The Sweet Employee-Owned Treat

Story by Marah Eakin

Please enjoy the below story by Marah Eakin. Do you prefer sugar cones or cake cones?

Photo: Joy Cone

The Sweet Employee-Owned Treat

By Marah Eakin

You might not know the name Joy Cone, but you’ve definitely had one. 

Now in its 105th year, Joy Cone makes about 3.5 billion (with a b!) ice cream cones every single year. That accounts for about 60 percent of cones used in ice cream shops and about 40 percent sold in stores. The company supplies cones to everyone from McDonald’s to Dairy Queen, and it also manufactures cones and cookies for use in tasty treats like Drumsticks and ice cream sandwiches. In essence, if you’ve enjoyed any sort of ice cream product in the past few years — and you probably have, given that the average American eats about 20 pounds of ice cream a year — then chances are good Joy played a part in your delight.

These days, Joy has four plants operating in North America, but when the company began, it was in the back room of a grocery store in a little Ohio Rust Belt community. There, Lebanese immigrant Albert George — whose mother had come over to America as a third-class passenger on the Titanic — opened George and Thomas Cone Company with his brother-in-law, using a small, hand-operated cone oven. The business did okay until the Depression, but that and WWII took a toll on sales and the company’s ability to get materials, and the company’s cone sales floundered a bit until 1964, when it lost its last remaining customer. 

That’s about when Albert’s sons, Joe and Mike George, stepped in. They kept things up and running for the next few years until the late ‘60s when they decided it was time for George and Thomas Cone Company to diversify its wholesale business and launch a retail brand on shelves. 

“To be on the retail side of things, you had to have a brand,” said David George, Joe’s son and current president of the company. Joy’s name came from the cone’s manufacturing equipment, said George.

“A cone oven is a circular oven about 15 feet in diameter, and there are molds attached to that. The batter pours into the mold, and then the other side of the oven clamps down. Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, a machine shop would make a set of molds and they would etch a name in each mold just to kind of say, ‘Okay, those are the Tasty molds. Those are Crystals, those are the…’ whatever. We got a set of molds that said ‘Joy’ on them, and so we thought, ‘that's a good brand name. Let's just go with Joy.’”

Joy subsequently took off, with Dairy Queen bringing in the company’s cones in the late ‘70s and the George And Thomas Cone Company name eventually going away altogether. Today, Joy is the largest cone manufacturer in the world. It’s also entirely employee-owned, something George says has led to incredibly low turnover in staffing for the company, something that’s especially impressive when you consider the average for most of manufacturing is about 50 percent.

“Employees can really see the value of owning a part of the company,” George said. “It's not just your paycheck every two weeks. You want to make sure the company does well, because you want your stock shares to increase in value. Employees work harder and better and smarter, because it's their company, and when you own something, you take better care of it.” Other employee perks at Joy include a very solid 401K plan, free soft serve on Thursdays and Fridays, and free boxes of fresh cones.

While not everyone might know the name “Joy Cone,” that doesn’t mean the brand hasn’t made a lasting impact on almost every American’s life. “It’s like baseball and hot dogs and apple pie,” said George. “It’s ice cream and a cone.”

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