“AMERICA'S TOP 25 ICE CREAM PARLORS"

Our Story

People often ask me how MDIIC got started....

I guess the story begins when, of all things, I was working for a software company as a web and multimedia developer. One day I knew it was time for a change. I wanted to work for myself, make my own rules, decide my own hours (BTW, this is a myth all small business owners tell themselves at first:  that they are going to “make their own hours.”)

From a young age, I always recognized two constants: a desire to work for myself, and the recognition that the only dessert that ever mattered was ice cream. With that, Mount Desert Island Ice Cream was born in 2005 with not much of a vision except to make my favorite dessert the best way I knew how.

That first year the goal was to fill a void by making flavors not seen in ice cream shops or on the shelves at the supermarket. This led to my first big obsession: Chocolate Wasabi - it needed to be done! However, I also spent time trying to perfect the classics.   I wanted to make ice cream with real ingredients in small batches. Not our of nobility, not because I was influenced by the artisanal movement, as this was not quite a thing yet. But because I didn’t know any other way.

As I worked to hone the craft that very first year, I kept everything simple, selling small quantities at local farmer’s markets and and to various restaurants. By 2006, I decided to make the big jump and opened our first retail location at 7 Firefly Lane in Bar Harbor. I had no idea what I was doing (really, I mean zero idea) as I had never worked in retail.  It all worked out though somewhat magically despite many mistakes I made along the way. 

The following year a second shop nearby at 325 Main Street on the outskirts of town in Bar Harbor. We needed a dedicated production spot, and we figured we’d sell a few cones down there to cover the rent. The shop ended up becoming a surprisingly busy little second location. 

Then one day, Obama stopped by.

While on their vacation trip to MDI in 2010, President Obama and family visited our Main Street shop.  I had received an ARC recovery loan that I had used to open our Portland store. When I heard he was coming to town, I wrote a letter asking him to come by so I could thank him. I’m quite sure he never got this letter and chose instead to visit this location because it was easily secured by Secret Service! He had Toasted Coconut and Michelle had Chocolate (though confidentially they were a bit more adventurous in the flavors they tasted when the press wasn't around). Their visit was an amazing experience, and best left as a story for another day.  However, all of a sudden our quiet little second shop became overwhelmed with visitors who wanted to have ice cream where the first family had visited!

That same year MDIIC made the leap south, expanding to Portland. A fantastic spot at 51 Exchange Street opened up that was just calling out for an ice cream shop. While Bar Harbor will always be our home, we also love being involved in the exciting Portland food community. After years of going back and forth the three plus hour drive seems like nothing these days. A special shout out to my landlord, Joe Palacci, who has supported our shop since we opened and is committed to helping small local businesses thrive.

Several years later I became friends with Brian Lowit and Melissa Quinley, two folks who happen to run Discord Records (of Punk Rock fame) and who also loved to spend time on the MDI. We happened to become friends though their visits to the shop - and after a few years they proposed we go into business together to open a shop in Washington D.C. This was a no-brainer, I knew the business would benefit from their influences, organizationally and artistically. After a rough start getting the store built and open, the Mt. Pleasant location in May of 2018 and has been thriving ever since.  I am so grateful to be working with Brian and Melissa, they challenged me to look at how the operation was being run, and make many improvements that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. MDI Ice Cream is now a better organization thanks to them.

Around the same time, an old friend, Kelton Boyer, threw out the idea of opening a shop in Matsumoto, Japan. Although we are both from Pennsylvania, we became friends when I lived in Japan back in the 90’s. While Kelton was amply busy with Watari (http://www.watari-japan.com/), his translation business, he thought that MDI Ice Cream would do really well as American-Style Hard ice cream is hard to come by in Japan.

I didn’t want to open new stores in Japan for the sake of it as alluring as that is, I knew Kelton would bring a lot that would enhance the entire company as a whole, and I have not been wrong. Kelton is one of these people who can just do anything like make his own pizza oven on the fly, make really beautiful shoji screens for his house, or for that matter, build his own house. More importantly, his natural inclination for the science of making ice cream has been brought the level of our frozen desserts up several notches. 

It’s been almost two decades since I decided to start this venture. And though we like to experiment with flavors, we still keep firmly to the same original principles I started with. We are not satisfied having a company that just sells a widget, analyzes the bottom line, then makes decisions from that standpoint. We strive to make the company to be much more than that.

MDIIC tries to be as environmentally conscious as possible by using responsible ingredients, responsible packaging and recycling just about everything we can. We buy from local sources as much as possible, and have through the years been part of some ambitious (though not always successful) attempts to support local farmers. When it comes to our shops, we have continued to try to create as many good jobs as possible, pay as well as we can, foster a fun environment to work in, and, most importantly,  just try to be as decent as owners and people as can be.

And, in the end, we still just want to make some great ice cream. Living the dream. Making the cream.