We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brenda Brownell . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brenda below.

Alright, Brenda thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

We pride ourselves on quality at The Olde Creamery. We attended Ice Cream School in Idaho where we learned state of the art technologies that sets our ice cream apart from any other ice cream in the area. We use a blast freezer that freezes the ice cream to -40 in order to prevent from ice crystals from forming throughout the process from when its made until its scooped for our customers. We also use 16% butterfat content in our mix that makes our ice cream super creamy and delicious.

Brenda , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My husband Tony Brownell and I own The Olde Creamery. We have 3 kids Talea(age 12), Braylen (age 11), and Beckett (age 5) that keep us extremely busy with every sport imaginable. We originally moved into the building in Garner for my design business as it was taking over our previous house. Tony got the idea of turning the once full functioning creamery into an ice cream shoppe and it was all uphill from there. Ice cream is not the only thing we offer @ all our Olde Creamery locations, we offer gift shoppe items from local vendors around the area (honey, coffee, candles, cups, popcorn, soaps, etc) We pride ourselves on customer service and this is a HUGE concentration area for us. Our staff are not allowed to have cell phones on the floor as there is nothing that Tony and I dislike more than when you walk into an establishment and people are on their phones and don’t even greet customers. This has worked well for achieving our customer service goals along with feedback from our staff that they like not having full access to their phones as they can enjoy their time at work and not worry about drama or issues outside of work while clocked in:)

We are most proud of our ability to cater to the customers and the quality of ice cream we serve. This year we won Reader’s Choice Award for North Iowa in both ice cream and dessert categories. This was a HUGE win for us and our staff.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Best source of new clients for us is definitely word of mouth. Serving small town communities the best referral you can get is a from a friend or family of how much they love a product or service you provide.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Consistency is the best thing I can tell you that has helped with our reputation in our market. Consistent hours of operation, stepping up as an owner and working if someone calls in sick instead of closing the doors are what people are looking for. Consistency in our ice cream being high quality all the time, consistency in customer service our customers receive from our staff are all huge players in our market reputation.

Contact Info: 

• Website: https://www.theoldecreamery.net/