batch

the batch / taza chocolate ice cream sandwich

Here’s the chef from the Stanhope Grille, Raymond Southern, and me (Susie) just a little while ago.  Our last stop on our delivery route today was his restaurant. It was our first time there, so he invited us into the kitchen where we were then treated to the batch salted caramel / Taza Chocolate ice cream sandwich.  Oooh, it was so good! He’s making it fun too by wrapping it up in silvery looking paper – just like an ice cream sandwich you’d get as a kid from the store.  It was really fun to see what someone like Raymond is doing with our ice cream.

Aside from this great treat, he told us about the many items on his menu that are made with local ingredients – like peaches that are just starting to come out.  Many of the entrees included fresh vegetables from Red Fire Farm.  He changes up the menu daily, so he can work with whatever is freshest.  We nibbled on some wheat grass that he was pairing up with chicken and and those local peaches.  That sounds really tasty!  Looking forward to going to dinner there one night coming up soon!

We’ve always planned to approach restaurants to see if they wanted to feature our ice cream on their menus. Until now though, we have only been focusing on selling it to grocery stores and specialty shops.  As we were focusing on that, the chef from the Stanhope Grille in the Back Bay Hotel, Raymond Southern, was trying out our ice cream, which he found at one of those shops – Formaggio. Raymond wasn’t just trying our ice cream, he was crafting an ice cream sandwich, using our salted caramel, to be served there at the restaurant.  Paired up with a cookie made out of Taza Chocolate, he says it’s been a hit there ever since! We love it!

Today we finally got a chance to sit down with Raymond and talk more about the ice cream needs for his restaurant.  He wants batch to be his in-house ice cream.  We say, perfect!  We took his first order, and next week we will start to make his ice cream to order and deliver it straight to his restaurant.

To go along with that, the Sherman Market folks let us know this week that they wanted to try out using our ice cream in ice cream sandwiches as well in their cafe – the Sherman Cafe. We say, the more ice cream sandwiches out there, the better!

If anyone tries these ice cream sandwiches, be sure to let us know on here, or twitter, or Facebook, how they are.  And if there are any restaurants where you order ice cream and would like to see batch be that ice cream, let the restaurants know.  We’re excited to add to this list and see what others do dessert-wise with it!

Check that out – the Improper Bostonian wrote about us in their latest issue!  It happens to be their Best Of Boston issue which means it stays on the newsstand for an extra week – they also said it gets read by 400,000 people.  Wow!  Very cool!  Here is a copy of that article in case you haven’t had a chance to see it yet.  We want to get it framed ’cause we’re kinda excited about it!

Once a week, we make a trip down to the farm on the MA/RI border to pick up the milk and cream for our ice cream.  Yesterday was our milk run day.  Here are some shots from the farm.  Note the fan in the barn door, nice to see them trying to keep the cows cool during this crazy hot spell!

We have been in the shops for almost a month now.  All we can say is WOW!  The ice cream has been selling like, well, ice cream on a hot summer’s day!  We are thrilled by the response!  Salted caramel has gotten a fat head with all the praise it has gotten.  The other flavors have been getting their kudos too.  A big thanks to all who have bought our ice cream so far!

We’re making it as fast as we can to keep up with the demand…which, ah, isn’t very fast! It could be called snail’s pace.  That’s because at this point, we are a teeny operation.  It’s just the 2 of us, making the ice cream in a shared commercial kitchen space.  Making it all by hand is partly what makes it so good but also what makes it quite time consuming.  So we are working on being able to increase our production to make more ice cream and put it into more shops.

In fact, this work is also taking precedence over developing seasonal flavors unfortunately. Looks like our eyes were bigger than our stomachs in terms of what we could achieve out of the gate.  We will come out with seasonal flavors at some point – just not any time before we figure out how to best ramp up the production of the existing 6 flavors.

We will keep you posted on our progress on all these fronts!

Here they are…our pint containers!

The tops were late to the photo shoot, so they missed out on the fun in the grass….

Click on any of the photos for a closer view.

We had a lot of fun with our designer coming up with the design of the packaging.  We hope you like it too!

The long awaited day arrived today.  We finally got our wholesale license to manufacture frozen desserts! The health inspector showed up, looked at our label, inquired about a few more things different from the initial visit, and then signed the magic paper!

It wasn’t as easy as that sounds to have arrived at this point.  In no particular order, here’s some of what we went through to be where we are today:

1. We had to become ServSafe certified – which means we learned all about how to properly handle food and avoid nasty contamination and pathogens. We took this course back in Sept – feels like eons ago!
   
2. We did a ton of research to figure out who would issue the license – City or State?  Actually for most of the time, we thought it was the State, but it turns out that the City deals with frozen dessert manufacturers.  This happens to be the ONLY exception for wholesale permits.  This led to some serious confusion and running around in circles.
   
3. We had to design a label that would not only be eye catching (our requirements) but one that also met the requirements of the State and FDA. It took many headaches to figure out what needed to be on the labels, in what font size, in what location, blah, blah, blah.  We had to decipher not only what could be on there but also what could not be on there.  Perhaps most frustrating of all though was that no one actually approves your label, they merely tell you if you are not in accordance with FDA or State regulations.
4. We had to make batches and batches of flavors and submit them to rounds and rounds of taste testing to finally land on the chosen ones.  Only then could we finalize on the labels and get them printed.  A really big decision here – how many labels of each flavor do we get?
   
5. We had to select our packaging.  We started down one path which would have been different from the usual white pint container, but then swung back around.  Then, it somehow was hard to find a steady, reasonably priced supplier for these.  What?  Doesn’t everyone use these?
   
6. We had to put together a HACCP plan.  For this too, we sought outside help. Not that we couldn’t have done it ourselves.  It was just much faster to hire a consultant who makes these plans for a living and knows how the inspectors think.
7. We had to buy a bunch of BIG equipment – some of which came from across the country and subsequently did not fit through the doors of the Kitchen.  Hello, piano movers!
   
8. We had to submit our ice cream to a lab for analysis on coliform counts and standard plate counts.  Happy to say we passed that with flying colors!  This testing will continue on a monthly basis – yeah, probably one of those things we’ll come to find annoying, but hey, there’s always annoying things.

All in all, it was quite a journey.  We’re happy we’re here, to say the least, and now are going to celebrate!

There are lots of businesses popping up around local foods.  Small food producers such as ourselves are one example.  Another are companies like Green City Growers that help you grow your own food in your backyard or even on a roofdeck(!) by building raised garden beds for you.  Yet another are companies that are helping farmers and small food producers to sell their goods more easily, by acting as wholesale distribution hubs.  One such entity doing that is Farm Fresh RI with their Market Mobile service.

Essentially Market Mobile is an online site that take orders from interested parties (restaurants, schools, etc.) for local foods. Those orders are then passed on to farmers and small food producers, who then deliver their goods to Market Mobile’s central warehouse drop-off on a designated day.  Market Mobile then finishes off the whole stream by delivering those goods to the restaurants and other wholesale buyers.

We love the idea of Market Mobile, as it provides a means to reach interested buyers who otherwise do not have the time to source local foods. Think chefs, who can’t spend hours trying to find a source for local strawberries (or local strawberry ice cream).  Additionally the costs in both money and time to deliver our goods are reduced by being able to be pooled together with other food producers and farmers.

While we are not ready to use a service like this or one from Organic Renaissance (that will be doing a similar service in MA), we look forward to seeing if down the line we could.  Our milk & cream after all will be coming from RI!

When we first came up with the idea for batch, we thought we would sell our ice cream at farmers markets throughout the city, as well as shops and other wholesale avenues.  With ingredients from local farms, we thought the locavores who shop at farmers markets would find our ice cream appealing.  Additionally, we could work directly with the farms at the markets to get our ingredients like fruit, honey, maple syrup, herbs, etc.  All in all it seemed like a great match for us…until we dug deep into permitting with the City of Boston and what we would have to do to meet the requirements.

The bottom line is that we would need a freezer on site..and a generator…and a way to transport those things to the market.  We had wanted to do this by bike because of its greenness, saving money on a truck, and wanting to get in some exercise, which we knew would be tough to do otherwise during our hectic summertime selling season.  Not to mention that the City Of Boston does not allow for scooping of ice cream without there being hand-washing facilities.  Oh, so yeah, add in a sink too.  (Though we could have gotten around this by doing packaged containers, but containers just don’t have the same enticing effect as seeing another person walk around with an ice cream cone.)  Anyway, we have decided that for our inaugural year, we are going to concentrate on getting shops to stock our pints and restaurants to serve our ice cream.  Next year we will hit up farmers markets.

In the meantime, we can still learn a lot by going to farmers markets and talking to small food producers there.  That is in fact what we did this past Saturday when we attended the Pawtucket Wintertime Farmers Market.  This market was rocking with tons of people. In fact on the way down there, we stopped at the new Whole Foods in Dedham, for a little research.  Well, there were way many more people at the farmers market than at Whole Foods – and on a Saturday morning.  OK…..wait, why would we sell to shops and not at farmers markets?  Oh yeah, regulations….. Anyway, I encourage you to check out the market in Pawtucket on Saturdays this winter.  There were a ton of excellent vendors, yummy things to eat, and great coffee from a nearby roaster (New Harvest), as well as it is in a cool old industrial building.

As a small business, we have had to make decisions on how to spend our money to get ourselves recognized from the pack.  One area that we believe is critically important is the branding.  For us, this includes our logo identity, packaging, website, other touch points like Facebook fan page, booth design for tastings, t-shirts, even our aprons used while making the ice cream, etc.  As such, we have really made it a priority within our budget to have a great designer who can help us create these things.  I know just enough about the importance of branding from my experience working at Orange to know that I wish we could have a bigger budget for this!  However, we for sure are always thinking hard about how we can achieve what we want to, given our budget.

On this topic, one thing we really struggled with was when to introduce this website and our Facebook fan page.  Ideally, we would have wanted to wait until we had our logo identity and packaging design, and thus could have had these sites reflect that look and feel.  (We’re working just as hard on those things as our flavors.  It all takes time!)  We decided, given where we are in our launch schedule, to just put up these temporary sites and do a small launch of them to friends primarily.  The real ones will come…..!