The Ledger
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Jones: Having $100K in savings might have deterred starting Dippin' Dots
“I sometimes say if we'd had a 100,000 dollars in the bank, we might not have wanted to risk it, but I felt like if it didn't work, I was still young enough that I could probably still get a job somewhere.”
Jones: Dippin' Dots and Opryland co-created the modern theme park kiosk format
“So this is when we kind of jointly came up with the kiosk concept, which you see in many theme parks today. It's a little standalone ice cream stand where someone stands behind it and sells it.”
Curt Jones: Dippin' Dots spent over $10M and lost its core patent
“So we ended up having to come up with basically four million dollars At the end of this lawsuit, so we had spent six million, we ended up spending four on, on them. Wow. And I had to spend an additional 750,000 dollars to appeal this decision to get my name cl…”
Curt Jones: Would fight $10M patent lawsuit again rather than settle
“What would you do different if you know, if you look back now, and I suppose the correct answer is like, well, I would have settled, and then it wouldn't have cost me ten million dollars, but my answer is that I probably would do the same thing again, because …”
Jones: Dippin' Dots Swung From $3M Profit to Loss in 2007
“Was the fact that milk prices had gone up 34% that year. Gas prices started going up a lot between 2006 and 2007. And then our liquid nitrogen cost went up like 10%. And so all of a sudden, on, on almost the same sales, we had went from like a net of two or th…”
Curt Jones: Dribbling cultures into liquid nitrogen creates distinct frozen pellets
“I found that you could pour the nitrogen into the cultures and freeze a big, big blob, or you could pour the cultures into the nitrogen and freeze a big blob, but I found that if you dribbled it in a little at a time, That you could actually form pellets.”
Curt Jones: Dippin' Dots began with lab pipette and liquid nitrogen
“So we grabbed about a, I think it was a little quart mason jar of the mix, and drove out to the lab, and I pulled out probably about a half a gallon of liquid nitrogen into a cylinder, and I took a pipette, and I took some of the ice cream mix, and I dropped i…”
Jones: Dippin' Dots was funded with $30K to $40K in credit card debt
“Yeah, I mean, we had at one point, I think we had between 30 and 40,000 dollars in credit card debt with, you know, with a business that wasn't making money, so we were We were struggling, you know, well, the first few years, we struggled quite a bit.”
Curt Jones: Dippin' Dots did $350k in Opryland sales in 1991
“Well, it would have been 1991 that we would have started getting some actual income from Opryland. I think that first year we ended up doing 350,000 dollars in sales.”
Jones: Dippin' Dots peaked at $47 million sales in 2006
“At the peak that would have been 2006. We did 40, almost forty seven million in sales. I think it was right at forty seven million.”
Curt Jones: Dippin' Dots sued Mini Melts for $16M in patent dispute
“We were suing him for, I think, around sixteen million dollars. Well, he countersued us for ten million dollars, and ours was based on infringement, his was based on antitrust, because he, one of the defenses you have if you're being sued for patent infringeme…”
Jones: Bank Default Notice Triggered Cross-Default on Dippin' Dots Loans
“But on the day that that three-month extension was due, we got an email that said, you're in default because you have not paid your credit line down. This puts all of your term loans in default as well.”
Curt Jones: Flash-freezing bacteria creates smaller ice crystals, preserving cell viability
“If you freeze that very fast, those ice crystals are smaller, so if you freeze the bacteria cells quickly, You get tiny ice crystals, and then there's a good chance that those cells can come back to life.”