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Friendly's Selling Ice Cream Business, Keeping Restaurants

Massachusetts-based Friendly’s Ice Cream is selling its manufacturing and retail operations to the country’s largest dairy processor for $155 million in cash.  It is the latest chapter in the story of a company founded in western Massachusetts during the Great Depression.

Texas-based Dean Foods Company bought the ice cream portion of the business from the Florida private equity company that has owned Friendly’s for almost a decade.  The sale does not include the chain of more than 260 restaurants. It marks the end of an 81-year business model where Friendly’s manufactured and sold its own ice cream in its own restaurants.

But fans of Friendly’s ice cream products should not be concerned says food services industry consultant Dennis Lombardi.

" It will be the same formula, likely to be the same manufacturing plant. Not much changing except the name ' Dean Foods' will go over the door someplace," he said.

In a press release, Dean said it is not planning any changes in staffing at the Friendly’s plant in Wilbraham, just outside Springfield, where the ice cream has been made for 45 years.

Lombardi said the sale appears good for the Friendly’s brand.

"It allows Sun Capital, that owns Friendly's restaurants, to focus fully on the restaurant operations and it allows Dean Foods, which is a manufacturer of good reputation, to do what it specializes in, which is the manufacture and distribution of retail foods," said Lombardi.

Other brands owned by Dean include Garelick Farms milk and Land O’Lakes butter.  The company owns a milk processing plant in Lynn, Massachusetts.

The ice cream business Dean is buying has been booming, with sales up 105 percent last year.

Much of that growth is attributed to Walmart selling Friendly’s ice cream in its stores. Ironically, a decision by Walmart to begin processing its own brand of milk will cost Dean substantial business next year, according to published reports.

While the Friendly’s ice cream sold in stores remained popular through the decades, the restaurants were struggling when Sun Capital purchased Friendly’s in 2007.  Friendly’s filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2011 and closed about 100 restaurants.

Two years later, a turnaround began under CEO John Maguire.  Restaurants were renovated and menus changed. There was an emphasis on improved food quality and better service.

" The only thing that matters for our success is the next time a Friendly's guest comes to our restaurant they have a great experience. If we do that we will be successful, if we don't ,we won't survive," Maguire said in an interview in 2013 as he showed off a newly renovated Friendly's location in Chicopee.

Friendly’s expects to open 10 new restaurants this year.

" Again, I think being able to focus just on the restaurant operations and not have the dual capacity of restaurants plus retail manufacturing is going to help the restaurants," said Lombardi.

The chain and ice cream brand started with a single store in Springfield that opened in 1935 by brothers S. Prestley and Curtis Blake with money they borrowed from their mother.

The record-setting tenure of Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno. The 2011 tornado and its recovery that remade the largest city in Western Massachusetts. The fallout from the deadly COVID outbreak at the Holyoke Soldiers Home. Those are just a few of the thousands and thousands of stories WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill has covered for WAMC in his nearly 17 years with the station.
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