Rio's flavors are infinite -- brandy alexander! red hot! blueberry cheesecake! -- and they're available in sizes from four-ounce samples to 55-gallon drums. The production line can crank out up to 500 gallons an hour. The company also sells pure concentrate, with each gallon yielding 32 gallons of syrup. That's enough for more than 4,000 snow cones.
For shaved-ice flavors, cherry is the most popular; it nearly eclipses the runners-up combined (blue raspberry and grape are Nos. 2 and 3, respectively). Rio purchases extracts and essences from a variety of suppliers to create its signature flavors; any given flavor may contain five or more extracts to get the taste just so.
Recent years have seen a return to the soda syrups that Stuart Tomber started with back in 1940. Thanks to the popularity of home-soda kits like SodaStream, such syrups have become a large and rapidly growing segment of Rio's business. Australia in particular is mad for craft sodas -- there, the colorless lemon flavor is the most requested.
Rio's products pop up in unexpected ways. They're in the food coloring that's printed on the end of register tape to signal it's time for a new roll -- because it comes in contact with food, it has to be edible. Rio products have also been used as dye for birdhouse paint -- the regular stuff can be toxic to fowl. Farmers have mixed the strawberry into their animal feed -- it turns out pigs think that flavor is tasty, too.
Even 75 years in, Rio strives to keep up with current trends. The company rode the "bacon bubble" for a while, Billy says, and though maple-bacon wasn't a top seller, the flavor ended up being a good one for vendors who used it in their funnel cakes. Other recent additions include salted caramel, huckleberry and crème brûlée.
Years ago, an idea was floated to make a beer-flavored snow cone. Like a watered-down brewski, it fell flat.
"It's the projects that keep me interested," Billy confesses. "I probably hear a million-dollar idea every day, and maybe one in a hundred pan out. But when it does, that's a good project."
Patricia Williams of Tropical Moose calls the Tomber family "the absolute best to work with." When Tro Mo moved into its Webster Groves storefront in 2009, she recalls, Addie was there with a hand-painted planter. These days Phil often stops by the farmers' market stand to chat when he's volunteering at Kirkwood's train station.
And if Rio doesn't get all the recognition it has earned over the last 75 years, that's all right by the Tombers. A wildly popular snow-cone stand in Texas gets its product from that modest brick building in downtown St. Louis, but the stand has been reluctant to tell its customers where the syrup comes from -- lest a rival business find out and want use it too.
Just like the origin of that rogue piña colada in Hawaii, Rio might well remain St. Louis' sweet little secret.
