Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams

When I was 10 years old, I was running by my grandmother. She was standing at the kitchen stirring a pot. And I was over at her house a lot. She stopped me in my tracks and she said, Jenny, you're so lucky because you can be whatever you want to be. You can be a doctor, you can be a lawyer, you can be an astronaut. It wasn't And I was And I just darted off. But I remember when I ran out the door to go outside in that moment, I thought, well, if that's true, then I'll be an ice cream maker. I started making ice cream when I was studying art at Ohio State University. And I figured out that ice cream is We had a chocolate merchant and a spice merchant and all sorts of incredible ingredients, wines, cheeses that I got to play with for four years. I was open for four years. Close that business and then open Jenny's back in the same market in 2002 and the rest is history. There's one called Bangkok Peanut. That was inspired by a Thai woman in the North Market and it's coconut milk and peanut and cayenne. That was one of my early flavors and it'still one of our most popular to this day. I mean, that's going on, I don't know, going on 25 years, I guess. Oh, my first, first, first flavors were, I mean, salty caramel, which I learned from a French chef that I had worked for just prior to opening my first shop in 1996. And people would drive in from the surrounding states to get it. Wildberry lavender, which is a flavor that we still have that I've been making since then. Chocolate was an industry one because I had to work really hard on chocolate. Chocolate will dry out the ice cream if you add a lot to it. So a lot of ice cream makers struggle with making a really dark chocolate that's actually super full flavored. But I worked on that for many years and finally figured that one out. I actually don't love the idea that our ice cream is expensive. I just think that our ice cream is what it needs to be. But if we want this kind of ice cream, we have to pay people who may grow produce the ingredients for it and it's really the only way to get it. It really is about is it worth it and is it better and can you taste all the nuances and is the cream lush and creamy and is it everything you ever hoped for? Then I think it's worth it and I think that's what people are after. Starting in Col If I had to start on High Street or whatever, I just wouldn't have been able to make rent. I had a lot to learn. I had to learn a lot of stuff. But also because we have access of course to agriculture and all the ingredients we could ever use. But then the other thing is we can ship from Col It's within a day's drive of I've never first of all met a farmer who doesn't want to grow or even involve some of the neighboring farms. And we're nowhere near the place yet where we need to worry about when we're going to run out of like, We're not even close to that. We love working directly with our farmers. We have a whole team of people at Jenny's whose job it is just to keep these relationships going. We celebrate them. We love them whether it's a goat cheese maker from Cleveland, Ohio or our whiskey distiller right down the street from us or growers or dairy families. So I think that's just why we exist as a company first. And so we do that first. And it's true of our own team as well, taking care of those people first so that we can take care of everybody else. People are drawn to our ice creams because people, and I'm the same way, and I've worked the counter for so many years, sort of see themselves in their flavors, So if you're a chocolate person or a whiskey nut person or a tart sherbet kind of person, it'so it's really fun to come to Jenny's and to taste all the flavors, even if you end up with your old standby because that's just But ice cream is very personal for people.