I’ve dedicated my life to ice cream.
I balance my precious time between my jobs at Cold Stone Creamery and Menchie’s, creating new flavors at my boyfriend’s apartment, studying in school to one day open my own shop and eating enough calories of cake batter Halo Top that I might as well have eaten Ben & Jerry’s.
I like ice cream a lot. After being in the industry for three years, I also know a lot about it and, being that I want to one day run my own ice cream empire, I care a lot about it.
In my trade, I’ve picked up on a few fun hacks and behind the scenes secrets about everyone’s favorite frozen treat.
1. Your order isn’t unique
Yeah, you probably think you’re fun and special for liking sprinkles with your cake batter ice cream or strawberries in your cheesecake.
Working behind the counter at Cold Stone, I’ve become especially adept at profiling people based on ice cream orders.
Older folks love pecans in their ice cream: butter pecan, turtle sundaes, rocky road, etc. They love it.
Teen-aged and twenty-something-year-old girls love birthday cake remix (cake batter ice cream with sprinkles, fudge and brownie) or chocolate devotion (chocolate ice cream with chocolate chips, fudge, and brownie).
Dads also love anything chocolate.
Women love cheesecake.
Hispanic women LOVE strawberry ice cream.
Your favorite ice cream scooper probably sees you walk in and immediately walks to the flavor they assume you like.
2. Ice cream isn’t all fun and games
It has been a serious work out splitting my time between froyo and ice cream.
At Menchie’s, the shifts are long, and you surprisingly have a lot of work to do (shocking, I know!).
The person you see lounging in the front while customers fill their $5 fill ups with fruit, candy and low-cal froyo is the lucky one.
In the back, the rest of the crew is cutting fresh fruit, organizing gallons of frozen froyo in the freezer and refilling topping about every 15 minutes.
Sure, it’s not particularly difficult work, but it’s more than you would think!
We had a girl recently hired that quit on the first day because she thought she would just be sitting in the front scrolling through Instagram on her phone.
And at Cold Stone, I had serious muscle definition from mixing and scooping.
The hard-packed ice cream made a fantastic target on arm day.
Smashing Heath bars for mixing was also oddly therapeutic.
3. “Enjoy your ice cream” “You, too! Oh … or uh, have a nice day!”
I hear this so often.
I tell a patron to enjoy their ice cream or froyo and they absent-mindedly return the sentiment before social anxiety kicks in and they realize I will not be eating ice cream.
It’s okay! I actually will be enjoying ice cream on my shift — and lots of it.
At Cold Stone, my crew had started a tradition for particularly boring winter days where we’d put a sample spoon in each flavor of ice cream and then race to eat them all.
Whoever could eat all of the samples in the shortest amount of time won.
This, of course, would lead to countless stomach aches (especially since I’m lactose intolerant).
We would also get a $5 credit for whatever we wanted per shift at Menchie’s and Cold Stone.
Through that system, I’ve tried every combination possible.
I’ve tried some duds (cotton candy and cheesecake mixed with KitKat and fudge), but I’ve also made some fantastic combinations.
My most well known was a banana cream milkshake at Cold Stone; it was French vanilla ice cream with bananas, caramel and whipped topping mixed into the shake. This is where I’ve gotten a lot of my inspiration for future creations.
Ice cream is a great business to be a part of, and I’m so thankful for the opportunities I’ve been given with the companies I’ve mentioned.
I truly love the business and all the fun quirks related to perpetually dealing with ice cream. This is my dream job — I hadn’t realized I peaked at 16.