All of our vegan ice creams take a lengthy and rewarding process to make. All pastry and baked goods that go into the ice cream are made from scratch in house. We make it over multiple days to get the best flavour and texture. We buy locally in season and hold popular flavours through multiple seasons. The ice cream keeps well when stored in our freezer that has clean and continuous air flow. We try to make all our strawberry ice cream in season so when you get it from us, even months later it will still taste like it did when we made the first batch.

1 - we make the ice cream mix from scratch using our in house developed recipes on the first day. The mix is aged overnight to thicken and bring out more flavour. We make a classic mix and a chocolate mix that are similar but slightly different recipes. Most flavours are from the classic mix with additions such as vanilla beans, fresh or roasted fruits, spices, burnt sugar caramels, or whatever flavour of the week we're feeling. 

2 - we age the ice cream mix overnight and churn on day 2 in small batches (about 11 litres per batch) in our special gelato machine that adds no more than 35% overrun (air). Our vegan ice creams are denser than your average. Most ice creams contain at least 50% air which makes them lighter and melt faster. As the ice cream is dispensed from the gelato machine we add our mix ins. We then transfer the goods into a blast freezer to rapidly freeze everything. The faster you freeze, the creamier the ice cream will be. One day we'd like to get a spiral freezer that super freezes the ice cream while circulating.

3 -  let the ice creams freeze overnight to reduce ice crystals and make for a super smooth scoop. 

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We're working towards circular and why you should care

This is something we've always worked towards and started to put into tangible and real action over the past couple years. Our goal is to create a more circular system as an independent maker in the world of ice cream and pastry manufacturing.

Here's some of the things we've worked on:

- Identifying Waste: developed a way to eliminate all waste from processing oats into ice cream. We make our oat cream from scratch with a process that doesn't require "extraction". Often when oat milks use extraction, they remove part of the fibre that doesn't blend perfectly, this results in leftover waste. We have a special process that allows us to keep all the fibre in the oat cream and keeps everything ultra creamy.

- In House Production: build our own ice cream kitchen and facility and stop relying on co-packers. We built our own facility to better control the quality and production of our ice creams. Did you know that most ice cream brands, even some artisanal brands don't make their own ice cream? The process is called co-packing and most experts will tell you this is the best route for producing and they are correct in many ways. We tried this and found it to be very challenging to control quality, even when it was our recipe in action. We decided to build our own production where we make everything in house and control all the steps involved. We make our mixes from scratch in house, we churn the ice cream in house, we bake all pastry and mix ins. It's more work this way but it tastes better in our opinion.

What's next:

- More Oats: putting even more oats into our ice cream base mix. Today we put more oats in our base mix than what you would find in your typical off the shelf oat milk. However, we have some other ingredients in our base mix that we would like to replace with more oats. This is something we're working towards now but does require some r&d still.

- Plastics: we're working towards removing plastics from our supply chain. All of our packaging is transitioning to plastic-free. It's taken some time but we are excited to offer our new ice cream containers made from paper with a sugar cane lining in the cup. The sugar cane replaces plastic and you won't even physically see a difference, it's pretty neat stuff. We are working on reducing plastics that come from other materials into our kitchens, such as our peanut butter that arrives in plastic pails.

- Farming Practises: we would like to work more closely with local farmers. Our oats today are sourced from Manitoba and Saskatchewan. We are working to develop a new system that allows us to work with farmers closer geographically to our facility and that can grow specific varieties of oats. The shorter the distance your food travels to you the fresher and more sustainable our food systems will be. Part of our challenge right now is finding the equipment to clean and process the grain. Please reach out to us if you have some ideas here.

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