Cold Stone Creamery
Pick your ice cream, pile on mix-ins, and watch a scooper fold it all together on a frozen slab of granite — then tip them and they sing. Cold Stone Creamery turned dessert into a performance across 2000s America.
Cold Stone Creamery was founded in 1988 in Tempe, Arizona, by Donald and Susan Sutherland, who wanted a richer ice cream and a way to customize it on the spot. The gimmick — and the name — was a frozen slab of granite on which staff fold a customer's chosen mix-ins (candies, nuts, brownies, syrups) into the ice cream. The original store, #0001, still operates near its first Tempe intersection.
Franchising began in 1995, and the brand exploded in the 2000s: Entrepreneur magazine named it the 11th fastest-growing franchise in January 2006, and it grew into one of the best-selling ice cream brands in the country, with hundreds of granite-slab shops in malls and strip centers. A tip-jar tradition — scoopers breaking into a song when you dropped in a dollar — became its signature soundtrack.
The company merged with Kahala Corp in 2007 (today it sits under Kahala Brands / MTY Food Group), and while the mid-2000s frenzy cooled, it still ran hundreds of U.S. locations into the 2020s. For a certain era, though, Cold Stone was the destination: the smell of fresh waffle cones, the clatter of scoops on cold granite, and a slightly off-key song for your tip.
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