Aureus is a brand development company that focuses on acquiring and growing established food brands.

Here are five tips for sustaining a profitable family business.

You won't find any fancy feeder hoppers or blenders in Praline's Inc.'s Wallingford, Conn., ice cream processing, distribution and headquarters facility. The company believes that the old-fashioned methods still yield the best-tasting ice cream. So plant employees start with a high-quality base, then mix in the variegates and inclusions by hand.

Bees are critical to one-third of the world's crops, including ingredients that are used in more than one-third of Haagen-Dazs ice cream flavors. However, their numbers continue to dwindle, an estimated one-third of honey bee colonies were lost between April 2016 and March 2017, Haagen-Dazs said.

Compared to many other ice cream processors, Wallingford, Conn.-based Praline’s Inc. runs a rather small operation. The 34-year-old company got its start with a single Praline’s ice cream store in Wallingford; it later sold that shop through a franchise agreement to exit retail and enter the ice cream-making business full time.

Cedar Crest Ice Cream makes an impressive amount of ice cream in its 45,408-square-foot facility in Manitowoc, Wis. The plant currently produces approximately 26 million pounds of product annually. The company uses the space wisely and continues to upgrade equipment and technology as product demand increases.

The four brothers who make up the ownership of Cedar Crest Ice Cream, Ken, Robert, Bill and Tim Kohlwey, all agree that their company may not be the biggest, but they're proud of what it's accomplished. And it's accomplished plenty.