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

Zach, appreciate you joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

When I first began making ice cream out of our home, there was no brand name, just a guy that made wacky and enticing flavors. Over time when the business began to grow, we realized we needed to make it official. My wife and I, along with our family, began brainstorming and surprisingly, A to. Z Creamery was one of the first names who came up with. The name needed to embody our capabilities and clearly state what we do. A pet peeve of mine is overly generic brand names like a jewelry store named “Imagine” or something silly along those lines. When we make ice cream, we can make any flavor from A to Z: apricots, basil, cheese, etc. and it’s also a word play on our initials with me and my wife, Alex and Zach.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

For my entire life, I’ve always been intrigued by unique desserts and untraditional flavor combinations. One food I was always fascinated by when I saw unique flavors, was ice cream. The problem was, not many scoop shops and grocery stores carried these unique flavors and even with traditional flavors of ice cream, the mix ins were sparse and I was continually digging to find the “chunks” in my pint or scoop.

During Covid, when we all operated under the work from home policy, I began my journey of making ice cream from a small machine my mom got me for my birthday. This was the perfect opportunity to put all of my creative thoughts to work.

I made a new flavor every couple days and shared my processes on social media. Everything was homemade and hand packed and absolutely loaded with mix ins. I only made 2 pints or so at one time for myself, friends or family but when I had inquiries from followers to buy, I took advantage of the extra income.

At one point, I would receive 100+ messages to purchase 3 to 5 pints I had available. This was the moment I knew we needed to start a business. And now five years later, we still operate the same way; homemade and hand packed ice cream with a rotating flavor sold online directly to consumers in pre packaged pints

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Social media the backbone of our business model. Since we don’t have a storefront and are e-commerce based, connecting online is vital to our success. Each week when we release a new flavor, we do 3 things on Instagram:

1. Post a video “teasing” the flavor
2. Announce the new flavor
3. Show behind the scenes (BTS) of how it’s made

We began our business just showing BTS and announcing the flavor. A great way to connect with potential and current customers is showing how you operate. When our audience can see the process and then the final product, it’s more personable and creates a relationship. As time went on, we added teaser videos with hints about what the flavor will be to keep our audience engaged. The videos have a playful field to them that aligns with our brand identity and another reason that makes us unique compared to other ice cream shops out there.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

This isn’t necessarily a story about how we had to pivot, but rather a story about not changing our business model. Since our business started over Covid and we sold all of our pints online, opening up a scoop shop would be the most typical path ahead of us. However, we knew if we opened up a scoop shop, it would go against our brand identity and we would become just like every other ice cream shop in the Twin Cities. but we wanted to be different! What made us unique was our rotating menu that didn’t repeat with only one opportunity to buy a pint online that usually sells out within minutes.

After the Covid policies went back to normal, we kept our same business model going and it was the best decision we ever made. We were able to keep our team small and not worry about hiring additional people to staff a scoop shop. And instead of customers being forced to eat their scoop of ice cream before it melts, they can take away a prepackaged pint and enjoy it anywhere at any time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Atozcreamery.com
• Instagram: @atozcreamery