The IVO comprehensive school in Deurne celebrated its 25th anniversary. To celebrate, they wanted to provide all 2700 students and teachers with 2 scoop ice cream scoops; a total of 5400 scoops of ice cream (or 500 liters!). And it had to be done within a few hours. An additional complication was that IVO consists of 4 schools: Peellandcollege, Hub van Doorne College, Sprongcollege and Alfrinkcollege. Fortunately, all schools are located next to each other around a sports field.

The solution

To shovel away this amount of ice cream in a few hours, we decided to deploy 5 ice cream carts, which were spread across the 3 locations (Sprong College and Alfrink College share a courtyard). In addition, with 3 ice cream carts, it was possible to deploy 2 ice cream men/women, so double productivity was possible. This gave us a scoop capacity of a total of about 2,400 scoops of ice cream per hour.

At a central location was the refrigerated van of our ice cream maker (Hoeve Willem III), in which the ice cream stock was stored. From there the 5 ice cream carts were supplied with fresh ice cream each time. All empty trays went to one of the school kitchens, where one of our employees cleaned the trays. The picture shows 2 of our ice cream trucks at Peellland College, just before the first groups of students arrived.

Because at that time we did not have 5 ice cream carts ourselves, we also called on the help of a fellow ice cream man from South Limburg, who supported us with 2 ice cream carts.

It was agreed with the schools that every 10 minutes, at each school, a group of 20-50 students would come to the ice cream carts. At 10 o'clock the first groups came. After that, scooping continued almost continuously at all the carts. After which the first school finished about 12:00, and the last one about 1:30.

 

 

A record

Our largest one-day job to date dates back to July 2020. When we scooped some 3,800 globes of ice cream for Blaricum College in Blerick; although spread out over a longer period of time.

 

Behind the scenes

What most people don't realize is how much work goes into such an action of about 3 hours of ice shoveling:

• Weeks in advance we are already making a plan, organizing the staff and coordinating the schedule with the client.
• A few days beforehand, our head ice cream man Rens visited the schools to check on the spot what the best locations were, where we could get power, where to park the trailers, etc.
• On the day itself we started at 7:00 in the morning with a number of people preparing the ice cream carts, getting ice cream, trays, cones, cleaning materials etcetera. And then loading the ice cream carts onto the trailers.
• At 9:00 am we were in Deurne with all 5 carts and all employees. There we unloaded everything and put all the stuff on the right location.
• From 10 o'clock it goes off. At 13:30 the last cart finished shoveling.
• Then load everything up again, drive to Tegelen, unload everything there.
• In Tegelen the whole crew is busy for more than 2 hours to clean everything.
• Meanwhile, Rens went to the Chinese restaurant and around 17:00 we could all sit down to dinner. Tired, but satisfied.