The Inside Scoop

If the recession has taught us anything, it’s that the sweet tooth must still be fed. And we all know those blissful minutes spent salivating over artisan ice cream are worth every penny. With the warmer months returning, owners of ice cream shops in the North Bay are gearing up for a busy season, whipping up the luscious confections their customers crave.

Doing one thing well and right

When Maraline “Mimi” Olson decided to create “a special place to come for a special product,” she hatched the idea for Screamin’ Mimi’s Ice Cream in downtown Sebastopol. Olson, a New York native, moved to Sonoma County in 1993. She’d owned a clothing store back east and also worked as a fashion stylist in New York City. As a new West Coast transplant, she wanted to run her own business again, but this time with something different.

“Ice cream is truly my favorite food,” she says. “Plus, I missed the ‘homemade ice cream’ that’s much more available on the East Coast. I felt that an independent, unique ice cream shop was really lacking in an area like this, that’s so food oriented.”

Starting with a small home ice cream machine, Olson set about experimenting with flavors. She also read books about how to open and operate an ice cream store, and she traveled back east and enrolled in Penn State’s well-respected, week-long course in ice cream manufacturing that teaches students the business “from cow to cone.”

Screamin’ Mimi’s became a reality in 1995 and, by 2003 Olson’s husband, Kurt, had left his job as a chemical engineer in the semiconductor industry to work in the shop, too. “I had two small children at home by then, and I needed someone else to help with the business,” she says. These days, she adds, “We both run the shop and trade off the ice cream making part of the job. Kurt currently does the bookkeeping and scheduling, while I do the training, hiring and ‘front end’ of the shop. We trade off on the ice cream making. And one of our children will be working at Screamin’ Mimi’s a bit this coming summer!” In the busy summer season, Olson is at the shop nearly every morning to mix together as many as 15 flavors.

Using a prepared base of hormone-free whole milk, Olson concocts up to 125 ice cream flavors that are rotated through the case. On an average day, 24 choices are for sale: 16 ice creams and eight dairy-free sorbets. Her most popular ice cream is “Mimi’s Mud,” which is espresso-based with Belgian chocolate chips and a fudge swirl. Another big seller is “Mimi’s Mistake,” which began as a genuine goof. Olson says she was “unsuccessfully multitasking” one day and mistakenly used a peanut butter base instead of espresso (it still has the Belgian chocolate and fudge, though). The flub became a hit.

What makes Screamin’ Mimi’s ice cream so delicious, according to Olson, is her refusal to buy artificial or cheap ingredients. “I don’t base my decisions on the price of the ingredients,” she explains. “I use pure vanilla, never artificial—and it’s expensive. Even after weather problems once resulted in a shortage of the beans, I kept paying the high price because that’s the flavor I wanted. The president of the spice company even called to thank me for being such a loyal customer.”

Olson sources most of her fruit locally, with fresh peaches from farmers’ markets, pesticide-free strawberries grown less than a mile from the shop and blueberries raised in Sebastopol. She also makes an olive oil ice cream using California oils. Yet experimenting with new flavors isn’t always fruitful. “I tried making a fresh kiwi ice cream once, but it never made it out to the case,” she says. “There was an odd chemical reaction. Visibly and texturally, the ice cream was fine, but I think the acids in the kiwi reacted, and there was an unpleasant aftertaste of souring milk. But one bad flavor in 17 years isn’t too bad.”

The menu at Screamin’ Mimi’s remains uncomplicated: ice cream, sorbet, coffee drinks and Italian sodas. “Even when the shop is slow in winter, we can stay open and not sell anything else [but ice cream],” says Olson. “There’s never been a lull where I thought we needed to start selling soup, too. We do one thing, and we do it right.”

Mexican-style ice cream booming

The Mexican state of Michoacán is known for its distinctive and well-loved ice cream, and the many natives of that area who now live in the North Bay can’t get enough of it. The popularity of the confection in Mexico has resulted in several recently opened local shops—including Michoacán Natural Ice Cream on Jefferson Street in Napa—that sell the traditional frozen desserts and fruit-based popsicles sought after by the Hispanic community.

Co-owner Rodney Carr leaves the day-to-day operation of the two-year-old shop to partners/managers Joel and Rosario Contreras. Joel is the chief ice cream maker and popsicle wizard (more than 30 flavors are available daily), while Rosario runs the front of the shop. They use an egg-free base and then add fresh fruit to create the 30 flavors for sale in the case on a typical day.

“We can make many more flavors, about 50, and we keep changing them out,” says Joel Contreras. “We hand-peel every mango, slice every strawberry and squeeze every lime.”

The mango parfaits are given an extra kick with chile pepper, and the pineapple-chile popsicle is a customer favorite. The classic Mexican-style ice creams share the case with other flavors such as cookies and cream, rocky road and seasonal options like pumpkin, eggnog and cookie dough.

“We get people coming in because this ice cream is something that reminds them of where they came from. It’s a taste of their home, here in the United States. They ‘own’ it, and they love it,” says Carr. “But there are also people, who’ve never tried this style of ice cream before, who’ve become regular customers and bring family and friends.”

The shop was on hiatus over the winter, which gave Carr and the Contrerases an opportunity to refabricate the production room as well as freshen the paint and the mural of monarch butterflies within the shop’s interior (the Mexican state of Michoacán is famous as the migratory winter habitat of Monarchs). They also used the break to get paperwork in order to sell their sweets at the weekly Chef’s Market in downtown Napa this summer. Rosario Contreras says the shop can bring a smaller selection of its ice cream flavors to private events at wineries and other venues, too. The shop is scheduled to reopen on April 1.

Scaling up to a national brand

In May, the bright green packaging that identifies North Bay-based Three Twins Organic Ice Cream will appear in freezers in Whole Foods stores across America (minus New York, New Jersey and Florida, for the time being)—a major marketing achievement for a company that began with one small scoop shop in San Rafael in 2005.

Only 10 years ago, Neal Gottlieb, Three Twins’ “founding twin” (“never CEO,” he states), was a long way from becoming an ice cream mogul. The Cornell University graduate was climbing the corporate ladder at Gap, Inc. when he chose a different path for his life. “I quit Gap and joined the Peace Corps,” he says. “When I returned to America [in 2003], I had plans to go to business school, but ultimately changed my mind. I’m not a cubicle guy. I’m more of an open office, shared-work-space kind of guy.”

Gottlieb named the company for himself, his twin brother Carl, and Carl’s wife (also a twin). The idea for organic ice cream came from his desire to produce “a great product at a fair price” that would appeal to a wide range of people who were “willing to pay a little bit more for an exceptional taste experience,” he says. “I wanted to start something in a small shop for a relatively small amount of money and then scale up to a national brand.”

Every single ingredient in Three Twins ice cream is certified organic, Gottlieb says, from the milk-and-cream mixture to the added fruits and other flavors. “Sometimes the word ‘organic’ puts people off, because they think it won’t taste great, and often there’s a reputation for organic products being higher priced,” he says. “But our ice cream is often less expensive than others, like Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs.”

The scoop shop in San Rafael opened first, followed by another in Napa’s Oxbow Public Market. As the need for large-scale production increased, Three Twins opened a manufacturing facility in Petaluma, which now churns out thousands of gallons of ice cream every month and is the company’s headquarters. Gottlieb then cut the ribbon on a third scoop shop in San Francisco’s Lower Haight (it’s now closed indefinitely after being damaged by a nearby fire). The newest scoop shop location, in Larkspur, opened in December. The company currently has 50 employees.

The San Rafael and Larkspur shops sell 12 flavors (18 in Napa), with “Lemon Cookie” being one of the most popular. “And we’re always exploring new flavors. It’s innovate or die. We use our shops as a proving ground before we package a flavor and try to sell it,” says Gottlieb. Only once did he botch a recipe. “I called it ‘carrot sorbet.’ I apparently didn’t add enough sugar and ended up with frozen carrot juice.”

Three Twins has created three new flavors for the nationwide Whole Foods rollout: “Sea Salted Caramel,” “Chocolate Orange Confetti” with orange oil, and what Gottlieb says is the first organic and fair-trade ice cream in the United States, using vanilla bean specks sourced from India. He will personally take part in marketing the ice cream at many of the Whole Foods stores that will stock it beginning in May, giving away free scoops at some locations. (The ice cream has been available for some time in about 100 Whole Foods stores in the western states.)

Gottlieb, who lives on a 27-foot sailboat dubbed the Incorrigible, prefers not to release his company’s sales figures. “But we were between $2 million and $4 million in 2011, a year in which we grew at 100 percent,” he says. As member of the One Percent for the Planet organization, Three Twins donates 1 percent of its annual sales to environmental nonprofits. Gottlieb has also launched Ice Cream for Acres, a land conservation initiative for buying large tracts of land inexpensively to preserve endangered species in nations such as Guatemala and Colombia.

As for the Three Twins’ brand color, reminiscent of Kermit the Frog, Gottlieb explains: “It’s a standout color, and that’s important on a shelf behind glass in a store. Some call it obnoxious, but I think it’s fun.”

Ice cream among the chocolates

Anette Madsen and her brother, Brent Madsen, are probably best known as chocolatiers, the proprietors of a bustling store in downtown Napa and another a few blocks away in the Oxbow Public Market. But for more than two decades, the two business partners have also been making small-batch ice cream at Anette’s Chocolate and Ice Cream Factory, their main store on First Street.

The store was known as Partrick’s Ice Cream for many years before it went on the market in 1991. Anette Madsen snatched it up and, with it, inherited all the previous owner’s ice cream recipes. “We’ve added more over the years and, at one time, had 30 ice cream flavors,” she says. “But as production of our fine chocolates, brittles and sauces increased, we decided to focus on 13 to 15 core flavors of ice cream and sorbet that are now available most days.”

Using an all-natural ice cream mix with no preservatives or artificial colors, the Madsens oversee the making of the ice cream once a week during the warmer months, and every other week at slower times of the year. “We use a lot of Clover Stornetta products,” says Anette, whose sister-in-law Mary (Brent’s wife) was born into the Stornetta clan: “Mary’s grandparents owned Stornetta Farms.”

One of the most popular ice cream flavors at Anette’s is “White Chocolate Cabernet Truffle,” a wine-and-chocolate swirl with bits of white chocolate. Introduced last year, “White Chocolate Cocoa Chip” is coming back again because the store received so many requests for it, says Anette. “Mint Truffle” and “Spanish Cappuccino” are also customer favorites. Seasonal flavors usually include pumpkin and peppermint.

Anette says her customers frequently suggest new flavors, too. “If the feeling is right and the moment is right, we can take one of their ideas and create something with it,” she says. “We do a lot of taste sampling behind the scenes and have a large group of people we use to try out new flavors.”

Anette admits that ice cream accounts for only a small percentage of the store’s overall sales, but the frozen sweets “really complement our whole store.” Sales of the chocolates can tend to fall off a bit when it’s hot outside, she says, “And that’s when the ice cream brings in a lot of regular customers.”

Tiny mom-and-pop favorite

In 2001, Ray Martin took some time off after selling a Walnut Creek restaurant he’d owned for many years. Raising a growing family in Fairfax while working as a sea kayak instructor in Sausalito, he was seeking a new business venture. “So I asked myself, ‘What does our hometown need?’ The answer was an ice cream shop,” he says.

According to Martin, the tiny shop called Fairfax Scoop, along Broadway Boulevard, was the only one of its kind in the nation selling organic ice cream when Martin and his wife opened it in fall 2001. “Straus Family Creamery in Marin County was in research and development on their own organic ice cream mix when I first called them, and I was the first to use their mix for my ice cream,” he says.

During their first winter in business, the Martins put in the long hours necessary to keep the shop open and churn out the ice cream; they hired their first employee when the weather turned warm. They now employ 10 scoopers during summer months and seven in winter.

Martin is the chief ice cream maker, typically whipping up eight flavors most mornings. He has 150 ice cream recipes to draw from, but he sticks to the most popular and best-selling ones. “I tend not to add too many new flavors because the more I add, the less the customers will see their favorites,” he says.

The shop’s signature flavor is “Vanilla Honey Lavender,” with the honey supplied by a local farmer and the lavender from Martin’s own garden. Some of the seasonal flavors include strawberry, blackberry, pomegranate, pumpkin and peach. “In July, when people haven’t eaten fresh peaches in 10 months, they get excited by that one,” says Martin.

A fruit sorbet is usually in the case, too, along with two vegan ice cream flavors made with almond, coconut or soy milk. Martin and his staff also make the organic waffle cones that cradle the confections.

Not every flavor experiment Martin has attempted was a success. “I tried a garlic-flavored ice cream once that was a total flop. It smelled up the whole shop. A couple of customers bought it, and I felt really bad about that.”

Limited by the shop’s small space and room for only 12 flavors in the case, Martin keeps the extras to a bare minimum. “We have the simplest menu on earth: ice cream and water—and the water is free,” he says.

Like many seasonal businesses, ice cream shops see fewer customers when the days get shorter and the temperature takes a dive. “As soon as it starts raining, it can be like an empty church in here,” says Martin. So every winter he closes the store for one month, from mid-December to mid-January, to take a well-deserved break.

Martin currently has no plans to expand Fairfax Scoop or peddle his ice cream elsewhere. “We want to keep this a hometown, mom-and-pop shop,” he says.

Jean Saylor Doppenberg is the author of three books: Food Lovers’ Guide to Napa Valley, Food Lovers’ Guide to Sonoma (to be released in May) and Insiders’ Guide to California’s Wine Country.