Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kate Hanke. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Kate, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
Ice Cream is sort of in our genetics.
Growing up, my grandparents used to drive us four granddaughters from Upper Arlington (Ohio) to Cincinnati (also Ohio) just to eat Graeters ice cream. Regularly. Graeters wasn’t widespread, or wholesaling, back then (70s and 80s) so it was definitely a road trip to get it. This created a love (may translate: obsession) of premium ice cream, and large chunks of chocolate, at a very young age. It has been said that I have a bit of a snobbery about the quality of ice cream and mix-ins all pointing back to the foundation that Graeters laid. Our grandparents would also do roadtrips to Utica (yes, still Ohio) to Ye Olde Mill where Velvet Ice Cream is made. I was fascinated by the behind the scenes look at the factory. And the ducks – the grounds were beautiful. In High School, when I was missing from class (usually the period after lunch) it was pretty easy to figure out where I’d gone – Joey’s Homemade Ice Cream or Owen’s Homemade Ice Cream, both only a few blocks away from the high school. One of my favorite road trips, as a young adult (now without my grandparents) was to go to Young’s Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs (Ohio, of course) for a thick cow shake (because a bull shake was just too big). I was fascinated by their process and how amazing the ice cream tasted – so fresh from the cow. In my mid to late 20s, I traveled all over the country for my job and made a point of finding local(ly made) ice cream shops – which wasn’t such the trend in the 90’s as it is today.
Steve literally does have it in his genetics. His grandfather Earl, owned Dairyland Dairy in Des Moines, IA and the Iowa Dairy Queen franchise. His grandfather started the dairy from scratch, delivering milk in glass bottles from his car. His parents actually met at one of the Dairy Queen’s that his grandfather owned. The story goes that his mom worked there and his dad was putting Christmas Trees on the lot and roof preparing to sell for the upcoming Christmas season and she was scolding him to come down from the roof and demanding to know who he was. Steve Sr. (Steve’s dad) shared his love of ice cream with his children and grandchildren with an old crank ice cream machine at the family cabin near Nevis (Minnesota). If you didn’t crank, you didn’t get any!
With these beginnings, our mission in starting Borealis Creamery was to bring truly amazing ice cream to our community of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. It filled a niche that did not exist locally as we make our own base, ice cream, sorbets and mix-ins. We are not buying a pre-made mix or scooping someone else’s ice cream – we do most all of it ourselves. It was also important to us to locally partner, collaborate and serve/support other businesses and individuals in our community. While we would like to be profitable (eventually?), the artistry behind the ice cream, sorbets and mix-ins is very important to us. As such, we use quality natural ingredients, locally sourced when possible and don’t over crank to put extra air into our ice cream, like big box brands do, so our ice cream is dense and creamy. As well, we hand-make the cookies, cake, brownies, caramel and hot fudge sauces and other mix-ins with high-quality ingredients and years of perfecting the recipes. This extra step, to us, creates a better-tasting ice cream for our customers. Quite simply, we wanted to bring our customers an ice cream that tastes and feels great and have worked hard to make that happen. A line of sorbets was added before we opened, as when we started marketing the business, several months in advance on social media, locals started asking for dairy free options so we responded to meet that need. Same as our ice creams, we use local and fresh fruit when possible and make the very best, creamy sorbet possible.
Kate, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Sure! I am the owner of Borealis Creamery. We are scooping small-batch, hand-crafted, artisanal ice cream and sorbet from a food truck in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. We’d been making ice cream for years for family and friends who said it was the best they’ve had. We’d talked many times about opening a coffee shop or ice cream shop with our ice cream recipes but it never seemed like the right time or the right place. Several elements fell into place at the same time making it seem like the timing was finally right, most importantly being that our local community did not have anyone making handmade ice cream and we could bring them something unique and tasty.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
The original vision of Borealis Creamery was for us to do production and sales from the food truck during the months of May to September with me being the primary person during the week and Steve helping out on weekends. We quickly realized that I couldn’t do it alone and thankfully our son, Fletcher, agreed to join the business on both the production and sales sides. As fall began to approach during our first summer (2022), we kept being told that the weather was still good enough for us to continue to be out. Then the dialog transitioned to that of people wanting our ice cream in the winter. As the demand was there, we had to pivot from our original vision to see how to meet the need. We partnered with a local business, Klockow Brewing Company, who had garage space big enough for the food truck and water/electric hookups. We did production there and put a freezer with pints into their taproom. What we thought would be a slowdown during the winter was surprisingly not what happened – our pint sales took off!
The second pivot was a realization that the dynamic of production 4 days a week and the food truck selling 3 days a week during the summer wasn’t the right breakdown and wasn’t meeting the needs of our community based on all the location and event requests we were receiving. We began working with the Department of Agriculture on our plans to convert space at our home into a commercial kitchen and be licensed as a small dairy processing plant. A drastically different image than we originally had of a girl in her truck selling some really good homemade ice cream during the summer.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
We started our social media presence in February with the first day for the truck being out not until mid-May. The initial post was of the day we brought the food truck home. The excitement behind this new journey was evident in the photo. We shared it initially with friends and asked them to like our pages on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
We, as our page, began liking and interacting with other local businesses pages and posts which drew attention to our page. We made sure to thank anyone that shared our page or our posts. We responded to every single comment with a like or reply comment back.
We were very deliberate in having a constant trickle of posts to keep everyone’s interest by announcing local partnerships (locations) or events as they were set up, by doing a What’s the Scoop series about us and about our business and then we started posting pictures of the flavors that we would be scooping.
Our business has thrived because of our local following who have shared our business with others and we make sure to post our gratitude and thanks to them as well.
Best advice is to be consistent in posting regularly, be genuine and be present, involved and active with your followers.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://borealiscreamery.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/borealiscreamery/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/borealiscreamery
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/borealiscreamery
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/BorealisCreamry
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/borealis-creamery-grand-rapids
- Google Business/Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/JFwkFkZ7TUf9jdae6
- Road Trippers: https://maps.roadtrippers.com/us/grand-rapids-mn/food-drink/borealis-creamery-grand-rapids
- Trip Advisor: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Profile/borealiscreamery