They opted to take a break from the corporate grind and take several off to enjoy life a little. After several years of travel, rest and relaxation - they had a desire to open their own business and try to achieve the "American dream". After several trial balloons with other business's, our founders were made aware of the popularity of a more common non-natural flavored version of their eventual p
roduct called Italian Water Ice on the East Coast (such as Rita's and others). They took a trip back east to research the idea and talked to machine manufacturers, ingredients suppliers and Italian Ice manufacturers to find out as much as they could about the product. They decided that it was not a product that most Californians would like as it was quite sweet, obviously artificially flavored and sweetened/processed with ingredients other than pure cane sugar (ie. Corn Solids, etc.). Rick's grandmother use to make a lemon fruit sorbeto (sorbet) in his youth which his family would eat at grandma's house when ever they would brave the 150 mile journey with him and his three brothers. He asked his wife, originally from Thailand, to look on the internet to try to develop some recipes for 100% Natural Fruit Sorbeto (or Sorbet/Italian Ice) and bought a very good residential Italian Gelato maker to have her start to develop recipes. Well, with-in a few weeks of trial and error, this little lady from Thailand was becoming a world-class Italian Sorbeto Desert Chef - at least according to all our initial repeat customers (the neighborhood kids would not stop knocking on the door after participating in several taste test - some of them at their parents request!). Rick and Jira decided to rent out a corner in a commercial kitchen to make samples with some basic containers and labels. The owner of the commercial kitchen was a caterer - two of her customers were private schools for which she supplied lunch. The kitchen owners husband was a very unhappy man, but whenever he would eat our Lemon OC Fruit Ice at the kitchen - he would always be quite pleasant and would say how popular our product was going to be. His wife said that it was amazing how much her husband enjoyed our product and asked if she could take 30 cups as samples for one of her private schools. She came back with an order for 500 cups for the next days lunch. She did the same thing again several days later to her other school and we ended up with another 1000 cup order plus a second order of 500 cups for the original school. Our owners still had the original small machine and spent most of the evening making product to meet the order. The small machine would make approximately 50 cups per hour. At that point they started to purchase larger equipment such as automatic juicing machines (which will juice 1 case of oranges in 3 minutes) and commercial ice-cream machines which would make 800 cups per hour. After six months of moving into the commercial kitchen - OC Fruit Ice was supplying Italian Ice to over 40 private schools in the LA and Orange County area and had now taken over the whole commercial kitchen. Our first year in business was the year before the strict California State Senate Bill 12 took effect and changed the face of a true nutritional school lunch for ever and the better. When our founders were made aware of this law 1year before implementation - they put together a comparison chart of the SB12 criteria and where OC Fruit Ice fell into that criteria. Our product was way below the thresholds on calories per serving (100 vs 250 max), percent sugar (< 20% vs 35% max), maximum total fat (
