Cold comfort: Fledgling Winnipeg ice cream company hits the ground peddling

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This article was published 17/08/2017 (2436 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

According to a recent article in the Houston Chronicle, entrepreneurs intending to start a new business should allow themselves a good 10 to 12 months to get their venture off the ground, if they have any designs on being successful.

Amelia Giesbrecht, the ebullient owner of Soft Spot Ice Cream, chuckles at that bit of news, given she welcomed her first customers July 1 — a mere 14 days after she came up with the notion for her made-from-scratch, artisan ice cream biz.

“This is probably going to sound super cheesy and maybe it’s the hippie in me talking, but when you get an idea and things start falling in place really fast with little to no resistance, I feel like it’s kind of meant to be,” says Giesbrecht, whose 20-some flavours, which include “I Choo Choo Choose You” (salted caramel, brown sugar, bananas), “Mystic Crystal Revelations” (avocado, toasted coconut) and “Strawberry Feels Forever” (Manitoba strawberries, vanilla beans), are as deliciously-named as they are, well, delish.

“I mean, even on my first day when I set up in Memorial Park, near the legislature; I had just parked my bike and was still wrestling around with my umbrella when I looked up and saw this lineup of 15 or 20 people, patiently waiting for ice cream. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is so crazy.’”

Giesbrecht laughs a second time when a scribe opines it’s one thing to want to hit the streets on a two-wheeler and pedal, err, peddle ice cream, and another thing entirely to follow through and do it. But it’s not as if she woke up one morning and convinced herself to be the second coming of Dickie Dee. No, there’s a bit more to the story than that, she says.

Giesbrecht, 34, grew up in Victoria. Following high school, she attended the Victoria College of Art, after which she spent close to a decade traveling the world, visiting such exotic locales as Taiwan, Greece and Sicily (“Best gelato, ever!”).

After returning to Canada in 2012, she got a job at a fishing lodge in B.C., then at a ski lodge near Jasper, Alta., where, for the next 10 months, she learned how to cook via an apprenticeship program. In 2013, she went to work at Naden Lodge, a posh fishing site situated on the northern tip of Haida Gwaii, formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands. (Although Giesbrecht signed a confidentiality agreement that prohibits her from revealing the identities of Naden Lodge’s A-list clientele, she did reveal she once prepared meals for a former governor of California who may or may not have uttered the immortal phrase, “I’ll be back,” at the tail-end of his stay there.)

“My main job (at Naden Lodge) was to take care of desserts and, without a doubt, the thing I enjoyed making the most was ice cream,” she says. “One of the first flavours I did was toasted marshmallow with a chocolate ball on top, smothered in hot fudge. I also did this peach chardonnay (ice cream) that our guests liked so much that if they didn’t spot it on the menu right off, they’d approach me and say, ‘Hey, you are serving that peach thingie, right?’”

Giesbrecht met her husband, Lorne Giesbrecht, a born-and-bred Winnipegger, five years ago at a Vancouver Island fishing lodge, where he was employed as a chef. Fifteen months after their October 2015 wedding, she and Lorne purchased a home in Winnipeg, primarily to be closer to his immediate family but secondly, to establish roots of their own.

“For the last several years, both our lifestyles involved working at one fishing lodge or another for a few months, then moving on and picking up a contract at a different lodge,” she says. “It was always go, go, go and towards the end of last year, we agreed it was probably time to have a place we could call ‘home.’”

In February, Giesbrecht, the “mother” of two Blue Heeler-crosses, Nike and Johnny, got hired at the Osborne Village dessert hot-spot Baked Expectations. Meanwhile, Lorne accepted an offer to become head chef at a restaurant scheduled to open sometime this summer. When that plan got derailed due to a series of unforeseen delays, the couple had a decision to make.

During a mid-June camping trip, they were sitting around their campfire when Lorne turned to his wife and said, “So, what are we going to do?” She wasn’t sure how to respond but no sooner had they returned home than he fielded a message from one of his past employers, wondering if he was willing to spend the next few months cooking at a fishing lodge.

Giesbrecht’s reaction to her husband’s job offer was along the lines of: that’s great for you, but what am I supposed to do here all summer, by myself?

Giesbrecht answered her own question a day later, while chatting with one of her childhood friends on the phone. She enjoyed working at Baked Expectations, she told her pal, but because she was new to Winnipeg, she wished there was something she could do that would get her out and about, meeting people and getting to know the city.

Five minutes after their conversation ended, she turned to Lorne, who was due to leave in five days, and announced, “Guess what? I’m going to start my own ice cream company.”

Talk about a fast mover: on June 16, Giesbrecht coined her fledgling venture Soft Spot Ice Cream. A day later, she and Lorne began assembling her transportable unit, following a shopping trip that netted them a pistachio-coloured “comfort” bicycle, a small freezer and a trailer to set the freezer on. By the time she drove Lorne to the airport June 21, not only had she designed her website (www.softspoticecream.com), she had also secured space in a Wolseley-area commercial kitchen, where she could get busy, churning out her frozen treats.

(About the only thing Giesbrecht forgot to do during the whirlwind build-up was take her bike and trailer combo for a trial spin, when it was fully loaded with 150 four-ounce cups of ice cream. “I was like, ‘Omigosh, this is sooo heavy,’” she says, recalling her first day on the job.)

For her ice cream, Giesbrecht relies on organic ingredients, including milk from Stoney Brook Creamery and eggs from Nature’s Farm foodshed, as much as possible. To date, she’s been averaging five new flavours a week and is forever thinking of fruits, spices — even homebaked animal crackers — that would work well together.

She has also come up with a few “one-off” concoctions to toast events such as Barn Hammer Brewing Company’s first anniversary, as well as last weekend’s much-celebrated meteor shower. For the former, she created a dessert pairing the local brewery’s Grandpa’s Sweater oatmeal stout with chocolate-covered pretzels. For the latter, she devised “Party at the Moon Tower,” which blends chocolate, rosemary and quinoa.

“My life is food — that’s my No. 1 passion — so when people ask how I even come up with ‘out-there’ flavours like saskatoon, honey goat cheese and pistachio crumble, I tell them that’s the easy part of the job,” she says, noting because she wants everything she sells to be as fresh as possible — two weeks old, max. She’s currently producing “very small batches” exclusively, which means whenever she’s not at farmer’s markets or out-of-town festivals, she’s more than likely in the kitchen, making ice cream.

“I feel really lucky because even though I’ve only been doing this for a month-and-a-half, I already have a good handful of people who come see me, wherever I happen to have set up for the day,” says Giesbrecht, who regularly posts her planned locations — and flavours of the day — on Instagram (www.instagram.com/soft.spoticecream).

“I’m not going to lie to you. Some days I’m so exhausted that when I’m on Broadway, for example, watching people in suits walk by I think, ‘Man, life would be so much easier if I just had an office job.’ But then it’s like they say, how the grass is always greener. Because every once in a while, somebody in a suit will stop and say, ‘Oh, I wish I could do my own thing every day and sell ice cream, like you.’”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca