Ice cream causes a headache for maker.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

Business North Carolina, December, 2000

His customers at The Scoop in Wilmington suspected nothing, but Dillon Tillman knew something wasn't right about the chocolate-chip, cookie-dough ice cream he was serving. "I looked down at it and I was like, 'That just looks funny,' and I served a couple and kept looking at it and was like, 'It doesn't have any chocolate chips in it.'"

Fellow ice-cream-parlor owners were finding similar quality-control problems. Their complaints forced Wilson-based ice-cream maker MelloButtercup Inc. to abandon a seemingly sweet cost-saving plan after just six months.

By farming out production of parlor-bound ice cream -- 40 flavors in all -- to an out-of-state ice-cream maker, MelloButtercup hoped to mothball part of its 54-year-old plant and escape other high costs...