10 Year Anniversary
2023 marked a decade of serving “HAPPINESS in every HOMEMADE scoop!”
As we reflect the many years of creating our business, it is with gratitude and amazement that an idea of making homemade ice cream to share with others, a stranger at a farmer’s market who openened his door to his ice cream business and who then became our mentor skillfully and patiently teaching us the ice cream trade (A BIG THANK YOU to Jeff Kostick, owner of Cayuga Lake Creamery), and trips to many food and ice cream conventions, hands on dessert trainings, business training by a world renowned ice cream consultant have all helped us make our first time appearance at an annual community outdoor event in August 2012 and then 9 months later open a brick and mortar shop. We arrived at the community event with a U-Haul truck and rolled our freezer chest into our designated place on the street by a handmade dolly and an E-Z up tent with a brightly colored paper banner sign and iron-on logo t-shirts, nervously serving our first batches of homemade vanilla bean, chocolate, raspberry, salted caramel, mocha chip, cookies and cream, and a chocolate porter ice cream hoping that people would love our product at our first Pop Up event.
A 960 square foot space with orange colored walls decorated with multi-colored polka dot stickers yields to our grand opening of a brick and motor shop on Market St. in May of 2013 during one of the busiest annual festivals, GlassFest that brings thousands of attendees to Corning Memorial Day weekend. Definitely an exciting weekend to open! We were so proud to have a location of our own to continue learning, creating more fun flavors and novelties as more customers came through our door sharing their ideas on flavors. We decided to share our knowledge and opened our shop to community events. This shop became our first to offer “Behind the Scenes” events with local boy scout and girl scout troops and students from local schools. It became a place to help community organizations create awareness of their causes and raise funds. We were soon asked to attend community events and picnics. During the last year in this location we were not only growing in our business, but also in our family with the adoption of our son. Both good challenges to have.
In the Spring of 2018 our little business would soon be moved into another bigger space a block away. This time this space was carefully curated and designed with wood milled by Ben’s grandfather decades ago, handmade tabletops from my brother in TX, and refurbished milk cans from my grandparents’ farm to tap back into our roots of home once living on dairy farms. Reminiscing spending time with our grandparents who lived their entire lives working on their farms, listening to their stories, and making homemade ice creams hand cranked style, calling them “dips’ of ice cream, inspired the naming of our ice cream shop.
Our larger kitchen and serving space enables us to offer 22 Signature ice cream flavors all year round with many seasonal and themed rotating flavors throughout the year. We are also able to make more ice cream cakes, create new products such as our various themed Happy Boxes, refreshers, smoothies, bake our own cookies for our ice cream cookie sandwiches and ice cream cookie pizzas, and make our holiday ice cream pies annually.
Invites to be a part of customer’s special moments and events in different locations became easily made accessible with the introduction of our concession trailer and our ice creams were soon served at other businesses during the pandemic years and are still available today as you’ll find at Crooked Lake Ice Cream Company in Hammondsport. Community connections just like the girl and boy scout troops visiting us to learn about ice cream making in our first ice cream shop, outreach programs supporting local organizations and schools in creating fun flavors to raise funds, and collaborations with other small businesses to support one another have also grown since the start of our business. Our new shop has become a place to gather and celebrate just like our first shop but with more space. With all of this activity it was time to give a refresh on our branding.
We are proud of what we have accomplished in a decade and we appreciate you all coming along on this journey and supporting us! With all of this we’ve experienced more growth, a challenge we are familiar with and ready to move forward on. Our current mission is to find additional space to produce all the fun ice cream flavors for our shop, external events, our concession trailer, and other businesses. This additional space would also fulfill our vision of creating a second home with larger space for a behind the scenes “Make Your Own Ice Cream” experience and a place to help host special events with your family and friends. We invite you to continue to come along with us as we continue this exciting journey in 2024.
