Ice Cream Man 2.0

Go! Ice Cream, a mobile ice cream business that will deliver handmade flavors by giant tricycle starting in June, wasn’t about business when founder Rob Hess first began his mad scientist experimentation in re-creating the favorite creams of his childhood.

 

For Hess it was about coming up with the perfect concoction that outdid even his go-to brands and flavoring it with the real, not artificial, ingredients: actual vanilla bean, homemade peanut butter, real strawberries and peppercorn. It was also about tooling around on a sweet throwback of a bike – a 1946 Worksman tricycle that once rolled General Motors factory floors. It was about a guy’s love of where he lives and works, Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, and what they’ve taught him about being a part of a community. It was about the inspiration he’s taken from local businesses that are churning out pure, tasty, back-to-basics products. And, perhaps more than anything, Go! Ice Cream – before it even had a name – was about meeting new people and blowing their minds with hand-crafted small batch ice cream.

 

For a few years now, Hess, who loves to cook anyway, has been “obsessed” with making authentic mint chocolate chip ice cream. This meant figuring out how to get mint out of mint leaves and chocolate chips from chocolate nibs. With that commitment to genuine ingredients in place, the flavor options only increased, and Hess took to coming home to wife Lara Zielin with fewer grocery staples and more of what would go into his next experiment.

 

“Lara would ask me to go to the store and get vegetables,” Hess says. “I’d also get $60 in cream and sugar, saying, ‘I need to make jalapeno ice cream!”

 

“In the beginning it was 100 percent just for fun,” Hess says. “The moment I made my first ice cream, I tasted the flavors, the textures, the differences compared to what I was eating out there, and suddenly my Breyers and Haagen-Dazs didn’t scratch the itch like they used to. The more I read, the more I figured out that ice cream is complex…It has to be in the right balance…It became this sort of passion of mine, finding that balance and figuring out how to get the flavors just right.

 

“I have the world’s most chaotic notebooks, with all the different ice cream flavors and notes: ‘How does one extract ginger from ginger root?’ “

 

Now, while it’s still fun, it’s also getting to be more work as Hess and his wife prepare for opening a full-fledged busines. They’ve got their permits, commerical kitchen, logo, bicycle style delivery shirts, and are riding a wave of media attention that started with a short tweet from the Ypsi Chamber of Commerce and led to stories and subsequently a following of fans waiting for opening day.

Orders willl be taken online and delievered once a week in Ypsilanti, where the bike, which has been seen around town giving out freebies, will host a giant ice cream social later this month.  

“I want to do something good for Ypsi. This place has changed me,” says Hess. 

 

The ice cream bike will also show up at farmers markets, fairs and special events, mostly in Ypsi, and possibly, eventually Ann Arbor.

 

Part of Hess’ plan is to keep the operation small and personal and to take on a larger mission of putting ice cream as a dessert in a new light.

 

“Ice cream mostly comes with a lot of ads, images, etc. that want to inspire you to sit on the couch and consume more and more and more,” Hess explains. “I want to let people feel like they’re embracing something they love, not that they’re reserving ice cream for a time they’re being bad. That’s why I wanted to put in the biking aspect. I stopped being hesitant about starting a business when I realized it could be seen as another activity to get out and enjoy.”

 

The makings of the business go back to when Rob began taste-tests with friends and family – about a 100 or so of them (taste-testing ice cream isn’t a particularly tough sell). Eventually, as the beat-up $60 Kitchen Aid canisters bought with a 20 percent off coupon from Bed, Bath & Beyond began to crowd out the freezer contents, they took Rob’s handiwork to their office at the University of Michigan. He’s since upgraded to an industrial ice cream maker that’s nearly the size of a mini fridge and makes six quarts at a time. “It cost me about the same as a small car,” he says.

 

Rob is a filmmaker and multimedia designer for the College of Literature, Science & the Arts. Lara is editor of LSAmagazine. Their co-workers became beneficiaries of the surplus ice cream.

 

“Quickly we became the most popular people at work,” Rob laughs. “Co-workers across campus were scheduling meetings here to be near the ice cream. I’ve been Film Rob to people for the last 20 years. Normal water cooler conversation was, ‘What film are you working on?’ etc. The minute I brought in ice cream it was all about ice cream. I became Ice Cream Rob.”

 

Lara convinced him to go commercial.

 

“I was most resistant to the idea. It was Lara who would talk me through it. She was like ‘No people are talking to me about it in the ladies room!'”

 

It was also Lara who convinced him to the buy the bike at a rummage sale. “I can’t describe why a grown man would want to ride a tricycle. I didn’t want to buy it. I called her, I said, ‘It’s $200.’ She said, ‘Get it, just get it, dude.’ “

 

Once he was convinced to expand beyond family and friends, it was time to master the tangled process of starting a business: licensing, certification, permits… the opposite of fun. He was surprised when local bureaucrats were flexible, genuinely interested in helping him get approvals for an unorthodox but not unheard of way of doing business. 

 

“The licensing process is a little nebulous. Part of it is I’m trying to recreate the wheel …I don’t exactly follow the industrial food model. The Michigan Department of Health, the Washtenaw County Health Department, for a long time they had no idea who I should ask … but they helped me get the answers.”

 

Then one tweet from the Ypsilanti Chamber of Commerce about the business and media attention began to churn. Meetings started happening.

 

One was with the general manager of Ann Arbor’s Produce Station. It was the store where he stocked up on all his ice cream ingredients when he was supposed to be focused on veggie buying.

 

“I went into the meeting thinking we weren’t talking about my product. I came up with my list of questions. I treated it as an informational interview,” he recalls. “At the end I said, ‘You’ve been so helpful I don’t know how I can thank you.’ The manager said, ‘What you can do is let us sell your products.’ I wanted to kiss him! I couldn’t believe that he had reached out to me. It was a super pinch me moment.”

 

Zingerman’s Creamery was as much a mentor and advocate as the supplier of the pasteurized cream mixture that will provide the base for the ice cream Hess pedals – and peddles.  

 

“It was another in a series of dream meetings,” he says, remembering the time and advice given by the creamery’s gelato maker. “Every person I’ve run into in the food industry has been extraordinarily cool and giving of their time. I’ve made three feature films and many short films and the difference between talking to an insurance agent about liability for a film shoot and the small food industry, it’s night and day.”

 

Most surprising to Hess was Zingerman’s support. “They could have been so concerned about someone starting ice cream in their back yard. But they have big back yard. They think the more great ice cream out there, the better.”

 

He also saw no fear of competition in the owners of Bona Serra, the downtown Ypsi restaurant where he’ll rent kitchen space, roasting strawberries and infusing them with balsamic on the days the restaurant is closed. Bona Serra makes its own ice cream and desserts. “They have been amazing. They were in my shoes. They were renting kitchens,” he says. 

 

What he hopes is that he’ll make ice creams that bring back memories, bring out stories. He’s not interested in pushing the boundaries of funky flavors like juniper berry, elderflower though he’s not above finding out how they’ll taste. His flavors, like salted caramel, vanilla bean, and mint chocolate chip, are classics.

 

“I want to make a really good rocky road. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.” 

 

Hess also wants to show some love to the people who have shown him what pure, tasty food is. “I know I’m totally a different person because I lived in Ann Arbor and experienced Zingeman’s sandwiches.”

 

He hopes his ice cream might have the same effect.

 

“It can take you on a journey, lead you to new things. That’s a little heavy for an ice cream company, but the people who have tasted my ice cream, people I didn’t know very well, have shared personal stories with me after eating it. We have a connection. And it’s because of ice cream.”

Kim North Shine is a freelance writer and Development News Editor for Metromode.