Dan Mueller has always had an entrepreneurial flair, owning several businesses in his life, usually a couple at a time. When his son was born with Cerebral Palsy, he and his wife, Whitney, spent hours and hours waiting in the ICU. During this time, Dan,a seminary teacher by day, rekindled thoughts he had about opening a real ice cream parlor. He started studying and learning all he could about ice cream and how it’s made. He came across a creamery in Pennsylvania that made Ice Cream the old-fashioned way with son and grandson of dairy farmers who had kept the tradition of old-fashioned ice cream making alive.
He reached out to them via Facebook and the friendly owner was willing to help. He invited him out to make ice cream with them for a day and even shared some 100-year-old recipes with Dan to help him get his Utah creamery off the ground. The Cannery Creamery was opened last month and is an amazing destination for a frozen treat.
Dan wanted something better than the fast food fare. He wanted something that people would remember and that would bring people back to the parlor time and time again. He decided to make ingredients the key differentiator. He noticed that most colors and flavors today are created with chemicals. Although artificial flavors can be much stronger, brighter and cheaper, they just don’t taste as good. He said he likes that natural flavors are better for you, but the most important part is they taste better. It is much harder to neutralize chemical flavors than it is to neutralize beet juice which makes their red coloring. He wanted real flavors and real food in his products. He also wanted the best quality. He said it would be a lot cheaper to buy a large tub of blue coloring but they would much rather make it with natural ingredients, which is a theme they stick to.
Starting with the ice cream base, they usually make it with 10-12% cream. Aficionados however know that old-fashioned ice cream contained 16%cream and real egg yolk. Dan got with a local dairy to make a custom mixture for them. You can taste the difference in the creaminess and texture. In fact, the ice cream base is made from four simple ingredients: cream, sugar, egg-yolk and skim milk. Some ice cream bases he looked at contained 30+ ingredients.
Keeping with the theme of real flavors and food, they use organic sugar cane,no high-fructose corn syrup, as well as fresh fruit, hand-ground vanilla, fresh-fruit puree and artisan well-water just to name a few of their unique ingredients. In researching chocolate flavors, they found that there were three main cocoa producers in the US all based in Ohio. After trying all three they thought, “Wow,they are all good.” They created a unique custom flavor mixing the three to make the proprietary Cannery Chocolate flavor.
If you like unique flavors, they have some awesome options. I tried the Cookie Monster which has three types of cookies crumbled up in a blue cookie-flavored ice cream. I tried the amazing Cannery Chocolate and the Mango Jalapeño, which is a yummy mango flavor mixed with some heat from peppers for a kick at the back of your throat. Another fun flavor is the Strawberry Balsamic, which is currently outselling their regular strawberry flavor. My favorites were both the Raspberry and Peanut Butter Reese’s flavor – wow! I could also eat the peanut butter ice cream all by itself. They have flavors come and go and introduce new flavors every week. They also make genuine Italian ice with real ingredients. See their coupon on the right page and make a visit to the Cannery Creamery. Your taste buds will thank you!