Unusual Flavors of Jeni’s Icecream

Three days back, I was at Jeni’s Splendid ice cream shop at Howell Mill Road, Atlanta. The shop is known for the unusual flavors normally not available at other ice cream shops or brands. Long queue in front of this shop reminded me of Natural Icecream place at Juhu where we stood for more than an hour to get our Custard Apple ice cream during early nineties.

What is so special with Jeni’sJeni's Splendid Ice Creams is an artisan ice cream company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, with national distribution. It is known for its creative flavors and its high-quality ingredients, has been featured nation wide in the press as an artisan ice cream maker.

Just read the name of few flavors to have an idea of what kind of experiment these people do with your ice cream scoop:

• Lemon , Blueberry and Parfait Pint
• Lemon Buttermilk frozen Yogurt
• Almond Milk Cortado
• Askinosie Dark Milk Chocolate
• Bangkok Peanut
• Brambleberry Crisp
• Brown Butter Almond Brittle
• Riesling Poached Pear Sorbet
• Coffee With Cream and Sugar
• Darkest Chocolate
• Lemon and Blueberries Frozen Yogurt
• Pistachio and Honey
• Pickled Mango
• Queen City Cayenne
• Salty Caramel
• Savannah Buttermint
• Salted Peanut Butter with Chocolate Flecks
• Sweet Corn & Blackberries
• Milkiest Chocolate
• Ndali Estate Vanilla Bean
• Middlewest Whiskey and Pecans
• Wildberry Lavender

Lady behind the venture

Jeni Britton Bauer is the lady behind Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. Before starting this venture, Jeni attended Ohio State University,  and studied art history and fine art. While in college, one of her friends was a graduate student in the chemistry department and gave her vials of scented chemicals which led her to gathering essential oils, making her own perfume, and selling her perfumes for a few years.

She also experimented with the tasteless essential oil of cyan and decided to mush it into chocolate ice cream to make a spicy frozen chocolate. It was the moment, she realized that ice cream was "the perfect carrier of scent" and she immediately started making many other flavors of ice cream with essential oils. Two weeks later, she decided that she wanted to make scented ice cream as a business and dropped out of Ohio State !

Thereafter, Jeni teamed up with one of her friends and attempted multiple times to open up a stall in North Market area of Columbus. However, the market constantly rejected them because it did not believe that an ice cream store had a place at their market. It was only until PBS aired a feature about ice cream being sold at a market that the North Market reconsidered. As a result, in 1996, Britton Bauer opened the first prototype store in the North Market area of Columbus, and she called it Scream Ice Creams. Some of the first few flavors were Salty Caramel, Wildberry Lavender, and Hot Chocolate. After making her own ice cream for four years, Britton Bauer closed Scream and decided to attend the ice cream short course at Penn State.

Thereafter, Britton Bauer got a job at the North Market and proposed opening a new ice cream store at the market for nearly a year without success. Meanwhile, her boyfriend bought her an Italian gelato machine that she could not afford at the time and began making her own ice cream again at home. Later, the first Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams opened in 2002, also in the North Market. From opening day of Jeni's, the store was incredibly popular. Within the first year, her boyfriend's brother joined the company, making him the third member of the company in addition to Jeni and then-boyfriend now-husband Charlie.

Three years later, in 2005, a state regulator alerted Jeni's that they didn't have a proper license that was required to sell ice cream in a market. As a result, Britton Bauer and her colleagues realized that they needed to open a brand new ice cream production facility instead of making the ice cream in the market. In 2006, she opened her first store out of the market and continued to expand into other locations in the area. In 2009, after Jeni, Charlie, and Charlie's brother realized that they needed a CEO, their close friend John Lowe quit his job at General Electric to become the company's first and only CEO.

Vegan Avatar

From March 14. the brand has offered a plant-based Dark Chocolate Truffle flavor in the past, but the new line will add three dairy-free, coconut cream-based flavors to its menu: Cold Brew Coffee with Coconut Swirl; Texas Sheet Cake; and Roasted Peanut Butter and Strawberry Jam. The cold brew flavor features Slingshot Coffee-infused sorbet with coconut cream swirls. The Texas Sheet Cake flavor features chocolate cake crumbles, bittersweet fudge, and rich cocoa. The peanut butter flavor features creamy peanut butter, a pinch of sea salt, and swirls of sweet strawberry jam.

Huge Sales
To make their ice creams in 2017, the company used 66,339 pounds of almond brittle, 2,394 pounds of Direct Trade coffee, 2,151 pounds of sea salt, 53,687 of Dutch cocoa powder, 1,413 pounds of Askinosie Chocolate cocoa nibs, 16,597 pounds of organic yogurt from Seven Stars Farm, 189 pounds of tea from The Tea Spot, 5,467 pounds of peaches from The Peach Truck, 1,545 pounds of alcohol—including Right Bee Cider, Yazoo Brewing, and moonshine from Millstreet Distillery, 20,100 pounds of Ohio strawberries, 2,493 pounds of pumpkins from Hirsch Fruit Farm, 3,542 sweet potatoes from Hirsch Fruit Farm, 21,550 Ohio blackberries, 484 pounds of whiskey from Middle West Spirits, 12,353 pounds of goat cheese from Mackenzie Creamery, 1,282 pounds of Ohio honey, and 1 million pounds of grass-grazed milk.