard today at the Yard Sale Event. The Yard Sale Event was held at a local Community College. Over 2000 people in attendence. 92 degree weather – The event started at 8:30am – By 11:30 I ran out of ICE. I was not fully stocked. I had a local event the night before and I basically took the reminding ICE with 1 full 5 gallon and 2-3/4 gallon and 2- 1/4 left over ICE. This truly was a lost opportunity for me. I made $800.00 in 3 hours. (I did have someone bring 2 more 5-gallons by 12:15 pm.) The event ended at 1:30pm. This was the best turn out yet! I had a line of 20 people or more for 2 straight hours! Thanks, I believe I am on my way!

– Rhonda Waller, Maryland

Just wanted to give you a quick update on how it’s going here in DC. We had our first event this past Saturday and boy was I nervous. All week they were calling for a 60% chance of rain and I didn’t feel like I was ready. Right-click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the Internet.Anyway, we went out there and the people loved the product. The free sample sign definitely helped. There was a parade that started around 9am and as some of the people walked by I saw them point @ the sign and say that they were definitely coming back to our spot. We had our first sale around 10:30am and we had a steady flow of people all day. We ran out of Lemon, Cherry and Blueberry, but I’m sure that’s no surprise for you. The festival ended @ 4:00pm and boy was I tired. It didn’t rain all day.We still have to work out some kinks in our operation, but overall it was fun. I loved talking to the people that come over and a number of them asked if we had a fixed store location where they can get more Little Jimmy’s.We currently have 5 more events scheduled for this season with more to come. We’re also going to sell at our local Farmer’s Market.Now, down to business — Is it possible to order more shirts and visors? We need at least 3 – XL and 3 visors. It definitely helps when everyone is uniformly dressed. Also, how many ounces are in the baseball helmets? How many scoops do you normally give? We were a little heavy handed this weekend.Thank you again for all your guidance and patience.

– Wendy Pugh, Washington DC

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