Indulgent Ice Creams Sport Sophisticated Flavors
By Lorrie Baumann
Sophisticated flavors, clean labels and high-quality ingredients are persuading Millennial foodies that ice cream isn’t a pleasure they need to leave behind with their childhoods. At this year’s International Dairy Foods Association’s annual Innovative Ice Cream Flavor Competition in Fort Myers, Florida, it was fun and fruity flavors that took top prizes.
Signature RESERVE Brazilian Guava Cheesecake Ice Cream, entered by Albertsons Companies; Spicy Mango Raspberry Fiesta Ice Cream, submitted by SensoryEffects Flavor Systems; and the Pomegranate and Sweet Potato Medley Bar, submitted by Perry’s Ice Cream Company, Inc. were named the most innovative ice cream products at the competition. The competition, held each year during IDFA’s Ice Cream Technology Conference, showcases the creativity of U.S. ice cream makers and flavorings suppliers and captures upcoming flavor trends in the ice cream and frozen dessert industry.
“Fruit was the name of the game in this year’s contest, and contestants showed off their expert ability to pair fresh, tropical fruits with almost anything, including spices, vegetables and decadent deserts,” said Cary Frye, IDFA Senior Vice President of Regulatory Affairs. “Ice creams featuring cookie doughs and butters, as well as salty nuts, were also highly favored flavors in this year’s lineup.”
The Albertsons Companies entry earned first place in the most innovative ice cream flavor category. It is a sweet-and-sour, super-premium cheesecake ice cream balanced with ribbons of tart guava puree and contains bites of cheesecake crust pieces. Spicy Mango Raspberry Fiesta Ice Cream was named the most innovative prototype flavor. It is a mango and red-pepper ice cream with a sweet swirl of raspberry. Perry’s Ice Cream’s Sweet Potato Medley Bar took top honors in the most innovative novelty category. It’s a frozen dessert bar made with real fruit and vegetable juice.
This year’s conference set records for number of entries in the competition, as well as attendance. More than 160 ice cream industry professionals attended the event, where they tasted, judged and selected the winners from a record total of 40 flavor entries.
The best ice cream tasted by this year’s sofi™ Award judges was Humphry Slocombe‘s Black Sesame. It’s one of a dizzying array of flavors offered by San Francisco, California, entrepreneurs Jake Godby and Sean Vahey, co-Founders of Humphry Slocombe. Godby, a pastry chef by training, is also the company’s Chef, while Vahey, who has a background in food and beverage management, also serves as its Marketing Director.
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The packaging for Humphry Slocombe’s retail pints includes a little of Godby and Vahey’s story, and there’s a quote on every carton. “It’s about staying true to ourselves….You’re still getting that experience. It doesn’t get lost in translation,” Vahey says. “Of course it’s super fun to come into our store, but we want you to have that when you pick up a pint of our ice cream too. At the end of the day, it’s about the ice cream. It’s a unique high quality ice cream that we want you to remember.”
The Black Sesame flavor that won this year’s gold sofi Award includes toasted black sesame seeds with sesame oil added to amp up the flavor even more. The rest of the current lineup includes flavors like POG Sorbet, which combines passion fruit, orange and guava in a nondairy sorbet; Matchadoodle, an ice cream made with green tea from Kyoto and snickerdoodle cookies made in-house; Blueberry Boy Bait, which offers brown sugar streusel stirred into a blueberry ice cream and Dirty Chai, a chai ice cream with espresso in it. The adult-oriented flavors were Godby’s idea, Vahey says. “We didn’t necessarily pigeonhole it as ice cream for adults,” he said. “We just happen to have adult tastes.”
That same combination of adult tastes and training as a pastry chef informs the ice cream sandwiches made by Too Cool Chix. The New York City-based company is led by CEO Sharon Monahan and her co-Founder Michele Elmer, a pastry chef trained by the Culinary Institute of America. “She really has pulled from the flavors she discovered being a chef,” Monahan said. The Beauty Bar, one of her company’s flagship products, is made from a lavender ice cream and lemon cookies. “It’s definitely a customer favorite,” Monahan said. I Dream In Chocolate depends on chocolate from Hispaniola in an indulgent small-batch chocolate ice cream paired with a dark chocolate cookie.
The entire line is built on high-quality ingredients, all natural and locally sourced, with organic ingredients used when possible. The ice cream is made with locally sourced milk, cream and cage free eggs – no gums are added; it’s stabilized with egg yolks. The lavender and vanilla are organic, and the cocoa is fair trade. “The clean label thing was there from the beginning,” Monahan said. “We took a look at what’s in a lot of other ice cream brands and said we’d like to see what we can do with cleaner ingredients. Our sandwiches have one tenth the amount of sugar as some of the other leading brands and one fourth of the sodium, so you really taste the flavors instead of just the sugar.”
Tea-rrific! Ice Cream, which won the bronze sofi Award in this year’s competition, also emphasizes a clean ingredient deck in its super-premium ice creams infused with freshly brewed loose leaf and herbal teas. Masala Chai, the flavor that won this year’s sofi Award, is made from a freshly brewed blend of Assam black tea, rooibos herbal tea, cardamom, ginger, clove, and several other spices and peppercorns. The chai is then added to a sweet cream base along with an extra helping of Tea-rrific!’s own mix of spices for good measure and balance.
In 2015, the company’s Chamomile flavor was a finalist in the sofi competition. For this flavor, Tea-Riffic! brews Egyptian chamomile flowers, which offer notes of apple and honey. The floral notes of this caffeine-free herbal tea, which is known for its soothing effects, combine perfectly with a luscious sweet cream base to create the flavor that won over the judges. “We are very excited to be once again recognized by the sofi judges,” said Souvannee Leite, CEO and co-Founder of Tea-rrific! Ice Cream, “It is truly wonderful when those who see and sample the best of the best on a regular basis choose your product as one that stands out among our many worthy peers.”
Ice Cream as Performance Art: Humphry Slocombe
By Lorrie Baumann
The best ice cream tasted by this year’s sofi™ Award judges was Humphry Slocombe’s Black Sesame. It’s one of a dizzying array of flavors offered by San Francisco, California, entrepreneurs Jake Godby and Sean Vahey, co-Founders of Humphry Slocombe. Godby, a pastry chef by training, is also the company’s Chef, while Vahey, who has a background in food and beverage management, also serves as its Marketing Director.
The Black Sesame flavor includes toasted black sesame seeds with sesame oil added to amp up the flavor even more. The rest of the current lineup includes flavors like POG Sorbet, which combines passion fruit, orange and guava in a nondairy sorbet; Matchadoodle, an ice cream made with green tea from Kyoto and snickerdoodle cookies made in-house; Blueberry Boy Bait, which offers brown sugar streusel stirred into a blueberry ice cream and Dirty Chai, a chai ice cream with espresso in it. The adult-oriented flavors were Godby’s idea, Vahey says. “We didn’t necessarily pigeonhole it as ice cream for adults,” he said. “We just happen to have adult tastes.”
“I just don’t know how to do anything else,” Godby adds. “The ice cream that we make is to my taste. I just didn’t see the reason to duplicate what other people were already doing very well. We were very fortunate that there was a market for what we were making, but we were going to make what we do either way.”
The two originally founded their business in December of 2008 with the thought that what they were starting was going to be just a quirky little ice cream shop in San Francisco’s Mission District. “We’re just being ourselves. We’re lucky that people liked us. This was not test-marketed,” Godby says. “We had no clue that it would blow up the way it did. And it did — it blew up hot.”
It took the business partners two years of wading through bureaucracy and working with contractors to get their doors open, and on their opening day, there was still a sawhorse in their lobby, and Vahey was sweeping up sawdust off the floor. “Most ice cream stores are pink and they’re soft and they’re cute. We are not cute,” Vahey says. “There’s nothing about Jake or I that’s cute or adorable. We’re intense and in-your-face, just like the ice cream. When you came into our shop, you had an experience.”
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Vahey and Godby had eight flavors of ice creams in the case in those days, and they were rotating flavors every day. Customers could sample any or all of the flavors before committing to a whole scoop. “Every ice cream had a story, and that wasn’t happening anywhere,” Vahey says. “We were bringing you into our world.”
“We couldn’t keep up with the demand; the lines were getting longer and longer,” Godby adds.
One of the proprietors’ first surprises was their customer’s apparent fondness for strawberries. Their culinary approach to ice cream required fresh ingredients and seasonal flavors, and their customers were asking for strawberry ice cream in the dead of winter, when there were no strawberries to be found. Finally, when spring came around and strawberries came onto the market, Godby made the ice cream that so many had been requesting, and he called it Here’s Your Damn Strawberry, which is the name by which the flavor is known today at Humphry Slocombe.
The pair didn’t have any marketing budget, but social media was just getting under way, so they made the most of it with posts that created a sensory experience. “We were going to put our faces and our voices into our marketing,” Godby says. We were doing tons of image-heavy ice cream and food porn, and that resonated with a lot of people.”
Today, the packaging for their retail pints reflects that same desire to bring customers into the world of Humphry Slocombe. Packages include a little of Godby and Vahey’s story, and there’s a quote on every carton. “It’s about staying true to ourselves. …You’re still getting that experience. It doesn’t get lost in translation,” Vahey says. “Of course it’s super fun to come into our store, but we want you to have that when you pick up a pint of our ice cream too. At the end of the day, it’s about the ice cream. It’s a unique high quality ice cream that we want you to remember.”
Creative Chill from Coolhaus
By Lorrie Baumann
Premium ice cream brand Coolhaus is getting set for summer with the launch of seven new ice cream flavors and three new ice cream sandwich varieties this year at Natural Products Expo West. The new ice cream flavors will be available in pints and include Milkshake & Fries, Street Cart Churro Dough, Midnight Munchies, Farmers Market Strawberry Cheesecake, Buttered French Toast, Chocolate Love and Best of Both Worlds Vanilla.
The three new ice cream sandwich varieties are That Dough Though Ice Cream Sammie, Gimme S’mores Ice Cream Sammie and Birthday Cake Ice Cream Sammie. That Dough Though combines chewy chocolate chip cookies and cookie dough ice cream, Gimme S’mores combines graham chocolate chip cookies and marshmallow graham ice cream, and Birthday Cake offers a sugar cookie with sprinkles and cupcake frosting ice cream.
The flavors as well as their names represent the women-owned company’s philosophy of having fun and being creative while also standing up for the quality of their super-premium ice cream. “We take what we do seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously,” says CEO and co-Founder Natasha Case. “We really also like to use design for storytelling and expressing our values. … We’re always, always making sure that our message is being heard by our consumers, that we’re creating this top-notch brand for them.”
Just to give a couple more examples of the kind of creativity sparked by that intention, Coolhaus’ Milkshake & Fries Ice Cream offers salted Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream with shoestring french fries and milk chocolate malt balls, while Midnight Munchies offers chocolate peanut butter ice cream with chocolate-covered pretzels and peanut butter cups. Buttered French Toast Ice Cream, which suggests the possibility of either having dessert for breakfast or having breakfast for dessert, offers a combination of buttered brown sugar ice cream with pecan pralines, cakey toast pieces and a maple swirl.
All this started when Case and co-Founder Freya Estreller met and discovered that they shared interests in both architecture and ice cream. Case’s background is in architecture and design, while Estreller had a background in real estate development. The two of them started baking cookies that they built into ice cream sandwiches that they saw as a kind of edible architecture. “I love that it [ice cream] is a canvas for all these great flavors. It’s the ultimate kind of nostalgic comfort food,” Case says. “It’s good for kids, good for adults, and when you combine it with the cookies, it opens up even more flavor possibilities. The combination of the two always spoke to me.”
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Once they’d come up with some ice cream sandwiches that they named after the architects and architectural movements that inspired them, they began working on how to go commercial with their concept. “We started the business and fell in love and decided that the best way to get the product to market was with a food truck,” Case says.
A food truck in California in 2009 inspired a 2011 food truck in New York City. “We’re an L.A.-born and raised brand. This is definitely home turf, and I love the way that L.A. has become this food destination,” Case says. “New York was an obvious extension because of the connection between the two large cities. We had clients in New York who would book us for L.A. activities.” Then friends who were also former architects reached out and asked the pair to bring their brand to Texas, and in 2012, they opened a food truck in Dallas. They decided that next they’d explore other channels, and now they also operate two scoop shops in California, one in Old Town Pasadena and the other in Culver City, which offers the advantage of being central to southern California’s entertainment industry, Case says. “Culver City we really liked because it’s really central. There’s a rich history of arts and entertainment with studios there,” she says. “We felt it was a neighborhood that was on its way to up and coming. We like to be pioneers and bring the elevated brands to a space and be a leader, and that’s exactly what’s happening in Culver City.” Coolhaus has continued to grow and currently includes a fleet of nine trucks and carts, three scoop shops and the wholesale distribution in more than 6,000 retailers nationwide that’s now the biggest part of the business.
All the way along, it’s been important to the pair to emphasize that their brand is owned by women, and this year at Natural Products Expo West, they were promoting the #iBuyWomenOwned hashtag as a way of bringing awareness to women-owned businesses. That message is catching on among female celebrities, and Case sees it as the foundation of a movement in the making. “We’re definitely making not only our L.A. identity but being a women-owned brand a big part of our messaging,” she says. “It’s just important to lead by example. Women are the majority of the consumers, especially in the ice cream space, and it’s important to lead by example and create the opportunities.”
The new flavors offered in pints are the company’s most recent addition to its line, but Case has even more ambitious plans in the offing. Later this year, the company will offer four holiday flavors in pints: Brown Butter Gingerbread, Spiked Eggnog, Pumpkin Pie Cheesecake and Chocolate Peppermint Animal Cookies. Another seven flavors in pints will be coming out next year, although Case isn’t ready yet to reveal what those will be, and a whole nondairy line will also be coming out 2019, she says.
“It’s exciting that as you grow, you can introduce yourself as being more and more unique instead of diluting yourself,” Case says. “We’re more confident of our identity as we get bigger, so we’re able to be more and more unique, which is really exciting.”