Home › At the Fountain › How to Make a Soda Fountain Pay
How to Make a Soda Fountain Pay
BY MR. D. WALLACE RINTELS, OF THE WALKER-RINTELS DRUG CO., BOSTON. Prize article contributed to James W. Tufts' Contest. Nearly all the literature contributed to that most important end in a druggist's work, the profits to accrue from the soda fountain, has dealt in generalities as glittering as the fountain should be; and I do not think it will be amiss to bring the subject to a more specific basis, and tell how a soda fountain has been made to pay. To make a résumé of the more important papers contributed to this subject will not be amiss; for the facts stated therein are absolutely essential to the proper success of our undertaking, and the subject matter cannot be too often repeated. Cleanliness is the foundation stone. The routine work necessary to cleanliness, however, is the kind of detail that from the nature of man becomes monotonous. It cannot be entrusted to any one person, for the desire to shirk work and gloss over neglect will soon crop out in any workman no matter how industrious he may be. Have an "eagle eye," therefore. Never pass the fountain without noting at a glance whether the glasses are clean, the fountain and slab immaculate, the holders properly polished, the lemons fresh, the eggs fresh, clean, large and brown-in fact, that everything is in the shape to tempt a thirsty mortal or to make a mortal thirsty. Do not allow soiled glasses to remain in the holders until you are ready to wash them. Remove them at once, and, if necessary, wash them at your leisure; but under no condition allow a used glass to remain in the holders. A most excellent adjunct to the washing of glasses is a dish of bicarbonate soda, which should be used freely to remove all traces of grease, formed when cream is added to acid syrups. Ice cream spoons should always be washed with bicarbonate soda. There must be a prodigal use of ice whenever there is an opportunity. Serve it in lemonades. Use it in making egg and milk drinks, but do not serve it with them. A drink to be palatable must be cold, and a supply of shaved ice should always be at hand. Further along I will explain a simple means of having ice always handy, and I should advise all who wish to make a success of soda water to either supply themselves with this apparatus or have a bowl of cracked ice always at hand. In regard to service. Should your business permit, - and I will try to show how it can be made to do so, no matter how small it is now, - have an experienced dispenser. A high salaried man is not necessary. If you will engage a bright lad and teach him, not leave him to find out, at your expense, how to do his work by the sacrifice of your trade and disgust of your customers, it will repay you many times over for the trouble involved. Ask him to make you a claret lemonade, an egg phosphate, any of the more common drinks: and, if he draws it properly, drink it with relish. If you do not know the art yourself, spend a few dimes in patronizing the more prominent fountains where experts are employed; watch them and learn from them. Take the lesson to heart, and teach it to your clerks. Thin glasses, neatness, attendants, courteousness, highly charged soda, are among the generalities which must be adhered to and looked after. Now to our specific subject. "Costly thy apparel as thy purse can buy can be well applied to the garb which covers and preserves that delicious beverage which has caused the American people to nearly forego the ale of England, the beer of Germany, the wine of France, and of which Samuel Johnson would have surely said, had he lived in our time, "The cup that cheers, but not inebriates." Have a fountain attractive enough to arrest the eye. Have you an old one, and complain that there is no soda business? Try a new one, and put forward an effort towards making it pay for itself. If properly run, it will do so the first season. Do not hesitate to advertise. I had 10,000 stickers- 250 each of 40 different readings - printed on heavy white paper, pasted them on the windows, changing them every morning. They cost $15, and paid for themselves in a few days. And a word about the octopus that is fastening itself on the soda fountain trade. I refer to the "patent" drinks. Some we are obliged to keep because they are advertised, like other patent nostrums. Do not display them more than is necessary. There is no more reason for paying a high price for the number of sherbets, punches, nectars, and what-nots that appear every day, and displaying them on your counter for the manufacturers, than there is to display somebody's sarsaparilla or nerve compound or other patent medicine, and thus give them free advertising. It does not require any great expenditure of gray matter to concoct these drinks. Rum, port wine, prune juice, raspberry, syrup, orange syrup, in varying proportions, are generally their basis; and it is easier and much more profitable to concoct your own specialty than to push somebody's else. As to syrups, make them as good as they can be made. Unless you do a large business, it is cheaper to buy raspberry, strawberry, orange, and pineapple concentrated syrups and crushed fruits, than it is to make them. The large manufacturers buy the fruit when the market is glutted, and can work it up much more economically than you can; but take pains to see that you buy the best. It will cost a bit more, but success lies in the increased volume of business; and economies in this line are not conducive to a big business. Their formulas will say that the juices or concentrated syrups will bear a certain dilution. Do not dilute to the limit. Make your syrups as good as you can, not as cheap. Simple syrup is better when made cold than hot. Loaf sugar costs a little more than granulated, but makes better syrup, as granulated sugar contains ultramarine, which generates hydrogen sulphide on standing. Be lavish with your cream. It makes the soda water rich, and will bring you customers. Next to a light cream, a compound of good milk and unsweetened condensed milk makes a rich glass of soda. While on the subject of cream, a word can be said of ice cream. Good ice cream can be bought at $1.00 a gallon, but the writer has been unable to find a satisfactory article at less than this price. To buy ice cream at this price is nearly pro-hibitive if you wish to be liberal with it.. If you can bring your business up to using two gallons of ice cream a day, it will pay you to make it, using the formula subjoined: - Light Cream, 8 quarts; Egg Yolks, 2; Egg Whites, 7; Powdered Sugar, 1½ lbs.; Extract Vanilla, ¾ ounce. Beat yolks, whites, vanilla and sugar together for ten minutes; add cream, beat again for ten minutes, and freeze. The ice cream made according to the above formula will cost sixty cents a gallon, and is as rich and palatable as any one is able to buy at any price. The above cost is on the basis of light cream costing sixty cents a gallon, and the fact that a gallon of cream will freeze into a gallon and a half of ice cream. A drink that has recently become very popular is root beer, and a large demand can be made for this wholesome and palatable beverage, if it is properly dispensed. The writer had James W. Tufts build for him two stands for holding root beer, which have proven a most profitable investment. They consist of handsome silver-plated cylinders which contain stationary can holding about three gallons, and a space between the inside and outside cylinder around which ice can be packed and which keeps the beer always cold. A spigot at the bottom allows drawing the beer. The top for the cylinder is dish-shaped, and holds about a bushel of shaved ice, to be used as a receptacle for steins, and also allowing the use of shaved ice for purposes mentioned before in this paper. Root beer requires to be charged to about 100 pounds' pressure, only high enough to cause it to run through a mineral tube, from which it is transferred from the measure to cylinder; and the charging can be done from empty fountains, there being sufficient gas left in them. The writer has a generator, and makes his soda water direct from marble dust and acid; but, when one's business is not large enough to permit this, I advise some form of carbonator, either automatic or otherwise, with compressed gas. An investment in a carbonator or steel fountain will be found a good one, as soda water made with a carbonator costs 11/½ cents per gallon, and it costs less than one-fourth as much to charge one's own fountain than to buy them charged, while there is never any danger of being without soda water. The saving on making ice cream and charging one's own soda water will enable one to hire an extra man to attend to the fountain. The introduction of ice cream with crushed fruits in the form of Sundaes. or College Ices has opened a broader horizon for the Soda Fountain and has been followed by the use of all kinds of nuts as well as raisins, figs, etc., to make the delicious confection. To what length this paper could be carried in its suggestions for "making dollars by saving pennies," not in the economies that will deteriorate the quality of one's goods, but in the larger economies that will enable one to give greater value and better service to customers, and by so doing increase one's trade and make it profitable, must be apparent to any practical business man. "Eternal vigilance is the price of" good soda water, and these lines are addressed to those who want to work and get their reward. They are only suggestions, but I think are practical, and, if properly carried out and enlarged, will go a long way towards solving the problem of "How to make a soda fountain pay."
The bulk of this piece is trade advice, but at its centre is a working ice cream formula from a Boston drug store, and that formula is the part a cook would try. It cannot be made safely today as printed.
- Why the cautionThe base is raw egg — two yolks and seven whites — beaten into eight quarts of cream and frozen without any cooking step. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would destroy Salmonella, and freezing preserves rather than kills it. A modern cooked-custard or pasteurised-egg recipe should be used instead.
- Scale of the batchEight quarts of cream yields about twelve quarts of finished ice cream, on Rintels's own figure that a gallon of cream freezes into a gallon and a half. He names two gallons a day as the volume at which it pays to make your own rather than buy in at a dollar a gallon.
- "Light cream"In period trade usage this meant something in the region of 18–20 percent butterfat, close to modern American light or coffee cream rather than half-and-half or heavy cream; Rintels's whole costing argument rests on buying it by the gallon at sixty cents.
- Loaf and granulated sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in solid cones, chipped and crushed for use. His claim that granulated sugar contains ultramarine generating hydrogen sulphide refers to the period practice of adding a trace of blue pigment to counteract yellowness in refined sugar; it is not a concern with modern sugar.
- Simple syrup made coldCold-process syrup — sugar dissolved in water without heat, usually by percolation — was preferred in pharmacy practice on the grounds that boiling inverts some of the sucrose and can leave a faint cooked note.
- Bicarbonate for glasswareThe dish of baking soda beside the sink is doing real work: it cuts the fatty film left when cream meets an acid phosphate or fruit syrup. Detergent has replaced it, but the underlying problem — greasy glasses killing the head on charged water — is unchanged.
- Root beer at 100 poundsThe 100 pounds is the charging pressure applied before the beer is run through into the serving cylinder, not something to attempt with domestic equipment. Note too that period root beer was often lightly fermented as well as carbonated.
- Marble dust and acidRintels made his own carbon dioxide in a generator by dropping sulphuric acid onto powdered calcium carbonate. This was standard in large fountains and thoroughly obsolete; do not reconstruct it.
James W. Tufts of Boston was one of the great soda-apparatus manufacturers of the late nineteenth century — his fountains were marble-and-nickel monuments, and his prize essay contests were a way of turning his own customers into evangelists for the trade. Rintels won with an argument that reads as modern retail thinking: control your own inputs, refuse to give free counter space to branded "patent" drinks, and spend on cream rather than skimp. His passing mention of "Sundaes, or College Ices" catches the moment when the soda fountain stopped being purely a drinks counter; both names were current in the 1890s, and the origin of the sundae is claimed by several American towns without documentary settlement. The piece also shows why fountains lived in drug stores at all: the apparatus, the carbonic acid gas, the syrups and the flavouring extracts were all pharmacy stock, and the druggist already owned the marble slab.