Too much of a good thing?

Tom Washburn, owner of Moxley’s, isn’t worried that Star Spangled Ice Cream may outgrow his company.

The growth of a politically conservative Web-based ice cream could mean a loss of business for Baltimore’s own Moxley’s ice cream.Star Spangled Ice Cream, which Moxley’s produces, is trying to grow its mostly mail-order operation to sell its pints — including “I Hate the French Vanilla” and “Iraqi Road” — at grocery stores, supermarkets and convenience stores, said company Vice President Richard Lessner. Lessner also is executive director of American Conservative Union, a conservative lobbying organization based in Alexandria, Va. His partners in the company are President Andrew Stein, a New Jersey lawyer, and CEO Frank Cannon, who works for a Washington consulting firm.The three are pleased with the success of their mail-order business and will start offering pints regionally, likely beginning with the East Coast, Lessner said.And that could mean that Moxley’s, a small business, simply won’t be able to keep up. But that’s OK with owner Tom Washburn. He expected as much.“If they outgrow us, that’s fine. We are a small manufacturer and we realize that we are limited in what we can do,” Washburn said. “I just don’t see us spending lots of money upgrading equipment that we’re not ready to invest in right now. We would only really do that if the Moxley’s brand justified it.”Right now, Moxley’s uses a so-called batch freezer, which produces about 30 gallons per hour. Continuous freezers, which Baskin Robbins uses, can produce anywhere from 200 gallons to 5,000 gallons per hour. However, they can each cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“We’re not going to be like the Lee’s [Ice Cream] of the world where we think we’re going to compete with the national brands,” said Washburn, referring to the Owings Mills-based ice cream maker.Moxley’s is aimed at local, specialty food retailers.“[I] have a special product that’s not mass marketed,” he said. “I kind of go hot and cold about what our next step is going to be. And the next step is, to be honest, if our pint business got so large we could probably have someone else make it on their equipment so that we wouldn’t have to buy that equipment.”Star Spangled now has five varieties, which it sells through its Web site — www.starspangledicecream.com — and at Sweet Annie’s in Lutherville. The three partners are considering other conservative flavors, including “Kerry Berry,” whose label describes it as “strawberry ice cream with a liberal dose of bleeding heart candy;” “RushMallow,” referring to conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh; and “Choc & Awe,” “chocolate ice cream exploding with chocolate chips and cookie bits.”“We’ve been selling just the four original flavors and the “Gun Nut” that we rolled out in October, but to go retail you need to have a little bit bigger product,” Lessner said. “As I understand it, when you go to retail outlets, you have to have a little bit broader retail line than four or five flavors; say, eight, 10 or 12 flavors.”