Happy 8th Year to our Black & White Ice Cream Sandwich!
It’s the Black & White ice cream sandwich’s BIRTHDAY!
Check out how it has evolved over the past 8 years. We’re in the process of making some changes to our flagship ice cream sandwich to make it more sustainable while keeping its flavor on point 👌
The process of making our B&W ice cream sandwich has changed significantly over the years. As demand has scaled, we’ve needed the process to become more efficient and uniform.
The cookies and ice cream were originally cut separately and assembled by hand.
Chocolate chips were big for the first year. We shifted to a smaller chip for better distribution.
Now we put a sheet of chocolate chip cookie in a frame and spread the freshly churned ice cream on top of it. The cookies and ice cream are all cut as one piece on a special machine.
The ice cream was once spread with an offset spatula and eye-balled for evenness. Each sandwich was a little… or a lot different. These days we have special “scrapers” to get pretty perfect layers.
Our aim is to be closely connected to our ingredients while making positive connections with as many people as possible. This means we focus a lot on local, but with certain ingredients such as cocoa and vanilla, that just isn’t possible. To stay in sync with our mission, we strive to responsibly source these beloved ingredients.
From the start, we have used a fair-trade organic cocoa powder from Equal Exchange for our chocolate ice cream and chocolate cookies. This co-op grown and produced cocoa from the Dominican Republic is delicious and traded in a manner that benefits the economic health of its origins, as opposed to exploiting them. Our goal for the past four years has been to move all of our chocolate ingredients to fair-trade or better.
Image courtesy of Equal Exchange
For about two years, the only exception to that move has been the chocolate chips in the Black and White sandwich. The main hurdle there being ingredient cost since the Black and White drives much of our wholesale business where margins are much slimmer. Last year in 2021 we used the last of our conventional chocolate chips and did not order more.
Since 2021 our Black and White sandwich can be found at our retail partners on chewy chocolate cookies and they are great! The new cookies are like a cross between the classic ice cream sandwich chocolate wafer and a thin fudgy brownie. They are made with organic fair-trade cocoa from Equal Exchange Co-op (same as our chocolate ice cream).
What makes this ice cream sammie one of our fan faves?
It’s a great gateway to Weckerly’s ice cream!
Both kids and grown ups love it!
Nostalgia factor - It reminds us of treats we had when we were little! (remember Dixie Cups?!)
