Farr Better Ice Cream creates new company — Asael Farr & Sons Company, Farr Better Ice Cream and Russell’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream, of Ogden, has created a wholly owned subsidiary company: Farr’s Fresh Inc. The new company has begun opening Farr’s Fresh Ice Cream & Frozen Yogurt Cafes.

The first Farr’s Fresh Café opened in Clinton in mid-August 2009. A second location opened in Orem in mid-November 2009. The first two locations are company-owned stores. Farr’s Fresh has begun selling franchises nationally with the new concept, with several locations in Utah.

Farr’s Fresh Ice Cream & Frozen Yogurt Cafés are unique in that they offer not only several versions of sweet and tart frozen yogurts and frozen custard, but also a broad selection of the same famous Farr premium ice cream flavors available in grocery stores throughout the Rocky Mountain west for almost a century. There is a twist, however. Visitors to a Farr’s Fresh Café enjoy that famous premium Farr frozen yogurt or ice cream in its purest and freshest form, before it is hard frozen in its grocery store version.

Each Farr’s Fresh Café measures approximately 2,000 square feet with an exciting element for customers, where they actually participate by preparing their own dessert.

“Customers create their own masterpiece, just to their own liking,” said Mark Gilleland, COO of Farr’s Fresh Inc.

Farr’s Fresh Cafés join a movement toward a “weigh and pay” concept being employed by trendy food service operations, particularly frozen yogurt shops. Customers self-serve themselves, choosing exactly the portion size and ingredients or toppings they want on their frozen dessert. The dessert is then weighed on a scale and priced by the ounce. Customers are able to self-customize ingredients, elements and size of the dessert specifically to their own tastes.

This new trademark format that Farr’s has registered, “Fresh Serve,” best describes its new and revolutionary products.

“The world is familiar with soft serve ice cream, which makes excellent shakes and soft serve cones,” explained Michael Farr, company president. “But, ‘Fresh Serve’ is new. It’s the world’s introduction to premium ice cream, the stuff sold in higher priced cartons in grocery stores, but in its fresh form and not compromised by having been frozen. That’s the trick here. We’re offering fresh ice cream, rather than traditional frozen ice cream.”

Information on the Farr’s Fresh concept is available online at www.farrsfresh.com, or by contacting Gilleland at (801) 478-4670.

Partnership

APX Alarm Partners with DoxTek for accounts payable — APX Alarm Security Solutions Inc. has teamed up with DoxTek to provide solutions for their accounts payable department. Persisting problems with the traditional method of handling paper-based documents led APX to consider automating their AP procedures.

“The first one was the filing problem, handling all that paper, filing it in alphabetical order,” said Linda Johnson, AP Manager of APX, in a news release. “And when people would need to look at it, they would pull it, and either they would put it back in the wrong place or there was a ton of paperwork to be re-filed.”

In addition to filing these documents, the cost to process an invoice was a major issue for the AP department of APX. To address the issue, the company tapped DoxTek for an AP solution that would best fit their business needs and requirements.

Based on a study done by DoxTek, APX spends an average of 840 hours a year on routing and filing of documents, search and retrieval, and data entry. This process causes APX to spend roughly $7,000 a month. With their new AP solution, their time and expenses associated to filing, searching and retrieving documents will be reduced by 47 percent.

DoxTek designed the system for APX using Kofax scanning software for document scanning, and PaperVision Enterprise software for electronic routing and search and retrieval.

By automating APX’s process of managing documents, the time-consuming and labor-intensive task is now reduced into just a click of a button.