ABOUT

"Like many people today, I’ve always dreamed of owning my own business and working for myself, but I had no idea what  I could possibly do to make that dream a reality. I truly never expected my dream to take the form of ice cream, but in retrospect, ice cream makes perfect sense.

 

I grew up in South Dakota in a family of eight children, who were being raised by a single mother. Our mom supported us kids on her meager teacher’s salary, and she being a farmer’s daughter, she rarely bought processed foods. She believed that processed foods had little to no nutritional value, therefore they were a waste of her hard-earned money.  

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Our mother was the eldest of nine girls and was responsible for helping take care of her younger sisters. By the time she had her own family, she was quite an accomplished home pastry chef and expert at concocting her own homemade ice cream recipes. Fortunately for us kids, we grew up in a house that always smelled of baked bread and, in the summer,  and for every birthday, we were fortunate to be able to enjoy our mom’s homemade hand-churned ice cream. 

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My brother Mark was searching the Internet looking for business ideas when he came across some recipes for alcohol-infused ice cream. It sounded a little crazy, but we decided to try to come up with our own recipes. I  bought a cheap little ice cream maker, put together a recipe for a White Russian flavor, and took it to our brother Tony’s birthday party to see what people thought of the flavor. People at the party ranted and raved about the ice cream and it was a huge hit! 

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After the party, Mark and I put together a few more recipes and were able to convince a couple of restaurants to sell the ice cream. However, we discovered that because the waitresses had to open and close the freezers so often, the ice cream would melt and re-freeze, forming undesired crystals. Because of this, and with no clear solution to the problem,  we decided to pull out of the restaurants. 

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We knew then that we needed to change our approach; we had to figure out a way to keep the ice cream from melting and re-freezing repeatedly, and the only solution we could come up with was to purchase our own freestanding Liq Creme branded freezers that would only be opened when a customer reached in and pulled out their desired flavor. 

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Our first two stores were a bistro in Longmont and a farmer’s market in Brighton. Sales from those two outlets were so good that they covered our operating costs and kept the dream alive".