As the Easter season fast approaches, the recent roll-out of a new bun and cheese ice cream from Scoops Unlimited, makers of the world-famous Devon House ice cream, is set to add to its growing bottom line.

Making its debut on Sunday, March 24, the product, which has already started to create waves in the local market, comes as an innovation from its research and development (R&D) department largely inspired by the Lenten season during which Jamaicans traditionally indulge in the consumption of above-normal levels of bun and cheese.

“We constantly bring on new flavours as we test the market to see what consumers will gravitate to. We may bring it on as a [permanent] flavour if it takes off and the demand keeps up. Otherwise, it will come as one of those seasonal flavours,” marketing manager for Scoops David Radlein told the Jamaica Observer on Tuesday.

The new flavour, which fuses actual cuts of local bun and cheese with milked cream, Radlein said, also came as another of its season-inspired flavours, similar to mango in summer and sorrel in Christmas.

Fired up by the market response to the product over the last few days, CEO of Scoops Matthew Clarke said that the company is now hoping to capitalise on the unusual nature of the new flavour.

“Based on what we are seeing, there is certainly a lot of buzz around the product and with Easter already coming in as one of our high selling seasons for ice cream generally, I think it will add, even if not as much as we would think, to overall revenues. I also definitely believe a few more customers will be drawn to our stores as people come to try out the unusualness of this new flavour,” he shared during a telephone interview with the Business Observer yesterday.

Scoops is a family-owned business founded by the Clarkes, also the owners and operators of its subsidiary Caribbean Cream Limited which trades as Kremi in the market. Scoops pushes its products to market through a growing network of stores, chief among which is the Devon House flagship branch, along with a number of third-party distributors, and from its fleet of mobile units which drives around parts of the island.

A privately held business — unlike Kremi, which is publicly listed on the junior market of the Jamaica Stock Exchange — Scoops has continued to grow revenues year-on-year. Tight-lipped about the level of this growth, however, Clarke would only say the business has witnessed tremendous growth over the years.

“Sales have so far been going great and our numbers are better than they’ve ever been as we’re selling more ice cream now than we’ve ever done in the past, and we continue to grow our earnings annually,” he said.

Pushing to retail its products in the near future, Clarke said the outlook is for the company to continue on a positive growth trajectory.

“One of the things we should have, coming up relatively soon, is that we’ll be making our entry into the modern trade in terms of having pre-packaged products in supermarkets and that’s something we’ll be trying to roll-out within the next couple of months, along with a number of other things we are looking forward to,” Clarke said to the Business Observer.

“I think there is considerable room for growth and we’re going to do our best to fill the need that exists,” he added.