Scoops Ice Cream is set to open on 122 North Jackson Street no later than the 29th, with co-owner Kenny Phillips expressing hopes that they will be up and running on the 28th. Phillips talked about how he and his wife Teresa Phillis were inspired to open an ice-cream and candy shop in Americus in a February 12th interview.
“During COVID, we like everybody else, [were] tired of the four walls of our home closing in on us. So we got out, started riding, and ended up in Covington Georgia.”
The result of their adventure was an introduction to the local Scoops ice-cream shop. Phillips mentioned that despite temperatures in the thirties, Teresa was enamored by the shop and decided to try their ice cream. Phillips told how she had previously talked about opening a business in Americus.
“She’s not from here. We married seven years ago, and she fell in love with the town, and felt like we needed to do something in town to provide a business or service. When we left there, she got to thinking, and said ‘What do you think about an ice cream and candy store in Americus?’ So after a lot of praying and talking and thinking, we said let’s go for it and see what happens.”
Phillips mentioned that the endeavor took over a year and 8 months, but that they are now finishing the final preparations.
“We are stocking shelves and putting up most all of the inventory and going through some training with new employees, being trained ourselves from the franchise, and we will have the store up and running by no later than February 29th of this year.”
Phillips described the ice cream that would be sold.
“The ice cream comes from two different creameries. One in Georgia, and one down in Florida. Every ice cream has been carefully designed by our franchise owner. She has gone to both of these creameries and given them her recipes and tweaked the recipes for all the various flavors. We’ll have 32 flavors every day, and then they’ll be a lot of seasonal flavors. Lots of other goodies associated with ice cream such as milk shakes, banana splits, malts, slushies and all those things.”
He mentioned that there would be rows of candy bins as well.
“We’ll have things people remember from their childhood. A lot of prepackage nostalgic candy, along with chocolate covered just about anything that you can think of. We have every kind of nut, and lots and lots of chocolate covered things.
We will have a chocolatier on staff that will hand dipping chocolate items every day, so we’ll have strawberries, and apples, and any kind of cookie that you can imagine, and truffles, high end truffles out of Atlanta. So we’ll offer lots of goodies along with fudge, different assortments of brownies, and a different assortment of big, chunky cookies.”