- November 27, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
After a difficult launch, Sandy Kenny’s ice-cream-truck business, Sandalina Treats, is beginning to pick up speed.
When Sandy Kenny approached the city of Flagler Beach about starting an ice-cream-truck business, she was told that she was out of luck. Mobile vendors were illegal in the city, officials told her. Her company, Sandalina Treats, wasn’t welcome there.
But this was her dream they were talking about. Kenny had fantasized about owning her own business, she says, and the truck was her shot at finally doing it. No way was she about to take no for an answer.
“Looking back, it all looks like a stepping stone,” she said, sipping coffee inside the Beachhouse Beanery, in Flagler Beach, now close to six months into her venture. “A lot of closed doors at the beginning, but consistency opened them up.”
After some digging, and nagging — “If someone tells you no you need to ask why,” Kenny says — the city found that nowhere in its legislation was a no-mobile-vendor ordinance. All of the friction was miscommunication. Kenny was free to jockey as much dessert as she wanted — or so she thought, before being thrown out of the city’s Fourth of July festivities last year.
“I marched down to the police station — I was mad!” she said, laughing. The ejection was another confusion. The police who told her to leave were still under the false no-mobile-vendors impression.
But, eventually, all that was cleared up, and now Kenny says the city couldn’t be more helpful.
Selling ice cream is not an earth-shattering endeavor, she admits, but that was part of its appeal. Ice cream is simple, inexpensive, good. In what have become commonly known as “these hard economic times,” ice cream, she felt, was the answer.
Something small and refreshing. Something that makes people happy.
“You think about your childhood and how fun it was to see an ice-cream truck somewhere,” she said. “It seems like everybody’s in a bad place these days. If you can find a little something that makes people smile, that’s a good thing.”
After about a year of permitting and getting her truck together — she sold $1,200 worth of jewelry to make the down payment — last summer, Kenny became a mobile-business owner in Flagler Beach. She achieved her dream, but she didn’t do it alone.
“Everybody’s been great,” she said. “It’s really been picking up.”
Kenny credits the local business community for helping to promote her. But she also points to individuals, like Nadine King, of Christmas Come True (where Kenny has volunteered for three years) ,and Mark Woods, of The Golden Lion Café, who she says have been instrumental in making her business a success.
King spreads the word whenever she can, Kenny says. Woods handles Sandalina’s social media.
Ryan Konig, a family friend who was 15 years old at the time, even designed the truck’s logo.
And all of the effort has been key, she says. Sandalina’s exposure is rising. The truck recently made appearances at a company party and in Flagler Beach’s and Palm Coast’s Christmas parades. It’s at every First Friday, and Kenny is currently in talks with the city’s library, to appear at its children story time sessions.
She also wants to expand her route beyond the southern-Flagler Beach circuit, and look into selling ad space on her truck.
“If you have a dream, just keep pursuing it,” Kenny said. “It may take awhile, but eventually it comes true.”
Even Kenny’s two children, 8-year-old Blane and 22-year-old Devin, help out. At one parade (events are the big money-maker in the ice-cream-truck game, she says), Blane was throwing ice-cream sandwiches into the crowd when all of the kids started going crazy and “attacking” the truck.
“It’s really weird how people freak out over ice cream,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”
Not even adults, though, are immune to Sandalina’s siren song.
“I’ll drive by — right here — by the pier, and people dance,” she said, pointing toward the beach. “Everybody dances.”
The road to establishing herself may have been rocky, but now Kenny sees momentum growing. She feels a sense of community around her company.
It’s not just Kenny’s ice cream truck; it’s the city’s.
For more, call 931-1244.
