About
The man who started it all around 30 years ago was named Socrates, hence the name Soc’s. He was quite the character and not easily forgotten, okay you’d never forget him. He was not know for his charm or friendliness, but he knew how to make great ice cream. Soc sold the place in 1989 and every now and then pays us a visit.
Who taught you how to make ice cream?
My father and I first learned the basics from Soc, he had around 20 homemade flavors. My father made the ice cream for the first few years, he wanted to make sure that it was always creamy. After a while I took over the ice cream making duties, I was always pretty handy in the kitchen. Even at the age of 22 I had several years of professional cooking under my belt and was able to develop every recipe we’ve had since. Most were good or better, several have been less than perfect, and some were ridiculous.
Who owns Soc’s?
The business has been owned and operated by the Calakoutis family since the fall of 1989. And if memory serves me right we started selling Christmas trees in December of 1990, mostly out of desperation to pay the mortgage over the winter. As the saying goes we bet the farm, we took every penny we had (which wasn’t much) and bought several hundred Christmas trees. My father built stands, signs, displays with any piece of wood he could find on hand. My dad and I worked day and night, we couldn’t afford a fence so he would hang out till 2am watching the yard to make sure nobody stole our trees. I have worked for my father most of my life in several family businesses, so you could say I have some small business experience. I took over the business in 1999, my father still helps out around the yard and is irreplaceable during the Christmas tree season. We always try our best to please our customers, of course we mistakes but we try to remedy the situation, learn from them and move on. We’d like to thank all of our loyal customers for supporting us over the years and appreciate their business. It’s always nice when people tell us how much they love the place and how their parents would bring them as children and now they visit with their own. I’m always striving to improve things and I’ve been blessed with some great employees over the years who contributed many brilliant ideas to better the operation. The best thing about owning and operating Soc’s is that I love running the business now more than ever and I can’t wait to have children so they can grow up working in the family business as I once did.
How Come your ice cream is so good?
We make everything here homemade with the exception of the soft serve ice cream, soft serve frozen yogurt, and a few no sugar flavors (which are excellent). Even our soft serve ice cream is better than most because we use the much pricier 10% butterfat mix, most people use the 5% which is more like ice milk. We take pride in the fact that we are one of the few homemade places around that doesn’t serve Richardson’s Ice Cream (which is a great product). But we get to make it our way, and your way, we listen to the feedback that you give our employees and try to modify the recipes to your taste. Around 8 years ago I spent several months working on Italian Ice recipes, I never wasted so much sugar and water in my life; but I was determined to create a quality product. After all, we had been using Richie’s Slush for 10 years give or take, which is one of the best. But it seemed foolish to me to buy it from them when we had every single ingredient on hand and the exact same equipment that they were using at the time. I’ll admit I may only have a few Italian Ice’s per year when the temperature goes over ninety, but we get rave reviews for our product and that makes me proud. With this new interactive website we’ll be able to get all your comments and suggestions first hand and I’m confident this will make our operation better than ever. So fire away!!!
Who came up with these funny questions?
My wife did, she got this site up and running, thanks hon…..
3 Responses to “About”
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I am the first time on this site and am really enthusiastic about and so many good articles. I think it’s just very good.
Always yours Mr. Cialis
hi all my best world !!!
you should post your hours on your website. (unless they are already there and I’m just missing them, which is completely possible). I love Soc’s!