As much as everyone loves to insult the Ohio transplant with big city dreams, even the most jaded New Yorker can't resist some midwestern charms, especially when they come in the form of dessert. Because we love ice cream, Gothamist called CEO and frozen dairy connoisseur Richard Graeter to talk about Graeter's Ice Cream, a Cincinnati institution that recently became available in NYC.
As the fourth generation owner, Richard took over the family business that his great grandparents started in 1900. No longer content with simply peddling on street corners, New Yorkers in need of a sugar fix can now stop by Fairway to pick up a pint, or get any of Graeter's signature flavors delivered straight to their door. Our personal favorite? Black raspberry chocolate chip. But considering each one is hand-packed and made with a century-old artisanal process, you can't really go wrong with any of them.
Where can New Yorkers sate a Graeter's craving in the city? We are at D'Agostino's, we are at Fairway, and Baldacci's, and just this spring we started distributing through Whole Foods New York City. So now you can find us pretty much everywhere in Manhattan. D'Agostino's was one of the first ones we were with. I remember back then we were in a play, Dead Accounts, Katie Holmes was in it. It had a really short run on Broadway a couple years ago, and the characters in the opening act of the play are eating Graeter's ice cream and going on and on about it.
I know Oprah plugged you guys a few years ago, too. She did! That was just about a little over 13 years ago, she served our ice cream on her show. Originally, it was just supposed to be the vanilla a la mode to a pineapple upside-down cake that her guest chef was cooking but then she went on and on about the ice cream, and said, "This is the best ice cream I have ever tasted!" and it kind of stole the show!
Would you talk a little bit about the French pot method that you have? Sure! So that is the way you made ice cream a century ago. And it's basically just a pot that sits inside of a vat, and the vat is filled up with brine. Then the pot spins and you pour in two gallons of your ice cream mix—which is just cream milk sugar and eggs—and that spins in the pot and you scrape the edges of the pot with the paddle. You just gently keep scraping it over and over again and in about 15 minutes it thickens into ice cream!
One hundred, maybe 120 years ago everybody made ice-cream that way, but now we are literally the last people in the planet who make it this way—at least in a commercial setting. You might find a chef somewhere that makes it for his little restaurant but no other company does this, it's really time consuming. And what's so special about this method is no air gets in, so it's really thick and dense.
And you guys have to hand pack it, right? Yep. When modern ice cream comes out of the continuous machine, it's really a foamy fluid, and it squirts into the pint and then it freezes overnight. You couldn't eat it. If you went to a modern ice cream plant you'd have to wait a few hours for the ice cream to set up before you could eat it. Where as at Graeter's, as soon as it comes out of the machine it's literally ready to eat.
You guys have a few scoop shops that you run in Ohio, would you consider opening anything up like that in New York? it's not in the short-term plan, but we are opening up new shops a little bit further from beyond our home. Just last month we opened our first scoop shop in Chicago. I would love to have a shop up here in the city but that might be a great first project for the next generation to take on.
Do you think it could be popular up here? Well I know New Yorkers love the project, because they already buy a lot of it. We ship it all across the country but our number one destination is Manhattan. I ship more ice cream to customers in Manhattan in these coolers than anywhere. I'd say we would do great up here. I won't say I'm looking today but I think some time in the future it would be an awesome place to have an ice cream store. Because New Yorkers like the best. They are discerning customers.
I know you guys are really not interested in changing any part of how you make your ice cream... Nope.
But that gets tricky now that you're expanding. How would you accommodate a larger market? Very simple. When I was a kid, our factory that my great grandmother opened had four French pot ice cream machines. And our factory now has 32 of them. We just added more ice cream machines. We did open a new factory in 2010, just a few miles away from our old one, but it was designed specifically to accommodate our very unique process. So there's not another factory like it in existence.
The other thing is, even though we're available here in New York, and you can find us even in stores in California, we still are pretty small. We're basically the biggest little guys. We're never going to be a Ben & Jerry's or a Hagen Dazs, we're still going to be Graeter's, and you're just going to find us a little big further from Cincinnati than you used to.
New York has a ton of little artisanal ice cream places that are popping up, but obviously you guys are still really popular here because of how many cartons you ship to Manhattan. Why do you think that is? I think it all comes back to authenticity. There are lots of little guys that pop up, and they make nice fun products but they're all using modern equipment. And modern equipment, it makes good ice cream, but it's different from a French pot. There are folks out there, especially the sophisticated consumers, like a lot of New Yorkers are, that look behind the brand and the marketing to see the real deal. And that's really where we stand apart.
