A Concrete Idea

Sam did.

Sam lived in St Louis where its always hot and sticky during the summer … and when it hot and sticky … a good business to get into is selling ice cream. So Sam bought a franchise ice cream shop and then few more … and pretty soon he had numerous stores right across town selling tasty cool treats … except Sam had one major competitor … Ted Drewes … Ted owned and operated his own ice cream store … a store that was always crazy busy … with clients buying Ted’s famous frozen custard treat that was so thick it was called “Concrete”

Ted was really happy just having his one big location and had no interest in franchising … Sam saw real value in creating a treat similar to Concrete … but made some of his own modifications including adding other special ingredients that required Sam to then develop and patent a special machine to make his version of the treats effortlessly. The rest is history.

Today, over 35 years later, the treat Samuel J. Temperato concocted for his 67 Dairy Queen locations in St Louis and then was launched worldwide by Dairy Queen sells hundreds of millions of units every year around the world .… And whenever people credit Sam for coming up with it, Sam always to point to Ted Drewes for the inspiration that became … The DQ Blizzard.

The DQ Blizzard is a great idea because taking inspiration from others while giving them credit is just good business ethics.