Ample Hills Creamery has been through many iterations since it was founded in 2011.
At its peak, the Brooklyn-based scoop shop had more than a dozen locations spread across three states and a massive factory in Red Hook. After facing bankruptcy, financial issues, and changing leadership, Ample Hills is back on a much smaller scale: five stores in three boroughs, including The Social in Prospect Heights.
Each of those stores receive shipments of up to 160 three-gallon tubs of ice cream in Ample Hills’ signature flavors per week. And all of that ice cream – up to 1,500 pounds of it — is churned in the company’s modest manufacturing facility in Industry City.
All of Ample Hills’ ice cream is created in small-batch freezers, explained CEO Lisa Teach, and poured into those three-gallon tubs by ice cream churners like Christian Rosa, who has been with the company since the beginning.
Rosa hand-mixes inclusions into the ice cream base as he fills the tubs — alternating layers of crushed Oreos and chocolate milk ice cream for the Chocolate Milk and Cookies flavor, or chunks of cake baked in-house for the Ooey Gooey Butter Cake.
When the company’s current owners took over last year, they moved forward with only the most successful stores, Teach said, the ones most likely to survive. The Red Hook factory was sold separately, necessitating the move to Industry City.
There were some flavor losses, too: the company’s signature Brooklyn flavor, It Came From Gowanus — a chocolate ice cream with orange brownies, hazelnut cookies and white chocolate pearls — has gone the way of the Dodo, as has the old Ample Hills location in Gowanus.
Customers in Queens may have noticed something different too. Nectar of the Queens, the borough’s exclusive flavor, is off the menu but only temporarily, Teach said. The bakery Ample Hills used to source baklava from has closed down, but they’re searching for a new supplier and hope to bring it back soon.
Since last summer, when Ample Hills’ current owners bought the chain, it has been focused on maintaining what it has, Teach said. Right now, they’re working through the busy summer season and preparing for National Ice Cream Day on July 21.
To celebrate National Ice Cream Day, Ample Hills will give buy-one, get-one free to its first 100 Loyalty members and free merchandise and temporary tattoos to everyone, while supplies last — and every customer, Loyalty member or not, will get a free topping all day long.
“Once summer passes, we’re going to start looking at flavor development again,” Teach said. “Because we’re known for coming out with really exciting, quirky, creative flavors every season, and we want to get back to that.”
They’ve already brought out some seasonal flavors since last summer — a pumpkin pie flavor with marshmallows for the fall, a variation on their Breakfast in Paris flavor called Breakfast in Bed for Valentine’s Day, and a white chocolate ice cream with peppermint called Winter Wonderland.
Ample Hills is also in the middle of their seventh annual collaboration with Baked By Melissa for Summer of Love, a sweet cream ice cream mixed with chunks of Melissa’s rainbow cupcakes.
“Any time we can do collaborations with New York or Brooklyn-based companies, we want to do that,” Teach said.
The small team work together to develop and tweak new flavors, and tasting the ice cream is Teach’s favorite part of the job. They got together recently to taste-test a new run of the Salty Malty ice cream to make sure it was up to snuff after it hadn’t been made in a while, she said, and similarly sampled a new lemon sorbet and decided it was just a little too lime-y.
Some have put their own stamp on the brand. Ample Hills’ production manager Jazmin Green created the Banana Pudding flavor, a banana and Nilla-wafer infused ice cream with Nilla wafer chunks.
Ice cream lovers can expect to be looped in on flavor development, too. Earlier this year, Ample Hills invited customers to vote in a Flavor Frenzy contest to bring back one of their favorite ice creams. It Came From Gowanus won by a mile, Teach said, and returned to stores for a brief visit.
“The brand was always based on the idea of bringing people together over their shared love of ice cream,” Teach said. “I think the last versions of the company went a little overboard, they opened stores in Florida and California. This time around, we don’t want to do that.”
But expansion is on the horizon. This fall, Ample Hills will be moving to a larger manufacturing facility a few blocks away.
The company is also looking to open some new stores around New York City. Teach said in the next few months, they’ll be scouting out potential new locations in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn — but not outside the city.
