Carving a niche
Business First of Louisville - by Terry Poulton
If Grocers Ice Co. president Walter Camentz hadn't been dead wrong in his market projections in 1947, the company probably wouldn't be nearing a century of continuous operation in downtown Louisville today.
And it certainly wouldn't be ideally equipped to exploit its new niche of supplying intricately carved ice sculptures to upscale customers in 15 states, according to Ron Turnier.
Now vice president of Grocers Ice, Turnier is married to Camentz's granddaughter, Mollie C. Turnier, the company's fourth-generation president. Mollie Turnier also is co-owner of the company with her father, Ernst Camentz.
Ron Turnier explained that after home refrigerators were introduced at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair, most of the other ice houses in the country began closing because they realized the ice boxes they supplied were becoming obsolete.
"But Walter was so sure home refrigerators would never be financially feasible that he went in the opposite direction," Turnier said.
A mistake turns into a boon
In 1947, Camentz added a state-of-the art block-ice plant to the sprawling brick structure at 609 E. Main St. his father had built when he founded Grocers Ice in 1906.
His big gamble proved to be a virtual white elephant for most of the next two decades.
With home refrigerators becoming more and more affordable, Grocers Ice's customer base steadily lost 100 percent of its residential account.
It struggled to stay afloat by supplying commercial customers, including grocery stores, hotels, and railways, Turnier said.
But business picked up in the 1960s as convenience stores proliferated and turned bagged ice into a consumer staple.
By the late 1980s, the future of Grocers Ice had begun looking even rosier thanks to the rising popularity of elaborate ice sculptures as centerpieces at corporate and social functions.
Then, in late 1991, the company was nearly destroyed by a devastating fire for which it was not insured.
Rising from the ashes
Turnier said it took the Grocers Ice principals six years of hard work to restore their building and their business. In 1997, the company resumed marketing ice and also expanded into selling produce through its Creation Gardens Co. arm, of which he is president.
By then, Grocers Ice had one of only a handful of block-ice plants still in existence, and in good shape, in the United States.
"And it's way too expensive to construct them today with anything like the same quality," he said.
The company's competitive edge also was strengthened by special ice-clarification processes developed by Turnier's father-in-law, Ernst Camentz.
A decision was made recently to sell that exceptionally clear ice not just in 300-pound blocks, at $44 per block, but to market some of it directly in a line of ice sculptures, retailing at $150 to $200 each.
Grocers Ice began doing exactly that this month.
Blocks of ice are shipped to Cincinnati in the company's two refrigerated semitrailer trucks.
There, artists at Artic Diamond Ice Sculptures Co. do the carving, after which the finished sculptures are sent to customers throughout 15 states in the Southeast.
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