In August, a trio of Chatham County natives, operating as Primo Partners, LLC, purchased two new Ben & Jerry’s ice cream franchise locations — marking an unusual move to expand as many storefront retail companies face ongoing contraction.
The team of young entrepreneurs, who now own eight Ben & Jerry’s stores after the recent acquisitions, started their business in 2008 when Antonio McBroom — now the company’s CEO at 34 — was a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill.
“I worked at Ben & Jerry’s throughout college,” McBroom said, “and decided I wanted to purchase the store.”
To help launch his career in franchise ownership, McBroom reached out to his childhood friend and mentor, Eric Taylor, 37, then working as an engineer in Boston. The two met as Chatham Central High School students where they played football together.
“I’d been out of college two years when Antonio approached me with the idea of owning a business,” Taylor said. “It was pretty exciting for me. I’ve always been financially savvy, so I was wondering, at that time, what additional things I could invest in.”
The Chapel Hill Ben & Jerry’s matched Taylor’s criteria and he agreed to come on as the budding company’s COO.
“We put our resumes together and then we met with Ben & Jerry’s and asked them to take a chance on us young entrepreneurs,” McBroom said, “and they did. And so, it began.”
Ben & Jerry’s got its own start in 1978 when friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield took a $5 correspondence course in ice cream-making from Penn State and opened their first ice cream scoop shop in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont, after borrowing $4,000 as part of a $12,000 investment. In the year 2000, the socially and politically conscious pair sold the company — which makes ice creams, frozen yogurts and sorbets with flavors such as Cherry Garcia, Chubby Hubby, Chunky Monkey and Glampfire Trail Mix — to Unilever.
Today, Ben & Jerry’s locations can be found in more than 40 countries; for franchisee Primo Partners, its operation grew to include four locations in the Triangle within four years.
Phillip Scotton, 29, son of longtime Siler City barbershop owner Phil Scotton, joined Primo Partners in 2012. He met McBroom as a student at Jordan-Matthews High School and later followed McBroom to UNC-Chapel Hill. Scotton was the perfect candidate to help the senior partners move beyond North Carolina into other southeastern states, McBroom said.
“Phillip was getting ready to finish up college and he did a marketing internship with me,” McBroom said. “He did such a phenomenal job we ended up becoming business partners in opening our Atlanta Ben & Jerry’s franchise.”
In early 2020, Primo Partners added a sixth location to its chain in Houston.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. Operations at all of the stores ground to a halt.
“For our business, it was a really bad time for it,” McBroom said. “We began to shut down just as the busy season was getting started.”
Storefront retailers and the restaurant industry, both of which rely on foot traffic for business, suffered the most palpable losses of the pandemic shutdown. For ice cream stores especially, however, the operational restrictions came at an inopportune time; spring and summer are by far their most profitable seasons.
Still, the company has made steady improvement since its stores reopened with limited activity.
“We’ve been surprised at the recovery that we’ve had since we opened on May 22,” Taylor said. “We started out of the box kind of slow. Most of our stores will probably operate at anywhere from 40% to 70% of the prior year-over-year sales. Obviously, foot traffic isn’t what it was before the pandemic hit, but we’ve been happy with the results that we’ve had since returning to stores.”
When the pandemic started, the executive team met to evaluate the company’s standing and plot its next steps.
“We decided to anchor ourselves in the quote that ‘bad companies fail, good companies survive and great companies improve,’” McBroom said. “So, we doubled down and looked to use that time to improve our business.”
They arrived at a chancy decision to purchase two new franchise locations in Chattanooga and Athens, Tennessee. Accurate fiscal assessment is tenuous while the pandemic persists, but the acquisitions seem to have paid off.
“It’s not exactly what we had planned,” McBroom said, “but we saw an opportunity and we want to continue to move forward in that way. Our vision is that Primo Partners continues to be the largest and fastest growing Ben & Jerry’s franchise.”
But McBroom and his partners hope to use their positions of leadership in a multi-state enterprise to achieve more than just ice cream sales.
“We’re a 100% Black-owned and 90% Black-led organization. I think we have the ideal position for us to be change agents,” McBroom said. “We have the platform of a hundred thousand different customers that we come in contact with every year.”
In harmony with that assertion, Primo Partners’ Ben & Jerry’s stores host pledge-to-vote programs, voter registration drives and educational programs to raise awareness of racial inequality and social injustice and to promote financial empowerment and literacy.
“We certainly haven’t been exempted from any of the structural racism barriers that you face in terms of obtaining desired locations in real estate, in financing and in banking,” McBroom said. “But that’s kind of the reason why we do what we do. We want to break down those barriers. We want to create an opportunity for folks who don’t necessarily see a ton of opportunity. As business owners and entrepreneurs, we want to show a roadmap for how to make that happen.”