PRIVATE TOUR – Gifford’s Ice Cream

by Henry Garfield

Cream of the Crop
The Gifford family has been doling out deliciousness by the scoop, quart, and half-gallon since the 1980s, with dairy farms going back generations. Meet the family behind the flavor.
Roger Gifford, president of Gifford’s Ice Cream, is a sensible man with sensible tastes. His favorite flavor is vanilla. The company that he co-owns with his brother John still makes vanilla ice cream the old-fashioned way, in freezers built more than 50 years ago, with real vanilla. “We’re still using some of the same recipes our grandfather used to use,” he says. “The basics of making good-quality ice cream are still the same.”
John Gifford, the company’s treasurer, prefers a scoop of chocolate topped with pistachio. The brothers share management duties, but Roger oversees production while John is in charge of sales. They also share a commitment to quality.
“When the price of vanilla went through the roof, we had to make a decision,” John recalls. “It was a real short conversation. We said, ‘We’re going to keep doing it the way we do. We don’t know anything else.’ We’re funny people. We’re very particular on the product we make.”
It’s been that way for at least four generations. “Our great-grandfather and grandfather were both in ice cream,” John says. The family is from Connecticut, but their father was born in Portland, and the brothers spent time in Maine during the summers while they were growing up, before their parents bought a dairy in Farmington in the 1970s.
Lindsay Gifford is John’s daughter, and the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. Her taste in ice cream is more adventurous than her father’s or uncle’s. “Mint chocolate chip with black raspberry and orange sherbet,” she says, when asked to name her favorite cone. When you’re the face of the next generation in a growing family business, you have to be willing to try new things.
From a single stand in the early 1980s, Gifford’s has parlayed a reliance on traditional methods and a willingness to experiment into a thriving business that now supplies ice cream to more than 500 stands throughout New England. Distribution is about 60% bulk (ice cream stands) and 40% retail. They run five of their own stands in Maine. Their products can be found in stores as far south as Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Lindsay Gifford estimates that the company produces around 70 flavors. “We’re constantly making up new ones,” she says.
“When we came to Maine, we were strictly in the milk business,” John Gifford says. “In 1980 we had a surplus of cream. We were almost throwing the cream away, because skim milk and 2% milk were the craze. We decided that we should get back into the ice cream business. We purchased the stand on Madison Avenue here in Skowhegan, and we opened it in June, strictly takeout. Roger and our father and Joel Violette made the ice cream in the corner of the milk plant, just for that stand. Our first intention was to sell just at the ice cream stand, just in the spring and summertime, not to sell to supermarkets, not to do any of that.”
In 1982, the family bought an old building in Farmington, and refurbished it into a seasonal ice cream stand. “When we started the stands, we had no wholesale business,” Roger Gifford says. “At the end of the season, people asked us where they could get our ice cream. For the first couple of years, we sold them three-gallon tubs in October, and people were taking those home and putting them in their freezers. Then in January and February, people were calling us and saying, ‘We ran out; now where are we going to get your ice cream?’ After a couple years of that, we decided to start selling it to a couple of local stores.”
“Our first store that we sold ice cream to was Jimmy’s Market in Bingham, Maine,” says John. “It was on my milk route. Jimmy’s was one of the first stops in the morning after I’d done a few schools. They gave us a chance. We said to ourselves that if this premium product could sell in the Binghams and Skowhegans of the world, well, maybe we had a shot.”
In 1983, the brothers were approached by Oakhurst Dairy about selling their milk business. “They approached Roger and me, even though our parents owned 90% of the business,” John says. “We decided to talk to our parents about it. We literally sat around the kitchen table, and said, look, here’s an opportunity. They’re interested in buying our company. Our parents said, you guys are young, you’re on the upswing, you make the decision on which way you want to go. And that’s unusual in family businesses, especially in the dairy industry.
“We had a very successful milk business. But we were in our 20s; we were both naïve enough not to know what was in front of us.”
Joe Violette is still with the company. Today, he’s the operations manager at the Skowhegan plant where Maine’s most famous ice cream is produced. It’s a surprisingly small operation, given the volume of ice cream flowing from here to stands and stores across the Northeast.
“You can make a lot of ice cream in a small area,” Violette says.
It starts with a mixture of milk and cream, delivered several times a week by Oakhurst. Then sugar, colors, and stabilizers are added, to make the mix that forms the basis of every flavor of Gifford’s Premium Ice Cream. The mix contains 14% butterfat. Lighter mixes are used for institutional ice cream, sold to some schools and hospitals (10%), and for frozen yogurt (2%).
In one of two modest-sized downstairs rooms, the mix is heated to 176° Fahrenheit to kill all the bacteria. Then it goes into a homogenizer, which pressurizes it to break up large particles. The mix is cooled to 38° and aged for 24 hours in storage tanks on the second floor. According to Violette, this aging process helps bring out the full flavor of the mix.
When it’s time to make the actual ice cream, the mix is pumped down to a second downstairs room, adjacent to the first, where bases and ripples are being cooked in steam kettles. This is the stage of the process in which each flavor takes on its unique characteristics. Chocolate, fruit, fudge swirls, ribbons, and nuts enter the maelstrom; it’s here that favorite flavors like Moose Tracks, Maine Wild Blueberry, and Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip are born.
Gifford’s makes its ice cream in Silverstar Continuous Freezers, which were manufactured by Cherry Burrell in the early decades of the 20th century. The company stopped making the machines before 1950; consequently, they are expensive and hard to find. Roger and John Gifford look for them at auctions across the country, and often find themselves bidding against the same handful of old-fashioned ice cream manufacturers.
“This equipment is special because it is slow churn,” Lindsay Gifford says. “This gives the product heavier weight and a creamier texture, as opposed to newer equipment that whips the product too fast and damages the creaminess, giving it more air.”
The freezers work on the same principle as the old hand-crank machines families used to have at home. Each one is a big cylinder with a smaller cylinder inside containing the ice cream. The outer cylinder is filled with ammonia cooled to a low enough temperature to freeze the ice cream inside. Blades continually scrape the ice cream from the sides of the inner cylinder as it freezes. Each freezer can produce 400 gallons of ice cream an hour.
At the end of the process, the product has the consistency of soft-serve ice cream. It’s then put into containers: quarts and half-gallons for stores, three-gallon tubs for ice cream stands.
The operation only takes a handful of people to run. “One guy mixes all the flavors; one guy runs the filler, putting all the lids and cups in; another guy runs the fruit mixer,” Violette explains. “Another guy does all the raw product. He processes the mix and makes the bases—the vanillas and chocolates. We call him ‘the chef.’”
The day starts as early as 5 a.m., with the easy, “base” flavors, like vanilla. “As you go through the day, you progress to your more aggressive flavors,” Violette says. In between runs, the equipment is thoroughly rinsed with sanitary water. “Usually, in a day we’ll run three or four different flavors. We try to avoid too many changes. You can go from a vanilla to a butter pecan and finish up with Moose Tracks.”
Allergen flavors containing nuts are run last. “Once you do a flavor like peanut butter, you’re done for the day,” Violette says. “You have to shut everything down and do a total cleanup, because you can’t have any peanut residue.”
Perhaps the most important part of the process—and certainly the coldest—is the “hardening room.” The packaged ice cream enters this deep-freeze on a conveyor belt, and is pushed onto a series of slowly-revolving trays filled with glycol, a material that draws heat away from the ice cream. With all the fans in operation, the temperature in the room is about 60° below zero. The movement of the trays ensures that all the ice cream is frozen to the same consistency. The process takes about five hours.
“It comes out rock hard,” Violette says. “The faster you freeze ice cream, the smaller the particles are, and the smoother it is. The whole key to making good ice cream, besides the ingredients, is to freeze it quickly.”
An even larger freezer is devoted to storage. Here, even in the warmest months of the year, parka-clad employees move pallets of ice cream on forklifts, working in below-zero temperatures. “As long as you’re moving and doing something, you’re fine,” Violette says. “It’s when you stand around that you get cold.”
There isn’t a lot of standing around, especially in the months leading up to summer, when Gifford’s is building up its inventory. Perhaps half the total square footage at the plant is devoted to storage. It’s a truly massive amount of ice cream, piled to the high warehouse ceilings on deep shelves. The company doubled its storage space five years ago, and yet it’s barely enough. “I probably have two and a half months of inventory,” Violette says, making an early-spring assessment. “When summer comes, I’ll have this place totally full, and we might have 30 days.”
How long does ice cream keep?
“We usually turn it over within six months,” Violette says. “Technically, there’s no limit to storing ice cream; we’ve kept some discontinued flavors for up to two years. What hurts ice cream is home frost-free freezers, because they thaw periodically. Every time your freezer does that, it warms the ice cream a little bit, and the crystals grow bigger. But in here, it’s minus 20 at all times.”
Renovations to the building over the past five years have not only increased storage capacity, but have made it easier to move product onto delivery trucks without the danger of partial thawing. Still, transportation remains a challenge, as it is for many Maine businesses, because of the state’s location in the corner of the country.
“We’re closer to Quebec than to Boston, but we can’t sell to Canada,” Roger Gifford says. “The dairy industry is one of their protected industries.”
“There are advantages to doing business in Maine and there are disadvantages,” his brother adds. “The number-one advantage is people. Our customers and employees are extremely loyal. We talk to other dairies and other people in business around the country, and our workforce is second to none. Their work ethic, dedication, loyalty—they feel like they’re part of the family. The other big advantage is the quality of our local milk supply. The quality of milk in New England is as good as anyplace in the country.”
On the other hand, “we probably have not one of the most friendly business climates, as far as taxation,” Roger says. “If we were in New Hampshire, we wouldn’t pay any sales tax, or any income tax. If I was in southern Maine looking where I was going to locate my business, I’d need a strong reason to stay in Maine. Maybe it’s the workforce.”
“Or the way of life,” John chips in. “If I want to go across town tonight, I might have to wait a couple minutes at a stoplight, and they blink after 10.”
“The state could do more to support small businesses,” Roger says. “There are a lot of programs that Maine has put together to try to help businesses, like Pine Tree Zones and tax incentives, but unless you ask, no one’s out promoting them. And don’t get me started on the sales tax laws.”
Nonetheless, despite a warning that he might get “wound up,” Roger tells the story of a state tax audit some five or six years ago. “Maine manufacturers have a sales tax exemption,” he says. “We have a certificate that says we’re exempt from paying sales tax, because the sales tax gets paid when consumers buy our product. If I buy a piece of equipment, I’m not supposed to pay sales tax on it.”
During the audit, two state employees visited the plant. “They were here off and on for about two months, digging out records for the previous 10 years,” Roger explains. “That’s disruptive, number one. And the whole time they’re here, I’m saying we’re exempt. And they say, well, you are, but not on everything. If it’s a pump that’s used in the process of making the ice cream, that’s exempt. If it’s a pump that’s used for cleaning your equipment, that’s not exempt.”
“Give me a break” is John’s comment.
“We have to clean our equipment by law as part of the Federal Food and Drug Act,” Roger continues. “It has to be done to certain specifications. I showed them our manuals. It’s part of the process, part of the sanitation process. They went through invoices for seals and gaskets and parts to the pump, and they were pulling them out and asking, ‘Which pump does this go to?’ for things we bought 10 years earlier. We got through the whole thing and they said we owed them sales tax. So I said, well obviously I don’t agree, so what’s the process to dispute this? They said it would take nine months to a year, and if you don’t like it, you can take it to the state supreme court. This dragged on for two years and we ended up settling it. I think I got something like $2,000 knocked off.”
But despite such hassles, the business has brought the brothers a great deal of personal satisfaction. “You don’t get rich, but we’ve been able to make a living for ourselves and our families,” John says. “People ask us, would you do it again today? No way. If I was that age, starting out with a 10,000-gallon business, I don’t think you could do it today. Times are different.”
The biggest change is competition for distribution from national companies in national chain stores. “Back then there were a lot of mom-and-pop stores; the blue law (which kept large retail stores closed on Sundays) was in effect,” John says. “The mom-and-pop stores you could talk to, and get your product in there more easily. Now there’s a rat race to try to get your product in, and there are costs to that, and companies like us can’t afford it. The reason that we’re in Shaw’s and Hannaford is that we were grandfathered in. But if we tried to get in there today, we couldn’t do it.”

Photo by Brice Bowman-Laberge

Photo by Brice Bowman-Laberge

Cream of the Crop

The Gifford family has been doling out deliciousness by the scoop, quart, and half-gallon since the 1980s, with dairy farms going back generations. Meet the family behind the flavor.

Roger Gifford, president of Gifford’s Ice Cream, is a sensible man with sensible tastes. His favorite flavor is vanilla. The company that he co-owns with his brother John still makes vanilla ice cream the old-fashioned way, in freezers built more than 50 years ago, with real vanilla. “We’re still using some of the same recipes our grandfather used to use,” he says. “The basics of making good-quality ice cream are still the same.”

John Gifford, the company’s treasurer, prefers a scoop of chocolate topped with pistachio. The brothers share management duties, but Roger oversees production while John is in charge of sales. They also share a commitment to quality.

“When the price of vanilla went through the roof, we had to make a decision,” John recalls. “It was a real short conversation. We said, ‘We’re going to keep doing it the way we do. We don’t know anything else.’ We’re funny people. We’re very particular on the product we make.”

It’s been that way for at least four generations. “Our great-grandfather and grandfather were both in ice cream,” John says. The family is from Connecticut, but their father was born in Portland, and the brothers spent time in Maine during the summers while they were growing up, before their parents bought a dairy in Farmington in the 1970s.

Lindsay Gifford is John’s daughter, and the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. Her taste in ice cream is more adventurous than her father’s or uncle’s. “Mint chocolate chip with black raspberry and orange sherbet,” she says, when asked to name her favorite cone. When you’re the face of the next generation in a growing family business, you have to be willing to try new things.

From a single stand in the early 1980s, Gifford’s has parlayed a reliance on traditional methods and a willingness to experiment into a thriving business that now supplies ice cream to more than 500 stands throughout New England. Distribution is about 60% bulk (ice cream stands) and 40% retail. They run five of their own stands in Maine. Their products can be found in stores as far south as Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Lindsay Gifford estimates that the company produces around 70 flavors. “We’re constantly making up new ones,” she says.

“When we came to Maine, we were strictly in the milk business,” John Gifford says. “In 1980 we had a surplus of cream. We were almost throwing the cream away, because skim milk and 2% milk were the craze. We decided that we should get back into the ice cream business. We purchased the stand on Madison Avenue here in Skowhegan, and we opened it in June, strictly takeout. Roger and our father and Joel Violette made the ice cream in the corner of the milk plant, just for that stand. Our first intention was to sell just at the ice cream stand, just in the spring and summertime, not to sell to supermarkets, not to do any of that.”

In 1982, the family bought an old building in Farmington, and refurbished it into a seasonal ice cream stand. “When we started the stands, we had no wholesale business,” Roger Gifford says. “At the end of the season, people asked us where they could get our ice cream. For the first couple of years, we sold them three-gallon tubs in October, and people were taking those home and putting them in their freezers. Then in January and February, people were calling us and saying, ‘We ran out; now where are we going to get your ice cream?’ After a couple years of that, we decided to start selling it to a couple of local stores.”

“Our first store that we sold ice cream to was Jimmy’s Market in Bingham, Maine,” says John. “It was on my milk route. Jimmy’s was one of the first stops in the morning after I’d done a few schools. They gave us a chance. We said to ourselves that if this premium product could sell in the Binghams and Skowhegans of the world, well, maybe we had a shot.”

In 1983, the brothers were approached by Oakhurst Dairy about selling their milk business. “They approached Roger and me, even though our parents owned 90% of the business,” John says. “We decided to talk to our parents about it. We literally sat around the kitchen table, and said, look, here’s an opportunity. They’re interested in buying our company. Our parents said, you guys are young, you’re on the upswing, you make the decision on which way you want to go. And that’s unusual in family businesses, especially in the dairy industry.

“We had a very successful milk business. But we were in our 20s; we were both naïve enough not to know what was in front of us.”

Joe Violette is still with the company. Today, he’s the operations manager at the Skowhegan plant where Maine’s most famous ice cream is produced. It’s a surprisingly small operation, given the volume of ice cream flowing from here to stands and stores across the Northeast.

“You can make a lot of ice cream in a small area,” Violette says.

It starts with a mixture of milk and cream, delivered several times a week by Oakhurst. Then sugar, colors, and stabilizers are added, to make the mix that forms the basis of every flavor of Gifford’s Premium Ice Cream. The mix contains 14% butterfat. Lighter mixes are used for institutional ice cream, sold to some schools and hospitals (10%), and for frozen yogurt (2%).

In one of two modest-sized downstairs rooms, the mix is heated to 176° Fahrenheit to kill all the bacteria. Then it goes into a homogenizer, which pressurizes it to break up large particles. The mix is cooled to 38° and aged for 24 hours in storage tanks on the second floor. According to Violette, this aging process helps bring out the full flavor of the mix.

When it’s time to make the actual ice cream, the mix is pumped down to a second downstairs room, adjacent to the first, where bases and ripples are being cooked in steam kettles. This is the stage of the process in which each flavor takes on its unique characteristics. Chocolate, fruit, fudge swirls, ribbons, and nuts enter the maelstrom; it’s here that favorite flavors like Moose Tracks, Maine Wild Blueberry, and Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip are born.

Gifford’s makes its ice cream in Silverstar Continuous Freezers, which were manufactured by Cherry Burrell in the early decades of the 20th century. The company stopped making the machines before 1950; consequently, they are expensive and hard to find. Roger and John Gifford look for them at auctions across the country, and often find themselves bidding against the same handful of old-fashioned ice cream manufacturers.

“This equipment is special because it is slow churn,” Lindsay Gifford says. “This gives the product heavier weight and a creamier texture, as opposed to newer equipment that whips the product too fast and damages the creaminess, giving it more air.”

The freezers work on the same principle as the old hand-crank machines families used to have at home. Each one is a big cylinder with a smaller cylinder inside containing the ice cream. The outer cylinder is filled with ammonia cooled to a low enough temperature to freeze the ice cream inside. Blades continually scrape the ice cream from the sides of the inner cylinder as it freezes. Each freezer can produce 400 gallons of ice cream an hour.

At the end of the process, the product has the consistency of soft-serve ice cream. It’s then put into containers: quarts and half-gallons for stores, three-gallon tubs for ice cream stands.

The operation only takes a handful of people to run. “One guy mixes all the flavors; one guy runs the filler, putting all the lids and cups in; another guy runs the fruit mixer,” Violette explains. “Another guy does all the raw product. He processes the mix and makes the bases—the vanillas and chocolates. We call him ‘the chef.’”

The day starts as early as 5 a.m., with the easy, “base” flavors, like vanilla. “As you go through the day, you progress to your more aggressive flavors,” Violette says. In between runs, the equipment is thoroughly rinsed with sanitary water. “Usually, in a day we’ll run three or four different flavors. We try to avoid too many changes. You can go from a vanilla to a butter pecan and finish up with Moose Tracks.”

Allergen flavors containing nuts are run last. “Once you do a flavor like peanut butter, you’re done for the day,” Violette says. “You have to shut everything down and do a total cleanup, because you can’t have any peanut residue.”

Perhaps the most important part of the process—and certainly the coldest—is the “hardening room.” The packaged ice cream enters this deep-freeze on a conveyor belt, and is pushed onto a series of slowly-revolving trays filled with glycol, a material that draws heat away from the ice cream. With all the fans in operation, the temperature in the room is about 60° below zero. The movement of the trays ensures that all the ice cream is frozen to the same consistency. The process takes about five hours.

“It comes out rock hard,” Violette says. “The faster you freeze ice cream, the smaller the particles are, and the smoother it is. The whole key to making good ice cream, besides the ingredients, is to freeze it quickly.”

An even larger freezer is devoted to storage. Here, even in the warmest months of the year, parka-clad employees move pallets of ice cream on forklifts, working in below-zero temperatures. “As long as you’re moving and doing something, you’re fine,” Violette says. “It’s when you stand around that you get cold.”

There isn’t a lot of standing around, especially in the months leading up to summer, when Gifford’s is building up its inventory. Perhaps half the total square footage at the plant is devoted to storage. It’s a truly massive amount of ice cream, piled to the high warehouse ceilings on deep shelves. The company doubled its storage space five years ago, and yet it’s barely enough. “I probably have two and a half months of inventory,” Violette says, making an early-spring assessment. “When summer comes, I’ll have this place totally full, and we might have 30 days.”

How long does ice cream keep?

“We usually turn it over within six months,” Violette says. “Technically, there’s no limit to storing ice cream; we’ve kept some discontinued flavors for up to two years. What hurts ice cream is home frost-free freezers, because they thaw periodically. Every time your freezer does that, it warms the ice cream a little bit, and the crystals grow bigger. But in here, it’s minus 20 at all times.”

Renovations to the building over the past five years have not only increased storage capacity, but have made it easier to move product onto delivery trucks without the danger of partial thawing. Still, transportation remains a challenge, as it is for many Maine businesses, because of the state’s location in the corner of the country.

“We’re closer to Quebec than to Boston, but we can’t sell to Canada,” Roger Gifford says. “The dairy industry is one of their protected industries.”

“There are advantages to doing business in Maine and there are disadvantages,” his brother adds. “The number-one advantage is people. Our customers and employees are extremely loyal. We talk to other dairies and other people in business around the country, and our workforce is second to none. Their work ethic, dedication, loyalty—they feel like they’re part of the family. The other big advantage is the quality of our local milk supply. The quality of milk in New England is as good as anyplace in the country.”

On the other hand, “we probably have not one of the most friendly business climates, as far as taxation,” Roger says. “If we were in New Hampshire, we wouldn’t pay any sales tax, or any income tax. If I was in southern Maine looking where I was going to locate my business, I’d need a strong reason to stay in Maine. Maybe it’s the workforce.”

“Or the way of life,” John chips in. “If I want to go across town tonight, I might have to wait a couple minutes at a stoplight, and they blink after 10.”

“The state could do more to support small businesses,” Roger says. “There are a lot of programs that Maine has put together to try to help businesses, like Pine Tree Zones and tax incentives, but unless you ask, no one’s out promoting them. And don’t get me started on the sales tax laws.”

Nonetheless, despite a warning that he might get “wound up,” Roger tells the story of a state tax audit some five or six years ago. “Maine manufacturers have a sales tax exemption,” he says. “We have a certificate that says we’re exempt from paying sales tax, because the sales tax gets paid when consumers buy our product. If I buy a piece of equipment, I’m not supposed to pay sales tax on it.”

During the audit, two state employees visited the plant. “They were here off and on for about two months, digging out records for the previous 10 years,” Roger explains. “That’s disruptive, number one. And the whole time they’re here, I’m saying we’re exempt. And they say, well, you are, but not on everything. If it’s a pump that’s used in the process of making the ice cream, that’s exempt. If it’s a pump that’s used for cleaning your equipment, that’s not exempt.”

“Give me a break” is John’s comment.

“We have to clean our equipment by law as part of the Federal Food and Drug Act,” Roger continues. “It has to be done to certain specifications. I showed them our manuals. It’s part of the process, part of the sanitation process. They went through invoices for seals and gaskets and parts to the pump, and they were pulling them out and asking, ‘Which pump does this go to?’ for things we bought 10 years earlier. We got through the whole thing and they said we owed them sales tax. So I said, well obviously I don’t agree, so what’s the process to dispute this? They said it would take nine months to a year, and if you don’t like it, you can take it to the state supreme court. This dragged on for two years and we ended up settling it. I think I got something like $2,000 knocked off.”

But despite such hassles, the business has brought the brothers a great deal of personal satisfaction. “You don’t get rich, but we’ve been able to make a living for ourselves and our families,” John says. “People ask us, would you do it again today? No way. If I was that age, starting out with a 10,000-gallon business, I don’t think you could do it today. Times are different.”

The biggest change is competition for distribution from national companies in national chain stores. “Back then there were a lot of mom-and-pop stores; the blue law (which kept large retail stores closed on Sundays) was in effect,” John says. “The mom-and-pop stores you could talk to, and get your product in there more easily. Now there’s a rat race to try to get your product in, and there are costs to that, and companies like us can’t afford it. The reason that we’re in Shaw’s and Hannaford is that we were grandfathered in. But if we tried to get in there today, we couldn’t do it.”

Family Recipe: The characters behind the Gifford’s brand

Roger and John Gifford are serious about their ice cream business, but put them together in the same room and they could be mistaken for a comedy team. The brothers have a propensity for finishing each other’s sentences. The taller Roger usually plays straight man to the rounder John, but both get off zingers at the other’s expense.

They enjoy ribbing each other about the company’s few failures. “We’ve had some duds,” John acknowledges. “One of them was Roger’s favorite flavor: lemon chiffon.”

“What about the hole-in-one sundae?” Roger shoots back.

“That was for stands with miniature golf courses,” John explains, for those not in on the joke. “It was a doughnut with a scoop of ice cream and fudge on top. I thought it tasted good. We sold about five.”

Then there was the experiment with caramel popcorn. “The only problem was that we had to buy 15 pallets of the stuff,” John says. “We were giving it away to school kids, the Boy Scouts, whoever would take it off our hands.”

When you’ve enjoyed several decades of steady success, it’s easier to laugh when plans unravel. And the Giffords continue to try new things, like handing out lobster bibs with cones of Lobster Tracks ice cream, or offering a short-lived promotion called BYOB—“bring your own banana,” for 50 cents off a banana split.

One of the most successful promotions is the “Tour de Gifford’s,” in which visitors to all five company-owned ice cream stands in the state can get a card stamped and win a T-shirt. All who complete the tour are entered into an end-of-season drawing for a bicycle. The stands are in Skowhegan, Farmington, Auburn, Waterville, and Bangor.

“A lot of our flavor ideas come from consumers,” John says. “We get letters, emails, and phone calls all the time.”

“Years ago, Colby College wanted to come up with a flavor just for the college,” recalls Roger. “The buyer at the school said he had a group of students who wanted us to come down, and have a little forum.”

“That was the most fun,” John says “We sat around, it must have been three hours, and the ideas they came up with were great.”

“We have flavor meetings,” Lindsay Gifford says. “We’ll get companies to send us samples, and mix up half a gallon at a time, using vanilla or chocolate or whatever the base is.”

“We’re the official testers,” says John.” That’s a job I’m going to keep forever.”

Other members of the Gifford family involved with the business include Arland Gifford, sales supervisor; Peggy Gifford, operations manager for the ice cream stands; J.C. Gifford, Maine sales rep, Samantha Gifford, seasonal sales, Ryan Porter, plant supervisor, and Scott Dumont, processing.

Company Brief: Gifford’s Ice Cream, Skowhegan, Maine

Year founded: 1980

Ownership: Brothers Roger Gifford, president, and John Gifford, treasurer

Creation details: Company was founded by Randall and Audrey Gifford. The Gifford family has been in the dairy business for 100 years and five generations. Prior to starting Gifford’s Ice Cream, the family operated a successful milk business, which was sold to Oakhurst Dairy in 1983. The first Gifford’s Ice Cream stand opened in Skowhegan in 1980.

Employees: 25 full-time, 100 seasonal

Positions: Operations manager, mixers and flavor supervisors, forklift operators, sales and marketing, administration, seasonal staffing for five company-owned ice cream stands.

Production schedule: Year-round, from approximately 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays.

Company facts: Gifford’s produces approximately 70 flavors of ice cream and frozen yogurt. Some flavors are distributed seasonally. New flavors are test-marketed on an ongoing basis.

Awards: Awards include first place from the National Ice Cream Retailers Association for Gifford’s Strawberry, along with “World’s Best Vanilla,” “World’s Best Chocolate,” and “World’s Best Orange Sherbet” at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin.

Challenges: The cost of energy, distribution, competition from national companies, availability and cost of shelf space in large chains.

Distribution: Gifford’s supplies approximately 500 ice cream stands throughout New England, and retail stores in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.

To learn more: Visit giffordsicecream.com.

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Tagged as: Gifford's Ice Cream, Maine Manufacturing, Top Maine Brands

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June 28, 2010 at 10:41 am

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