Rather than offer customers generic ice creams they can get almost anywhere or team up with a well known premium ice cream brand, Pizza Capers has opted to go out on a limb and create a new artisan ice cream and gelato range on its own. 

Aptly labelled The Little Ice Cream Shoppe, the new range encompasses six different flavours:

• Salted caramel and malt crunch
• Red velvet chocolate cupcake
• Cookies and cream 
• Chocolate gelato
• Mango gelato
• The flavour so crazy it doesn’t have a name (a concoction of vanilla ice cream, candy coated chocolate beans, chocolate sauce, sour candy, marshmallows and chocolate butterscotch balls)

Lincoln Patterson, marketing manager, Pizza Capers is proud that he and his team created the range on their own.

“All of my team and myself developed it 100 percent in house, we had no external agency assistance whatsoever, we did all of the photography and all of the brand concepts ourselves.

“[This decision] also ended up being a saving to our franchisees, because if we were to have pitched this out to an agency it would have cost us an awful lot of money,” he explains.

He says the interests of the company’s franchisees were at the top of the agenda when developing the ice cream range, because it meant they could offer their customers something no one else could.

“We have a responsibility to our franchisees to make our brand as attractive as possible, outside of the food ice cream complements our product reasonably well, so we thought why not create something that is really desirable and high in quality and make it available exclusively to Pizza Capers customers?”

The new ice cream and gelato range is designed to complement Pizza Capers’ other offerings.

He says product innovation is driven by both the consumer and the company’s competitors.

“Product innovation is one of the ways that we can compete with those low cost, high volume chains that have massive amounts of advertising dollar.

“While we can’t compete with that advertising dollar, that doesn’t restrict us from creating new and innovative things,” he adds.

To put this into perspective, Pizza Capers has 124 stores and the brand is confined to Australia, whereas more than 12,700 Pizza Hut stores are currently in operation throughout the world, 287 of which are in Australia.

Patterson explains the company, which falls under the Retail Food Group (RFG) umbrella along with Crust, communicates new product information to franchisees well ahead of time to ensure they are familiar with, and/or know how to create new products before they are introduced into stores.

The Pizza Capers team were responsible for all creative aspects of the new range, including marketing and advertising.

“When you are talking about products that stores need to manufacture, such as a new pizza flavour, there is a high level of communication and lead time so our stores can practice how to make the product and to make sure they are comfortable preparing it.

“When you look at things like the ice cream it is really more of an educational process that we need to go through so our stores understand a little bit about that product,” he says.  

Pizza Capers places a high level of importance on both communicating with and training its franchisees as this ensures new products are marketed and delivered effectively.  

“We need to be 100 percent confident that we can execute it [the new product] at store level, and secondly we need to be confident that consumers are going to want that product.

“The end result does float back to the franchisee and the business being able to make sure that they manufacture and deliver the product or have enough information in store to sell those products,” says Patterson.