Rita's Italian Ice & Frozen Custard Opens New California Location

CALIFORNIA, Md. – On Wednesday, July 19, 2023, Rita’s Italian Ice & Frozen Custard celebrated the grand opening of their California location with a ‘Free Rita’s for a Year’ giveaway!

Ordering windows opened at approximately 3 pm on Wednesday, and the first 50 guests in line were rewarded with FREE Ritas Italian Ice for an entire year! Already an amazing kickoff to their grand opening celebration, however even if you weren’t one of the first 50 you could still continue to celebrate from 3pm to 5pm with discounted $2 Small Italian Ice and $3 Small Gelati!

The event also provided visitors with free giveaways from the Ritas prize wheel, photo opportunities with Rita’s mascot ‘Ice Guy’ and lots of opportunities to earn free Rita’s swag and merchandise. There was also an official ribbon-cutting ceremony hosted by local franchisees Jeff, Robyn and Tyler Burroughs at 4 pm.

If that alone wasn’t enough to get the local community to show up and out for Ritas, the Burroughs additionally agreed to donate 25% of all proceeds from the grand opening event to the Clements Cuties Foundation helping to provide support to local children and families that have been affected by childhood cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

“Back in early 2021 we bought our first Rita’s Italian Ice location in Southern Maryland. Once we took over our first location which was in Dunkirk, Maryland the questions started with Rita’s. Why is there no Rita’s location in the California/Lexington Park Maryland area? The answer we got back from them was, “It’s an available area”. When we got that answer the 3 of us (Jeff, Robyn & Tyler) made the decision to quickly purchase the franchise license for this area,” stated Jeff Burroughs regarding how this California location came to be.

“After purchasing the license the real fun started which was finding the right location. With knowing the market and driving around to look at every potential location we kept coming back to the old PNC Bank option in the California area. We knew the property had been for sale for several years but the question was if we could make it work.”

“The next step was to figure out if we could actually use the existing building and make it a fresh new landmark in the area. After many discussions, we all decided to move forward using this old building. We knew if we pulled this off the building will have gone through many transitions over the years from a service station, convenience store, bank with a drive-thru and now repurposed to be a Rita’s Italian Ice. During the conversations, we also figured out that if done right this would currently be the only Drive-Thru location in the State of Maryland.”

“When we first started the goal was to have opened in 2022. During the process we were hit with many different type of delays that were out of our control from permitting to even supply chain issues. There were many stressful periods during the process but now that we look at the finished product most of the challenges were worth it. The Rita’s of California is truly a new design of a store in the company to include many options Walk-In, Walk-Up, Drive-Thru, and Third Party Pick-Up.”

“On April 22, 2023 we opened the all new Rita’s of California location. Rita’s Corporate asked us to do a soft opening period which we planned to do. The day we opened the complete Southern Maryland Community came out in large numbers to enjoy our Rita’s products and has continued every day since. I have always said, ‘We don’t do anything small in SOMD’.”

Burroughs also revealed that after seeing the success of this new California location, their next step was to start looking for the next potential location or area in Southern Maryland. This is only the beginning!

Rita’s Italian Ice & Frozen Custard is located at 22618 Three Notch Road California, MD 20619

CHECK OUT ALL THE PHOTOS BELOW!