Frozen treats not in season
While few scream for ice cream when the weather is cold, local ice cream shops would love to see business begin to heat up
At a time when there’s snow on the ground – or, at least in the mountains near town – and most are trying to warm up with hearty soups and hot cocoa, going out for ice cream seems almost unnatural.
“It’s like you’re breaking the rules,” said Tom Purdum, owner of Brain Freeze Creamery.
After all, the creamy, cold treat and its relations – frozen yogurt, sorbet, sherbet, gelato – are synonymous with summer.
But Purdum and other local ice cream shop owners like him want to remind ice cream lovers: “We’re here. We’re open.”
So, “Why not?”
Foot traffic at ice cream parlors in the Inland Northwest dips right along with the temperature. In fact, some Spokane-area shops report as much as a 75 percent drop in ice cream sales during winter, with January and February generally being the slowest for business.
“It just slows down. It almost grinds to a halt,” said Jennifer Davis, who owns The Scoop on Spokane’s South Hill. “It’s the weather.”
Soon, ice cream sellers will see what Davis calls the “buffer” months – March and April – before numbers bump back up for summer. Then, there’s another buffer – September and October – before sales slump in November.
“As soon as Halloween and the time changes and it’s dark at 4, it drops off,” Davis said.
Seasonal flavors – pumpkin, peppermint, apple pie – draw in customers. So do diversified offerings such as espresso, sandwiches, soups, pastries and chocolates.
The Scoop specializes in Liège-style waffles and also sells “lots more hot chocolate” during colder days. Its location – across the street from a school – helps boost traffic during non-summer months; sales increase before and after class.
At Brain Freeze in Spokane’s Kendall Yards development, Purdum said, “Coffee sales are up. Soups are doing well.”
Ice cream is another story.
“It’s been in spurts with no rhyme or reason to it,” said Purdum, who bought the local micro creamery with his wife, Julie, in 2011 and opened the storefront in mid-May.
This is the shop’s first winter. In the middle of January, it was going through about 40 gallons of ice cream per week, Purdum said. That’s compared to 150 gallons during July and August.
At The Scoop, Davis reports similar numbers: about 150 gallons per week during mid- to late summer and as low as 20 gallons per week in January.
Cannon Coffee & Cone has no gallons. The pint-sized shop in Spokane’s Browne’s Addition exclusively sells Brain Freeze ice cream, which was in short supply at the end of December after Snoqualmie Gourmet Ice Cream issued a voluntary recall due to a potential bacterial contamination. Brain Freeze buys its ice cream base from the Snohomish, Washington, ice cream maker.
“We took literally a ton of ice cream to the dump,” Purdum said. “We didn’t have anything.”
Brain Freeze was out, so Cannon Coffee & Cone was out, too. And after the start of the new year, “I decided just to not re-order,” said owner Eric Crow. “January is the slowest month in the restaurant industry. It’s slow everywhere. For ice cream, it just doesn’t work.”
In addition to the time of year, Cannon Coffee & Cone also has the issue of space. “I have 27 seats. Twenty-five of them are outside,” Crow said. “While I believe Northwesterners are hardy, no one wants to put on a parka and sit outside on the patio.”
Doyle’s Ice Cream Parlor gets it. An institution in Spokane’s West Central neighborhood since 1939, it shuts down for the season in October, usually reopening in May.
To cope with the downward seasonal sales slope, some shops stay open but reduce staff and hours of operation. Brain Freeze, for example, closes at 9 p.m. this time of year, an hour earlier than in summer. The Scoop cuts back even more – from a 9 p.m. closing time in summer to 6 p.m. in winter.
The last couple of years, Mary Lou’s Milk Bottle in Spokane’s Garland District has been keeping the same hours for all seasons: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday and Monday, and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. But the ice cream parlor and café cuts its staff by 50 percent, mirroring the annual wintertime drop in ice cream sales, said manager Dan Ritchie, whose parents – Ed and Kris Ritchie – own the place.
Mary Lou’s makes its own ice cream and regularly keeps 16 flavors in its case. Huckleberry is a top seller. Ritchie said his personal favorites are probably mint chocolate chip and cookies and cream. But he doesn’t eat much of it in winter – or any other time.
“I’ve kind of had my fill of it,” he said. “You’ll catch me sneaking bites, but never a full scoop.”
Milkshake sales at the landmark corner shop – shaped like an old-fashioned milk bottle – “never really slow down,” Ritchie said. That’s partly due to the fact that shakes are included in the $8.50 daily special. (On their own, they’re $4.97.) But cone and sundae sales drop off by about half.
“There are die-hards. We have regulars that come in and buy ice cream on a weekly basis,” Ritchie said. But, “When it’s kind of gloomy and rainy, it doesn’t help.”
National production also dips in winter. The U.S. manufactures nearly 1 billion gallons of regular ice cream per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Add low-fat ice cream, sherbet and frozen yogurt to that number, and it jumps to about 1.5 billion gallons. Production peaks in June. July is National Ice Cream Month.
December sees the smallest amount of ice cream manufacturing. But the decadent dessert isn’t just the stuff of summer. Saturday was National Ice Cream for Breakfast Day.
“The secret is ice cream actually helps warm you up,” Purdum said. “It’s physics and whatever. You eat the ice cream and it’s cold and your stomach has to stoke the furnace to really get your metabolism going to warm up to process it.”
Energy released in digestion produces an overall warming effect called thermogenesis. High-fat foods like ice cream – along with foods that are high in protein and carbohydrates – tend to heat up the body during digestion more than fruits and vegetables, which are mostly water.
“It takes more energy to digest that kind of food because it’s more complex,” said Kara Roberts, a registered dietitian nutritionist and spokesperson of Greater Spokane Dietetics Association. “It takes your body longer to break it down. While ice cream gives a cooling sensation at first, it can actually make your body temperature rise temporarily.”
Stalwart fans don’t care about the chemistry. Some visit no matter the weather, always up to down a scoop or two even if the weather outside is frightful. The ice cream is still delightful, especially when it contains 19 percent butterfat, like Brain Freeze.
“It helps put layers on for winter,” Purdum said.
His ice cream is known not only for its high fat content but eclectic offerings. Wintertime flavors run from about Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day. Depending on the holiday, there’s pumpkin cheesecake, maple nut, maple bacon – actually, Purdum said, “anything maple”– eggnog, peppermint, cranberry, red velvet, dark chocolate with strawberries or Bordeaux cherries, and more.
This year, Brain Freeze even produced flavors inspired by the four food groups in the 2003 film “Elf” – candy, candy cane, candy corn and syrup. It also made a green and blue combo with Skittles in honor of the Seattle Seahawks making it to the Super Bowl two years in a row.
So far this season, no Brain Freeze customers have snowshoed and cross-country skied in for ice cream.
But, “That would be pretty cool,” Purdum said. “I’d probably give people free ice cream if they did that.”
The weather would have to cooperate. While there’ve been many sub-freezing days and nights, so far this winter about 15 inches of snow have fallen, less than half of what’s normal for this time of year, according to the National Weather Service.
Other, longer winters, snowshoers have shown up at The Scoop, but Davis doesn’t remember anyone skiing in for ice cream. Her shop recently began making all of its ice cream in-house in small batches using liquid nitrogen and no emulsifiers or stabilizers – just heavy cream, whole milk, sugar and flavoring. Seasonal offerings include apple crisp, molasses, cinnamon chocolate cashew, and peppermint stick, peppermint bark, and peppermint cookies and cream.
Enjoying the frozen treat when it’s cold outside almost seems like an act of rebellion.
“Maybe they’re exercising their bad-boy personas,” Purdum said. “It’s 10 degrees out, so (they say), ‘Screw it, we’re going to get ice cream.’ ”