Sometimes it takes leaving some ingredients out to make something new.
The flavor lab at Kemps, which makes all of its ice cream in Rochester, recently rolled out an entirely new brand with 16 flavors with a new approach.
“This is a really big deal for us. We haven’t done anything like this in at least a decade,” said Kemps Senior Vice President of Growth and Innovation Rachel Kyllo. “This is a big bet for us.”
While ice cream will never be a health food, the Kemps’ bet with Simply Crafted is on making a healthier product that is also richer and creamier.
The Simply Crafted line of “premium plus” ice cream is a “clean label” product. That means the average person can understand the ingredients on the label, so no high fructose corn syrup or any artificial flavors or colors.
“It’s a major trend in food. People want less artificial ingredients,” said Kyllo.
Brandon Behnken, a senior research and design scientist, spent almost nine months in the plant’s lab on North Broadway creating the Simply Crafted ice cream.
Part of the challenge was sourcing natural ingredients and figuring how to use natural stabilizers to whip air into the ice cream.
This spring, the 185 employees at the Rochester plant started producing White Chocolate Raspberry, Mocha Mudslide, the already wildly popular Strawberry Rhubarb Cobbler and the rest of the Simply Crafted line in the 34 flavor tanks.
Since it hit the shelves, the very Minnesotan Strawberry Rhubarb has been a breakout hit for the new line. Kyllo says stores are having trouble keeping it on the shelves.
“We’ve had lots of consumers call us to say they’ve went to two, three or even four stores to find all of them sold out of the Strawberry Rhubarb Cobbler,” she said.
Owned by the agriculture cooperative Dairy Farmers of America, or DFA, Kemps is very aware how family farms have been struggling with challenges like a tough market, tariffs and violent weather.
DFA represents more than 14,000 farms. The milk churned to ice cream comes from dairies located within 200 miles of the plant.
“We feel that makes it even more important for us to keep things fresh and new … to make and sell more products,” she said.
Toward that goal, General Manager Casey Sallander keeps the plant running three shifts through the week and all week long during peak demand times, like July. National Ice Cream Day was on Sunday.
“Our busy time is from Easter through the end of July,” he said.
That doesn’t mean ice cream consumption falls off in August. Kemps produces enough during peak production to fill the freezers to cover the demand until things cool off in the fall.
The Rochester can roll out 86,000 units per day — that’s 86,000 packages of ice cream, frozen yogurt and novelties such as ice cream sandwiches. The shiny equipment can fill more than one container per second. That tallies to about 40 million ice cream products rolling out of the Med City on trucks every year, he said.
Weather and other factors can affect demand, so the Kemps production rate is continuously adjusted to serve the market. While 2019 has been rough for dairy, this summer has been good for ice cream.
“We had a soft May due to the cold and rainy weather. June surpassed volume a year ago and July volume is significantly above a year ago,” said Kyllo.