Dear valued customer.
As I am sure you appreciate, the last 3 months have been the highest demand spring for ice cream probably since records began, certainly in living memory of us all.
Apart from a recent customs hold up on a trailer of ingredients from Martini (the first such since Brexit) we have maintained available stocks for the vast majority of ingredients. There are always the few exceptions where our supplies may have had production problems to overcome. There are many reasons for this including raw material shortages and production queues. In order to overcome the impact on supply, Antonelli maintains sufficient stock levels over the peaks of the season so that your business is not so badly affected. Even in the few instances where we do run out of something, we mostly have acceptable alternatives due to number of brands we stock.
Cones and wafers are bulky products with production all year to maintain availability throughout. Antonelli are unique in that we make 99% of the cones and disc wafer we supply to the UK and Ireland; all other waffle cones and disc wafers being imported.
In this exceptional year when we all thought "it must rain next week", for a month or more, we have been to work at full capacity for most weekends this on top of our double shift.
Eventually our schedules hit the point where we could see that there was a risk we might run short of cones for you. One option we have is to buy in disc wafers in order to maintain supply of cones, the oven that we bake wafers on was left on cones which not only gave us the extra cone volume per day but saved the change over time.
The discs that we purchased have a smaller pattern on the engraved side and on average are 5mm smaller in diameter. They will also taste different because they are not made by Antonelli, even though there is no ingredient change.
The slightly smaller wafer means that we have to print that bit smaller too. To compensate you for this we will be reducing the prices by 5% whist this substitution exists. Pricing automatically revering when our wafers are again used. We forecast that this will be in September this year.
Our 10 day lead time on printing wafers we have maintained and see no reason why this will be a problem going forward.
We know that you to have been under pressure for ice cream stocks and working tirelessly to look after your customers expectations. David and I do hope that you will bear with us and be assured that we are baking hard to support your business in this well received bumper start to the ice cream year.
Yours faithfully
Mark Antonelli
