Why do You Only Have 6 Scoop Flavors?

In 2016 when we opened our first brick and mortar shop in Fishtown we had a tough decision to make. How many flavors should we have on the menu? 

There were some concrete limitations that helped to inform our decision. First, the shop is small, 325 square feet, and of that, we only had a fraction of the space available for scooping ice cream. The shop is narrow as well, about 12 feet wide. Since ice cream sandwiches were the thing that many folks associated with Weckerly’s, we also had to dedicate space to storing and displaying the sandwiches. This left us with less than a four foot wide space for a dipping cabinet (aka ice cream freezer).

If we used the round 3 gallon tubs common to the industry, we could have offered 8 flavors at a time. However, we always need to do things a bit differently. Whether made of plastic or cardboard, those 3 gallon tubs are not reusable, and often not recyclable. That didn’t cut it for us, so we opted to use stainless steel pans that could be washed and reused. Unfortunately, that meant that we would only have space for 6 flavors of ice cream at a time. 

As it turned out, this was kind of perfect for us. You see it takes at least 3 days to make a single flavor. Our creamery crew works 5 days a week, meaning that having 8, 10, or 31 flavors would be quite a stretch for us.

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.” Sometimes we think that the same quandary may apply to six flavors. Each day we hear equal measures of “gosh, there are too many choices” and “the menu is too small.” Thus it seems that six flavors is always too little or too many for anytime you want to eat ice cream. However, I think we can all agree that 3 o’clock is always a good time to eat ice cream!