Today we’d like to introduce you to Kellie Conant.
Kellie, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I grew up in Southern California but came to Dallas to attend school at SMU. I studied Marketing and Spanish and graduated in 2016. I have grown up traveling so I backpacked in Europe for a few weeks right out of college and then took a job back in Dallas for an auto insurance company. It was a great first job that paid well but I didn’t feel like I was at my full potential sitting at a desk each day, so I left. My boyfriend, Brandon, joined me and, with all the money we saved, we went to Europe for 6 weeks on a culinary adventure. We thought we might want to start a restaurant, so we were doing everything food while we were there – checking out some amazing restaurants, eating lots of gelato, taking cooking classes, and learning as much about the culture as possible. Halfway through the trip, Brandon got cold feet about starting a restaurant and looking back, I am SO glad he felt that way. He was thinking ahead (normally, I am the person to do that), and was worried about our lack of background. Starting a restaurant requires so much overhead and usually some sort of experience.
We both traveled back home to our families and lived on opposite sides of the country for about a year, trying to figure out what to do with our lives. We both searched for jobs and had many interviews, but nothing seemed to stick. Around December, we both decided to take a break from searching and interviewing to enjoy the holidays.
That month, I landed in Atlanta to spend time with Brandon’s family. We were driving up to Florida for the new year and Brandon and I were discussing the frustrations of our job search. He started talking about this ice cream joint in Florida around where we stay. The business uses a commercial ice cream brand and charges a lot for each scoop, yet there is ALWAYS a line out the door of families and couples trying to get their ice cream fix. We spent the entire 5-hour drive discussing how we could bring a business like that to one of the cities we spend time in, but instead make ice cream that is high quality and tastes really good. We thought of possible names, core values, locations, how we would source ingredients, what our branding would be like.
From then on, we RAN with the idea and never looked back. We decided on Dallas as the location as it was halfway between both of our families and, after living in Dallas for six years, we both felt like we never found ice cream that met our standards. After we spent the first few months of 2019 testing recipes and gathering up a bunch of ideas for our business, we made the move to Dallas at the end of April. Our LLC was formed in May and we started the work of getting certifications and permits (lots of permits), searching for ingredient sources, testing out more ice cream flavors, gathering information about what was needed to start at the Dallas Farmers Market, looking for a commercial ice cream machine and scoop cart, and much more. It was a lot of work. I always tell people if I would’ve known back in December what I know now about all we had to do to create this company, I probably would have been scared off from doing it… so I’m really glad I didn’t know!
We found a farm in Emory, TX for our dairy and Allen’s Chapel for our eggs. We found a commercial kitchen that could host us, purchased our machine, and started testing our flavors on the machine. We got accepted to the Dallas Farmers Market in September and had our first weekend of selling, which was a huge success. We sold out of almost all of our ice cream and now we’re ready to get selling again the next bunch of weekends. It took a lot to get to where we are now, but it feels so good knowing I’m doing something I’m passionate about and I get to serve people ICE CREAM! I mean, it doesn’t get much better than that.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
One of the biggest challenges along the way was understanding all the permitting we needed for this company. With no background, we were going in blindly for everything we did. Brandon would spend hours a day on the phone with different government entities just trying to find out what permits were necessary. He would call the state, the state would tell him to call the city, the city would tell him to call the county, the county would tell him to refer to the FDA, but the FDA laws were unclear. No one seemed to know the answer to any of our questions, yet we were told we would be in trouble if we didn’t follow the laws. That was a dip in the process that was pretty tough to overcome, but we did it!
Overall, the challenge of getting to this point was just not knowing what we were doing. We’ve learned along the way that you kind of have to “fake it til you make it” because that’s what everyone else does. We did a lot of figuring things out on our own and I guess we’ve made it this far!
Parlor’s Handcrafted Ice Creams – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We make scratch ice cream with the highest quality, local ingredients you can find in the DFW area. The milk we use in our ice cream is local and 100% grass-fed and the eggs we use are pasture-raised from a local Dallas Farmers Market vendor. We also source some of our mix-ins like chocolate chip cookies and chocolate from local Oak Cliff companies. If it’s not local, grass-fed or pasture-raised, it’s organic. As big foodies and ice cream lovers, we have learned over time that great ingredients create really great tasting ice cream.
I’m proud that we make our ice cream from the ground up. Most people don’t know this, but many ice cream companies, even if they say they make their ice cream in house, use pre-made “bases” or “mixes.” Often these come from “Big Dairies” and can be filled with all sorts of unknown ingredients that aren’t great for us. We tried making ice cream at home using minimal ingredients and starting with eggs, milk, cream, and sugar instead of a Big Dairy pre-made mix and it tasted way better, so we thought, why can’t we do that with our company. That’s how ice cream used to be made anyway! So many people have tried our ice cream and said it reminds them of the homemade ice cream their mom or grandma used to make and that’s exactly what we are going for. It tastes like that because it’s made with REAL, high-quality ingredients.
We support local farms and businesses for our ice cream and we really focused on sourcing the BEST ingredients. We’re different because we are SCOOPED ice cream (not rolled, not nitrogen ice cream) that tastes like it did back in the day. Good ole scooped ice cream. We are also a mobile scoop cart at the moment so that we can cater to events, etc.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Well, it really just began, but I would say two moments:
1) About two months ago when Brandon and I decided to hit a brewery for fun after a long week of work. We sat down at a community table and an older couple sat next to us. They started asking us about what we did for a living. We hadn’t been asked that since we started our company, so we told them everything. They were so impressed and had so many ideas for us. After they left, I realized that what had happened: a giant reflection on all the work we had done over the past months. Instead of looking at everything we had ahead of us like we normally did, we got to think about everything we had already done. It was a lot, and I felt really proud at that moment of everything we had accomplished.
2) The day we sold for the first time, we gave a lady a taste of our French Vanilla Bean Ice Cream. She took a bite and her face lit up. She said “wow. This is amazing. It tastes exactly like what my mom used to make for us.” And that was exactly what we have hoped for. It felt so good to hear that. And since then, we have heard that same expression a lot.
Contact Info:
- Website: parlorsicecreams.com
- Email: info@parlorsicecreams.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parlorsicecreams/
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