“From Beloved Beacon to Forgotten Relic: Unraveling the Astonishing Decline of Howard Johnson’s Empire”
His second struggling business in hand, he renamed the establishment Howard D. Johnson Co. Patent Medicines and Toilet Articles, and got to work to see if he could turn it around. First, he hired paper boys to go forth and sell his newspapers to the local community, rather than waiting for them to come purchase the papers from his shop. Next, as the soda fountain was the most lucrative part of the company, he began experimenting with ways to augment that side of the business, in particular focussing on ice cream meant for making sundaes and floats.
As for this, he eventually came up with a slight modification on normal ice cream of the era, with stories varying on how he settled on his now famous final recipe, either purchasing it from a German ice cream pushcart vendor, doing his own experiments, or that he simply used a recipe of his mother’s- with some accounts stating he did all three. Whatever the case there, what Johnson settled on was essentially doubling the butterfat in a normal ice cream recipe, both making his ice cream different than his competitors, while also being something customers seemingly loved. In the initial going, he offered three flavors using this base recipe- vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. But in the aftermath as ice cream sales very quickly rose at his establishment, through further experimentation, he came up with his soon to be famous 28 flavors, including such things as Butter Pecan, Caramel Fudge, Fudge Ripple, Peanut Brittle, Coffee, and Butterscotch.
