HOW WE GOT HERE

In 1948, a boy called John Ritter had an after-school job working at a local ice cream shop in Chicago, Illinois. John’s absolutely favorite perk of this job was getting to sample the ice cream when it was fresh out of the machine – before it had been packed and frozen solid like the ice cream sold in most stores today.

The deliciousness of this ice cream – it was SO smooth and creamy – stayed with John until long after he was all grown up. In the meantime, he met and married his wife, Bonny, and together, they built a life in Chicago and raised a family.

The decades went by – four of them. Finally, John was about to retire from a long career as a film animator, when one of his sons said to him, “Dad, come on. Every time we’ve ever stopped at an ice cream shop, you’ve said you’d like to own one. You can’t retire yet! This is your chance.”

That conversation was a game-changer. Soon after, John decided to open a genuine, old-fashioned ice cream shoppe that would serve super-premium ice cream, made fresh all-day long. Most importantly? It would taste just like the ice cream from his after-school job had tasted right after it came out of the machine.

To find the perfect recipe for this, John and Bonny traveled all around the country to learn about making ice cream. And the more they tasted and saw, the more they became excited about an ultra-premium ice cream product called “frozen custard,” created using a recipe developed in France over a century ago.

The rest, as they say, is history! John and Bonnie opened the first Ritter’s Frozen Custard shoppe in Franklin, Indiana, in 1989, and today, Ritter’s Frozen Custard is headquartered in New York, with shoppes all across the Midwest, Florida, and Texas.