A new player in the shave ice game will open up for business Saturday at Maui’s Kaahumanu Center and on the road, via two shave ice and ice cream trucks.
Tikiz Shaved Ice and Ice Cream, as it is known on the mainland, is a franchise operation established in Florida in 2012 by Brian Tollefson, who may never have imagined he’d be importing coals to Newcastle with a Hawaii franchisee.
Tollefson "and his wife came to Hawaii on their honeymoon 10 years ago and really liked the whole tropical theme," said Vince Rosano, Tikiz Maui owner.
"He was into other franchise businesses, juice bars and stuff," and he didn’t care much for how the ice cream truck business has deteriorated over the years, Rosano said.
Tollefson put the two ideas together, combining the clean-cut Good Humor man of old in a spartan white truck, with the vibrant tropical colors of Hawaii and its shave ice, and created Tikiz Shaved Ice and Ice Cream.
Rosano bought the Hawaii franchise rights and immediately got the "d" out of there, so its trucks will be called Tikiz Shave Ice and Ice Cream, while the kiosk at Kaahumanu Center will be known as Tikiz Shave Ice and Snow Shakes, in deference to longtime tenants at the mall already serving ice cream. Snow shakes are a blended version of shave ice ingredients.
The mainland Tikiz trucks traditionally offer as many as a dozen ice cream novelties in addition to the shave ice, "but we’re going to focus more on shave ice, with maybe two or three ice cream bars," Rosano said.
Rosano’s Tikiz trucks will be available for hire for private parties, starting at $125 for half an hour for a party of up to 25 people.
The birthday boy or girl would get a T-shirt and music, while the guests would receive plastic lei and get to apply their own syrups to their shave ice. The so-called Surv-board features an array of syrup dispensers from a surfboard-shaped frame.
Rosano also is marketing the trucks to schools, churches and other nonprofit organizations for fundraising sales, after which the nonprofit host would receive 20 percent of the truck’s sales.
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ON THE NET:
» tikiz2u.com/maui
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Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.
