1-900-Ice-Cream

PROFILE

Mar 1

How Ryan Fitzgerald built an ice cream institution…without charging by the minute.

It’s winter in Philadelphia and the weather is frigid, yet there is a hoard of people standing on the corner of Locust and 20th Street in Rittenhouse Square, bundled up and waiting to get a cone at 1-900-ICE-CREAM. Regardless of the temperature, the scoop shop is bustling with guests eager to try the latest flavors from owner Ryan Fitzgerald, which on this day included maple-cinnamon french toast custard and salted caramel apple pie soft serve swirls.

But before there was 1-900-ICE-CREAM, there was Boku Supper Club. Fitzgerald left his job in venture capital in 2015 to focus on running an underground 24-seat restaurant out of his apartment. “I liked to cook and entertain.” Though it started out more bare bones, with Fitzgerald creating the menu and running the kitchen, it eventually “turned into a thing,” and he found himself hosting guest chefs and artists to curate multi-faceted experiences. Once he had chefs to take care of the savory dishes, Fitzgerald turned his focus to pastry. “We needed dessert, so I would spin ice cream the night before. Then it became ice cream sandwiches.”

Fitzgerald dove full force into developing recipes, turning his apartment into a “dairy lab.” “I was really pedantic about getting the ratios standardized. There were copious amounts of spreadsheets.” The tedious effort paid off, and Boku guests started requesting ice cream sandwiches and pints outside of the supper club. “One Thanksgiving I made the best vanilla ice cream, so I said, I'll make 150 pints, lock in your order and come pick it up. That sold out in two minutes.” He continued with the Instagram-driven preorder system for about six months before it became clear that the concept had legs. Fitzgerald transitioned to a commissary space at Liberty Kitchen before leasing a production space in Kensington two months later.

Since the beginning, the ethos of 1-900-ICE-CREAM has been “a little irreverent, kitschy, with fun names, leaning into psychedelics, with lots of call backs to the '90s.” For every pint, Fitzgerald designs a unique label, and meticulously posts flavor updates on Instagram and through their Flavor Hotline (dial 1-234-ICE-CREA). He attributes part of his success to this DIY approach. “I think people liked the scrappy nature of it, the hand-drawn cookie dough. Plus the transparency. I’d post my cash goals, say I'm trying to raise $10k for the next freezer or whatever, and people could watch the growth and know where their money is going.” Additionally, having his hands on every step of the process allows Fitzgerald the freedom to change flavors daily (he rarely repeats pints and has created over 500 unique flavor combinations) while maintaining quality, and constantly integrate new offerings like Bricks (“spoonable milk shakes”) and ice cream tacos with handmade waffle shells. “Everything is vertically integrated,” he says. “We print the labels and distribute. It makes us really agile.”

A big part of that agility starts with the base of the ice cream itself. The flagship scoop shop started with Fitzgerald’s “Philly-style hard ice cream”—a blend of milk and cream with sixteen percent butterfat—along with a custard that he eventually tweaked to a ten-percent butterfat mix with four-percent egg yolk. “What sets us apart is the fact that the dairy is our formulation, direct from one Pennsylvania farm. Other shops either buy a standard commodity mix or buy finished ice cream from a wholesaler. Our farm milks the grass-fed cows in the back, processes our formula, and we send out a truck to pick it up.” The system would also allow the eventual addition of a sherbert mix and a soft serve mix among other variations, and Fitzgerald also connected with a contract baker to handle custom-made mix-ins. “There are a lot of levers you can pull in ice cream to get different characters. Higher protein lends more chew. Higher butterfat is more dense. We use two plant-based stabilizers at a very low concentration so it’s not gummy.”

Now with two scoop shops, local delivery, plus monthly nationwide shipping, Fitzgerald’s focus is to “stabilize. We had a ton of growth really fast. So now it's about carving the details in.” One of the first projects on the list is to make more components in-house, like cones, candied nuts, and whipped cream, along with customizing the front-of-house spaces and potentially incorporating a coffee program. “I want the customer experience to match the quality of the ice cream,” says Fitzgerald. He is also working on custom pans with a pneumatic cutter to bring back ice cream sandwiches. As for more locations? That’s to be determined. “I like it small,” says Fitzgerald. “I just want to be a cornerstone of the Philly ice cream scene.”

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