"Michigan Cream & Sugar Ice Cream Company was founded by the grower-owners of Michigan Sugar Company as a way to show off some of the neat things you can do with locally-grown products and sugar. What better way to show off Pioneer Sugar and the great dairy that we produce in Michigan than an ice cream shop?
But while the farmers knew how to grow sugar beets, and Michigan Sugar knew how to make sugar, they didn’t know how to make ice cream. They needed someone who did, and because the whole idea is about ‘locally-sourced’, they didn't want to go to a big national food service brand. They reached out to a local company in Saginaw: Horizons. Horizons joined Pioneer Sugar, and then Michigan Milk Producers Association, to come together to form Michigan Cream & Sugar Ice Cream Company.
We make every single one of our flavors from scratch, right down to the ratio of sugars to butter and fat to liquid in the base. It wasn’t enough for us just to make ice cream—we wanted to make great ice cream—so we worked for about a year developing recipes before the shop opened and we sold our first scoop of ice cream.
We have 19 flavors in our case, and we make a special base for each of those flavors—we don’t just use a stock base and dump different ingredients into it. Some of our ice cream flavors have a custard base, like Pecan Sugar Cookie and Dairy Farmers Delight. They have at least 8 percent egg yolk in them which provides some of the creaminess. The Brownie flavor is a chocolate Philadelphia base, which means the recipe is sweetened with sugar and uses cream and milk as the base. We did a fun carrot cake flavor with a lot of carrots in the base. That's going to add more solids, so we have to offset that with how much milk powder or cream we use. Those custom bases are part of what makes our ice cream so special, besides the local sourcing that we do.
I could talk forever about Cream & Sugar’s local sourcing! For our Maple Walnut flavor, we get the maple syrup from Newbegin Maple Syrup in Clifford, Michigan, a small farm started by a man and his father. In 2022, they won the Michigan Maple Syrup Association’s Maple Syrup of the Year.
We get the walnuts from St. Laurent Brothers which are infused with maple syrup. We don't grow a lot of coffee beans in Michigan, so for our coffee ice cream flavors,
Live Oak Coffeehouse roasts their coffee beans in Midland and we get beans from them because it's roasted locally. Strawberry Rhubarb was a fun one. The rhubarb came from Stutzman Family Farm in northern Michigan. We made our own strawberry rhubarb compote and it was almost a sherbet, it was so soft and people loved it.
We could check a box and say we're locally-sourced, just because we get our sugar and milk locally, but we try to be as local and small batch as much as possible. We want to help build the community by supporting other local businesses.”
“At Michigan Cream & Sugar Ice Cream Company , we love doing off-the-wall or weird flavors every once in a while. For our Caramel Sweet Corn flavor we did last year, we got the corn from Paul's Produce stand off of Cass in Bay City. We love doing off-the-wall or weird flavors every once and a while, and that one did very well!
There are a few candidates for our craziest flavor. Strawberry Rhubarb was a fun one. The rhubarb came from Stutzman Family Farm in northern Michigan. We made our own strawberry rhubarb compote and it was almost a sherbet, it was so soft and people loved it.
Every year for Cinco de Mayo, we try to do something fun and spicy. Last year, it was our habanero cinnamon flavor. This year, I'm looking at doing something with hot honey. I have a five-gallon bucket with 60 pounds of honey I got from Shomaker Farms last weekend. Right now, I'm using that for some honey lavender with the lavender seeds that come from Lavender Hill Farm, another Michigan farm.”
“I joined Michigan Cream & Sugar Ice Cream Company in the summer of 2020. That was supposed to be our first big summer…but there were some curveballs thrown in there!
I was working at Horizons, one of the businesses that helped start Cream & Sugar. Willie, our original ice cream wizard, took a step back with COVID and everything, so when they reopened after that first initial lockdown, I wasn’t doing anything at Horizons because there were no banquets happening. Cream & Sugar called me up and said ‘Do you want to come out and make ice cream?’
How do you say no to that?
The rest is history. It's been a lot of learning, experimenting, making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. A lot of blood, sweat and tears has gone into these flavors being refined to the point that they're at now, and they are always getting better, too.
Ice cream is fun, but developing great flavors requires a lot of work, art, and science. Right now, we have multiple test batches in my freezer we're working through. It's important to know the butterfat content of the ice cream to make sure you know what the melt point is going to be. Ice cream freezes at about 26 to 27 degrees, and that’s when it comes out of the batch freezer. We need to know that's the correct point and what the best service point is going to be. I already know that before I even make it. I know that it's going to be best served at about three degrees above zero.
And we need to do more than just create a great flavor once—we need to be able to make it great again and again, so consistency is just as important. There are processes we’ve put in place to make sure that happens. I geek out on spreadsheets! We don't use a lot of measuring cups and scoops. Instead, we do everything down to the gram on digital scales. Recently, I posted a candid picture on Facebook of a bunch of buckets of powder with spreadsheets taped to them, because every time we make a recipe, whoever puts that sugar in there crosses it off when they add it. They pour the cream and cross it off just to make sure it comes out the exact same way every single time. Our team does a great job with everything.”
– Tim Mangan, General Manager, Michigan Cream & Sugar Ice Cream Company
