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Fructose is the endurance sweetener

Check out this great article on fructose:
The farther you have to go, the more you’ll want to consider pure crystalline fructose. Because fructose, compared to glucose, helps the energy store in the muscles last longer.

Endurance and Muscle Glycogen. Carbohydrates stored in the body’s muscles are referred to as muscle glycogen. The more muscle glycogen available during sustained exercise, the greater the potential for improved endurance.

Sugars and Glycogen Storage. The various sugars have different effects on muscle glycogen depletion rates. Glucose, for example, provides a quick spurt of energy, but also triggers the release of insulin. This actually increases the depletion of muscle glycogen and also suppresses the conversion of fat to energy.

Fructose and Glycogen Storage. Taking fructose before exercise, compared to glucose, results in a much lower rate of muscle glycogen depletion. Because fructose does not cause a rapid rise in either blood sugar or insulin. It provides a steadier supply of blood sugar and helps the store in the muscles last longer. This carries the potential for greater endurance during exercise.

The Glycemic Edge. In recent years, emphases has been placed on the glycemic index in the evaluation of dietary carbohydrates. Glucose, which creates the greatest rise in blood sugar and insulin, has been assigned a glycemic index of 100. Foods which behave most like glucose have high index numbers. Fructose, however, has an index of 20, one of the lowest of the 63 carbohydrates on the list, and in this regard can be said to offer a “glycemic edge.”

 

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Calling All Frozen Yogurt Franchisees

Considering Going Independent as a Frozen Yogurt Shop?  Now Might Be The Time

Have you been looking for an alternative to the franchise control and transitioning to become a free and independent frozen yogurt shop? The concept is appealing to many and just might be the right next step for you too. Current economic events are disrupting supply chains, raising costs, and changing consumer habits.

Independent ice cream shops are an alternative to the frozen yogurt franchise model and are free to change more quickly and adjust to local tastes and preferences. In addition, you cut expenses when you source the frozen yogurt mix yourself WITHOUT extra franchise fees.

Here are some questions you might ask yourself:

1. Have I been selling frozen yogurt as a business long enough to be established with a good customer base?

2. Do I have a positive attitude to solve business issues and problems that might come up in the future?

3. Do I want more creative control over my business and look forward to creating my own brand in my community?

4. Do I want to eliminate franchise fees and restrictions on who I can buy from?

5. Am I willing to dig in and drive my business to its full potential?

Alternatives to the Frozen Yogurt Franchise Model: Nanci’s Frozen Yogurt and FroCup.com can help your Frozen Yogurt franchise shop:

1. Knowledge and Experience – Nanci’s has been in the food industry and with a specialty focus on the frozen yogurt industry for more than 40 years! We know frozen yogurt and soft-serve ice cream. We are an industry leader in soft-serve product research and development; we have created several “firsts” in the yogurt industry. We continue to create and improve.

2. Training and Customer Support – We’re not a franchise but we love to help. Check out our steps to independence to get you started at nancis.com/grow. We have training videos at nancis.com/training and we’re here to answer any questions you have by phone or email.

3. Ordering options – You can order directly from our e-commerce website anytime you need at FroCup.com. You are also welcome to email or call in orders during our office hours, whichever method is most convenient for you.

4. Product availability – We have most everything you will need to run your Frozen Yogurt shop available on FroCup.com. From the base mixes and flavors to cups and spoons and everything in between. We work to keep everything in stock and ready for you. We also ship out orders as soon as possible so that you get your products in a timely and reliable manner.

Call us at 1-800-788-0808 to get started.

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Spring Frozen Yogurt Flavor Recommendations

Spring has sprung! Shifting your flavors to match the season can help increase sales. Check out our Spring flavor recommendations below and feel free to be creative with flavor names.

APRICOT
APRICOT MANGO
BLACK CHERRY
BLACKBERRY
BLUEBERRY
BLUEBERRY POMEGRANATE
BOYSENBERRY
COTTON CANDY
GEORGIA PEACH
HAWAIIAN PINEAPPLE
HONEYDEW MELON
KEY LIME
KIWI
KIWI COLADA
LEMON MIST
LEMON-LIME
MANGO
MANGO STRAWBERRY
PASSION FRUIT
PINK GUAVA
STRAWBERRY COLADA
STRAWBERRY KIWI
STRAWBERRY LEMONADE
WATERMELON
WILD BERRY

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Make Frozen Yogurt at Home

If you don’t have a commercial soft serve machine, the texture at home would not be as smooth and firm that you would get in a frozen yogurt shop. If you are a home user and do not have a business, the best place to get frozen yogurt mix is on eBay.

Choosing the Right Sweetener: Fructose vs Stevia

Fructose sweetened and Stevia sweetened frozen yogurt products are popular and are preferred over sugar sweetened. Stevia sweetened mixes work best in home machines because they freeze at a higher temperature.

Fructose Frozen Yogurt Mix and Commercial Frozen Yogurt Machines

When using fruit-based sugars like fructose in frozen yogurt mixes, the temperature is critical for proper freezing and crystal formation. Typically, in frozen yogurt shops, they use large frozen yogurt machines that continuously cool the frozen yogurt mix to around 17° F (-8° C). The frozen yogurt mix is constantly churned at these temperatures inside the machine using refrigerant. Commercial frozen yogurt ice cream machines use precise scraper blades that scrape the inside of the machine and allow for thorough mixing of the frozen yogurt mix, producing a smoother texture. In contrast, homemade ice cream makers tend to produce final products that are more granular.

Stevia Frozen Yogurt Mix and Homemade Ice Cream Makers

Most ice cream makers made for the consumer market use a thick metal drum that you first chill in the freezer at home. For example, many machines are made by Cuisinart or Hamilton. To mix your homemade ice cream or frozen yogurt, you remove the metal drum from the freezer while you churn the frozen yogurt mix. As you churn the mix, the temperature rises because it is not held at a constant. Achieving a constant 17° F (-8° C) isn’t possible with these methods. However, you can get much closer to the 25° F (-4° C) needed in order to successfully mix frozen yogurt that uses Stevia as a sweetener.

Nanci’s makes frozen yogurt mix with Stevia in 2 base flavors (no sugar added): Chocolate and Vanilla. If you are looking to purchase only single bags, our frozenyogurtparts eBay store is a great place to find them.

If you are looking for a great way to reproduce the classic star pattern of ice cream or frozen yogurt extrusion, you could use our star caps in the end of a ziploc bag with the corner cut off.

Flavoring Frozen Yogurt

When it comes to choice, Nanci’s has 100+ flavors to choose from. You can also check out our recipes page to find mixing instructions for the proper ratios. You can check our Ebay store flavor listing to order any individual flavors we make.

Bonus Tip

Pre-chilling your frozen yogurt to around 32° F (0° C) before mixing will lower the temperature differential between the mix and the homemade ice cream maker metal drum. In turn, this will allow the drum to stay at colder temperatures longer, resulting in better results no matter what type of frozen yogurt mix you use.

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Machine Maintenance

The start of a new year is aSLX400En excellent opportunity to take a look at your soft-serve machine and make sure that it is primed and ready to go for 2016! This includes not only continually cleaning your machine, but also proper lubrication and checking for any wearable parts that may have seen better days. Annually is a good time to remove the side panels and visually inspect for leaks from the motor casing and loose connections. You should also take the temperature of the hopper and freezing cylinder on standby and auto modes and compare that to what the machine is saying to check that it is calibrated correctly still. Ensuring that your machine is running properly and that it is consistently producing a quality product throughout the year will be essential to your customer base and overall margins at the end of the year.

Cleaning your machine is an important aspect of maintenance to help the longevity of your machine. Get in the habit of cleaning your machine at least once a week. This process includes running a sanitizing agent through the machine, effectively killing any bacteria that may have grown or built up.  If your machine goes weeks without being thoroughly and properly cleaned harmful bacteria may build up and could potentially lead to spoiled product.

Once the sanitizing agent is mixed with water and poured into the hopper of the machine, put the machine on the wash cycle and allow the product to cycle through the machine for a period of 5 minutes. This will allow the sanitizing agent to reach all of the nooks and crannies of the machine, killing any remaining bacteria. Be careful not to enable a feature on the machine that willPacket x2 freeze down the product, as the process of the water freezing could severely damage your machine. Every other week, we recommend pulling all of the machine components such as the face plate and the freezing cylinder shaft and let them soak in hot soapy water as well. The process of cleaning the machine is simple in its procedure, and it can be done any employee if they are properly trained how to do so. Check out http://frocup.com/product/sanitizer-packets/ to get started today!

Lubrication is another key technique in keeping your machine running for an extended period of time. The main component of the machine that requires lubrication is the back end of the shaft that sits deeper inside the freezing cylinder. Pull this out and pull off the rubber gasket that fits on the end of it. Lubricate around the square piece at the end of the shaft and place the gasket back onto the lubricated piece. When you pull out the freezing cylinder shaft to clean it is an excellent time to lubricate it as well. Tubes of all-purpose lube are also sold at http://frocup.com/product/machine-lube/.

There are various wearable machine parts that can become damaged and wear down over time. The scraper blades, for example, attach to the shaft on the inside of the freezing cylinder wear down and don’t scrape the edge of the cylinder with the exactness and precision that they once did. This leads to the freezing of product on the edge of the cylinder and can lower the overall quality of your product. These scraper blades are different with each individual machine company so make sure the blade is rated for your model of machine before buying replacements. You can find various machine springs, seals, and O-rings as replacement parts at http://frocup.com/product-category/supplies/.

Look for general brittleness or the wearing down of plastic parts as key points in replacement. Replacing parts before they go out will save you from costly damage to other components of the machine and keep you from having a non-functioning machine during your peak season. Understanding your machine is very important in maintaining it over time. Pulling out all of the main components and familiarizing yourself with them as you sanitize, lubricate, and replace any necessary parts will help you to keep your machine running strong throughout 2016 and beyond.machine breakdown diagram

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Considering Opening a Frozen Yogurt Shop?

Frozen yogurt shops are one of the hottest retail concepts around. It is a fun way to meet a lot of people and become a presence in your local community.  Nanci’s Frozen Yogurt can help refine your concept with low investment cost and high margins. No need to pay high franchise fees. Give yourself the best chance at success by running the numbers and understanding some business basics first. Check out the profit calculator for a customized analysis for your concept.

There are several key drivers to making a profit with a frozen yogurt store. It is important to emphasize profit versus sales. You may have great margins but if your customer base is too small, your sales won’t be enough to drive those high margins to success and profit. You should think of these profit drivers as dials or levers – you can adjust the dials various ways to maximize profit.

 

Key Profit Drivers

Sales Revenue

  • Volume (the number of customers per day and the number of ounces of yogurt sold)
  • Price per ounce
  • Sales of additional items (non-yogurt items)

Costs

  • Labor costs
  • Rent & utilities
  • Product costs (don’t forget to include the cost of free samples)
  • Supplies (cups, spoons, napkins, etc.)
  • Store and equipment maintenance

 

Turning the Dials

INCREASE SALES REVENUE

  • Get more customers. Typically this will mean more costs (like advertising and marketing), but you can also be creative and find traffic generating ideas with no or little cost. Another way to drive more traffic is to improve your product by offering new or unique flavors and by creating a unique product compared to your competitors. Nanci’s products are ideally suited for this – contact us to discuss further.
  • Increase the price. You can increase price and often not affect sales volume, but this is tricky because there is an elusive price Tipping Point. When you cross it your volume will actually decrease because either customers will stop coming or they will buy less. This Tipping Point is unique to every area and every store. One approach is to keep your base price per ounce high but then use discounts and promotions to give customers a lower effective price. Remember that it is much easier to lower your price than it is to raise it.

 

LOWER COSTS

 

When evaluating costs there are Fixed Costs and Variable Costs. Fixed Costs are costs that are the same regardless of how many customers you serve. For example, your rent cost will be the same whether you serve 10 customers or 300.  Rent is a fixed cost. On the other hand, cups are a variable cost because you only incur costs for each customer.

  • One of the largest single costs for your store will be rent. There are a couple strategies to take when deciding on a location. For the purposes of simplicity, we’ll break it down into two strategies at opposite ends of the spectrum, even though in reality there are various strategies in between these two.

High Rent / High Volume. If the location is high rent it needs to also be a high traffic area to drive your sales volume. High rent areas may also allow you to charge more per ounce. In order for this strategy to work, you must have a large number of customers.

Low Rent / Low Volume / Low Cost. If the location is a very low rent property that means it’s probably off the beaten path and doesn’t have as much natural traffic. Generally, this would result in less traffic and lower sales volume, although there are stores that are in horrible locations and still gain a “cult following” and have lots of traffic. A low rent location may also mean you need to charge less per ounce, lowering your sales revenue. In order for this strategy to work you have to keep your costs extremely low and find ways to generate traffic in spite of your location.

  • Labor will most likely be your single highest cost. The big question here is whether or not you can run your store with just one employee. Our profit model shows that unless your store has strong volume (150 customers per day or more), you could lose money having two employees staff your shop. Of Course there are other factors to consider, like employee safety and or employee fraud.
  • Product Costs.This is also a tricky area, because your entire concept is based on your frozen yogurt mix. If your product isn’t good, you won’t succeed. But at the same time, you want to keep those profit margins robust. Nanci’s solves this issue with mixes that are high-quality and available to you at a very competitive wholesale price.
  • Most likely, the customers will demand free samples, but at the very least you should understand how many free samples you are giving away and how it is affecting your costs. One option is to have the sample cups behind the counter so the customer has to request one from an employee. Studies show that when shoppers make eye contact with a store employee they are less likely to steal something – I’d like to think this principal holds true for abusing the free samples as well.

The general belief in the business world, is that you need two or three food retail shops to be able to do it full-time and quit your regular full-time job and work for yourself. Depending on your available capital, you may want to consider opening 2 or 3 shops at the same time. This will also give you immediate brand relevance and can often protect your area from incoming competitors.  Visit FroCup.com for information on machines to get started.  Discounts are available if you order more than one machine at the same time.  FroCup and Nanci’s can help you outfit your new store with all the equipment you need.

Feel free to call 480-834-4290 or email info@nancis.com with any questions.

 

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Frozen Yogurt Training Videos

We’re excited to introduce three new training videos available on our website. We’ve kept them short and sweet, but packed with useful demonstrations.

The videos include:

  • How to Prepare Nanci’s Mix
  • How to Add Air into Mix
  • Soft-Serve Machine Overview

You can view the videos at www.nancis.com/training

Here’s our new Intro to Nanci’s video as a teaser…

 

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Improving Your Customer Service

Customer Service is the root of many businesses, particularly the Frozen Yogurt industry. For most people, going out to grab a cup of froyo isn’t just about the smooth and creamy treat melting on your tongue and tickling your taste buds.  It’s about the experience.  Customer Service is not a transaction — it is the relationship with your customer. It’s making that frozen desert into a little cup of personal bliss for each customer.

Important basics to remember

-SMILE! Even the friendliest person in the world might come across as indifferent or fake if that is what their face says. Remember, the amount of communication between two people is predominantly non-verbal.

-BE ATTENTIVE.  No one likes to be ignored. Greet customers as they enter, and bid them farewell as they leave. On occasion your shop might be very busy — perhaps a line out the door and around the corner (good for you!) — but remember to keep checking in with the customers as they come in and as they wait. It does not matter if they are at the front of the line or just stepping into the back, their business matters.

-BE PROFESSIONAL. Hop off the counters, and wash your hands often. Quit touching your face and looking at your feet. Be confident in how you carry yourself in the workplace and show respect even when disrespected (hey it happens). Keep composed and be ready to work!

-MAKE SUGGESTIONS, GET CREATIVE. Most frozen yogurt shops have local favorites or signature flavors.  These are perfect things to suggest to new customers or returning customers wanting to try something new. Don’t be afraid to experiment! Finding weird and new ways to combine flavors and toppings reinvents the experience for customers and brings back that first-time feeling that is both exciting and mysterious.

-KEEP BUSY. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the “if you can lean, you can clean” phrase seen often in the food industry work place. As an employee, often times work can drag on, which can begin to reflect in your mood and in turn reflect out towards others. Staying on top of cleaning and regular store maintenance in between gaps in customers will not only improve business but also helps pass the time. Take a little extra time cleaning the tables or floors. Or prepare for the rush hour.

-DEVELOP RELATIONSHIPS. There is nothing quite like walking into a neighborhood shop and being greeted by a familiar face and even by name. This sense of familiarity and friendliness creates a community feel to your shop. People like to feel that they are making a purchase from people, rather than a corporation or a business. You can also develop relationships with neighboring businesses and their employees. Not only can they be a great marketing resource for you, but they can be great customers as well.

Most importantly, always remember that the customer comes first. The customer is the point and purpose of a business. Make coming to your store the highlight of your customer’s day.