Smiley’s Ice Cream | 2018 Wine and Oyster Festival Culinary Pairing
Smiley’s Ice Cream will be joining us this year at the August 5, 2018 Wine and Oyster Festival On Sunny Slope Farm in support of the Artisan Center of Virginia. Come on out to taste their ice cream as well as wine from 11 other Shenandoah Valley Virginia Wineries.
Traditional ice cream, or “porch ice cream” as we like to refer to it, is at the heart of what we do. It’s the ice cream many people grew up making on their porches at home with lots of ice and salt and their own homemade recipes. Ice cream that focuses on quality ingredients and flavor, and is not as concerned with how much overrun (air) is in the ice cream. After all, air has no flavor the last time I checked.
We began with the simple idea that we would make our ice cream the same way I grew up making it as a kid on my parent’s back porch. So we did, putting flavor and quality ingredients at the forefront, and it became a popular hit that developed into a mobile business. We could make the flavors of ice cream that customers wanted, the old fashioned way, with original wooden bucket ice cream freezers and only the freshest ingredients right at their event in a 12′ enclosed trailer that’s regulated and inspected by the health department.
In the winter of 2015, we added a new 20′ trailer to our business that allows us to make our great recipes in commercial modern batch freezers. This allows us to use the same great recipes that our customers have come to love, make any quantity of ice cream that our customers want, make bulk quantities of ice cream at an affordable cost, and allows us to operate our business in a more environmentally friendly way as the new batch freezers don’t create the salt water waste that is created in making the ice cream the traditional way.
Our newest trailer allows us to bring the services of an ice cream shop right to the customers location. It was designed with the customer in mind, as we have learned a lot since 2001 about what customers want. We can serve from the trailer, or lay down the back of the trailer to bring the equipment into the event that we’re serving at. We can serve 800 people down to 50 people from the same trailer.
In the summer of 2017 we opened our first brick and mortar ice cream shop. This shop will provides us with a retail and wholesale store, a stable environment to produce our great ice cream, indoor and outdoor seating for customers, and adequate freezer and refrigerator storage for our products and supplies. Our shop space is still a “work in progress” as we continue to add products and services that our customers are requesting.
Our business will now offer both the reliability of a storefront and the services that only a mobile ice cream trailer can offer. It’s this flexibility, and love of making great quality ice cream, that backs our motto of “Bringing happiness to you one scoop at a time!”
