Why premium ice cream is sold in small containers
It started, like many success stories, with a question. What to do with the excess milk produced in the farm? Former Sen. Jun Magsaysay posed this question to his son Paco. At the time, his farm, the 27-hectare Real Fresh Dairy Farm in Bay, Laguna, was producing thousands of liters of fresh milk weekly, from Holstein Sahiwal cattle imported from New Zealand. Could there be another way to make use of their milk?
Paco came up with a chart on possible products. Yogurt? Cheese? And—wait a second— ice cream? Bingo! Ice cream it was. After all, he himself would eat lots of ice cream when he was growing up in the United States.
Soon he came up with a premium brand of ice cream which he named Carmen’s Best, after his daughter. Not only is it made with fresh milk and cream; its ingredients are topof-the-line, from the walnuts, malted milk balls and imported vanilla bean pods, to the pecans from the US and the pistachios brought in from Sicily.
Early challenges
But again, like most success stories, there were challenges.
“No one knew our brand,” he recalls of those early days. “We had no marketing budA
get, no accounts we could ask referrals from. I was literally knocking on as many doors as I could.”
They also had no business model they could follow, since there didn’t seem to be any other premium brand of ice cream in the market then.
Still, Paco persisted. It was a matter of increasing their accounts one by one, he says. A big break came when they were approached by Puregold. When Carmen’s Best began appearing on its shelves, other supermarkets took note, and soon began carrying the ice cream in their stores, too.
It has been 10 years since those early, challenging days. Since then Carmen’s Best has expanded at an impressive rate. From their four initial flavors—Brazilian Coffee, Salted Caramel, Butter Pecan and Malted Milk—they now have 30 lip-smacking flavors, including Cookie Dough, Vietnamese Coffee, Rocky Road, Strawberry Shortcake and Milk Tea. Many of the flavors he created were either from his childhood memories or were inspired by his travels, such as the Hokey Pokey, which he discovered in New Zealand, and the Spanish Turron in Spain, which is an almond ice cream.
Several supermarkets now carry the brand. It even has its own ice cream shop in Power Plant Mall Rockwell and is available in several provinces and overseas, as well. In Singapore, where it’s served in an ice cream shop in Capitol Piazza, Carmen’s Best has been rated number three in the list of Top Ten Desserts.
Paco believes what separates them from the rest is their meticulous attention to detail. They never take shortcuts, he says, and they choose their ingredients with the best taste in mind, regardless of profit margin.
Memorable moments include serving Pope Francis the Malted Milk and Brown Butter Almond Brittle ice cream on his flight from Manila back to Rome in 2015, and winning the Agora Award for Entrepreneurship in 2018.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary on Feb. 1, the company is giving away 10 iPads (watch for the contest rules announcement).
Tips
Meanwhile, Paco gives these tips for the best way to enjoy eating ice cream:
•Before storing your ice cream, set your freezer at the highest possible temperature.
•Once your ice cream is in the freezer, avoid opening the freezer frequently as the fluctuations in temperature will affect the quality of the ice cream.
•Do not ever microwave ice cream. This will destroy its consistency. When ice cream melts and then is refrozen, ice crystals will form, which will degrade the flavor of the ice cream.
•Before scooping out ice cream, let it stand at room temperature for three to five minutes. This makes it easier to get the scoops. You can also scoop the ice cream from the sides first, which are the first areas to soften.
• There’s a reason premium ice cream is sold in small containers—the longer it stays in the freezer, the faster it will degrade (icicles will form). Premium ice cream is made to be consumed soon. Therefore, do not let your premium ice cream stay for long periods of time in the freezer.
Here are tips for enjoying your cold treat from the makers of Carmen’s Best