Something you might not know about the small-batch ice cream biz? The winter months don’t really slow down sales at all.
Phil Farzanegan tells me this on the first truly cold day of 2024, an overcast November morning with wind whipping through northeast Minneapolis. Inside the Minnesota Dairy Lab production facility, things are humming. Caramel bubbles on the stove for Thanksgiving pies, and a small batch of an exploratory flavor made in collaboration with an Edina olive oil brand churns away on a stainless-steel countertop.
Sure, you might not see families walking around with cones in hand, but the cold months move plenty of pints. “In fact, we sell more pints in the winter than we do in the summer,” Farzanegan says.
As for why I’m here on this particularly cold Monday? Well, we thought a fun way to get a behind-the-scenes look at this buzzy, award-winning ice cream company, which popped up seemingly out of nowhere two years ago, would be by making a collaborative ice cream flavor. And to our great delight, they said, “Sure!”
This isn't a sponcon partnership; we just thought it'd be cool, and when someone offers to turn you into ice cream, you don't say no. Racky Road is a very real ice cream flavor you can order online right now, and you can read more about it below. But before we get into that, let’s learn a little more about how the sausage (ahem, ice cream) gets made.
Farzanegan has been in the restaurant industry since he was a teenager in Florida making sandwiches at Quizno’s. When he got sober in 2015, he went to a long-term treatment center in New Jersey; the treatment center wanted to send him to a transitional facility when his time there ended. That’s how he ended up here in Minnesota, at a place called The Retreat in Wayzata.
“Minnesota wasn’t even on my radar … I knew, like Fargo, you know?” Farzanegan says. But his timing was fortuitous. The Retreat needed a cook, and he took the job happily, using it as an opportunity to learn about making everything he could—including ice cream.
Before long, Farzanegan and his partner Jessie were visiting all of the local specialty ice cream makers in town: A to Z Creamery, Bebe Zito, Milkjam, Sweet Science. (Again: lotta small-batch ice cream for a place where it’s 10 degrees out half the year!) What started as a curiosity—something fun to do for a while, especially during the pandemic—became an obsession. Farzanegan kept experimenting, giving pints away to friends, family, and coworkers.
“The last thing I wanted was to have two jobs,” he says, but he kept hearing the same thing: “You need to sell this.” So the couple started doing online sales out of their garage through Instagram, in the very under-the-table kind of way in which some other popular local pop-ups have gotten their start.
Somehow they ended up on the radar of Tono Pizzeria’s Shaz Khan, who wanted their ice cream in his restaurants. So Farzanegan moved out of their condo’s kitchen into a commissary space, and, after a long and confusing regulatory process, started officially selling ice cream. Two years later, Minnesota Dairy Lab has five employees and close to 50 wholesale accounts; this is now Farzanegan’s full-time job, though he worked in the kitchen at The Retreat until June.
One reason these ice creams shine is that everything—everything—is made from scratch. They pasteurize their own base, giving them ultimate control over the final product, and if there are any mix-ins in the ice cream, they’re either made in-house or by another small-batch partner. And Farzanegan is the lab’s mad scientist, orchestrating each flavor for maximum deliciousness. “I spend more time on my computer looking at spreadsheets and graphs and solubility tables and sugar concentrations…” he says. “I get headaches staring at the computer.”
Awards and acclaim have followed thanks to the Dairy Lab’s inventive flavors, like Malted Golden Oreo, Brown Butter Rosemary, and Shiso Yuzu Umeboshi Sorbet. And with that attention, there’s been an unexpected outcome: Lots and lots of people have asked Minnesota Dairy Lab about doing collaborative flavors. Guilty!
“We typically look for collaborative partners that are kind of also chef-driven, somewhat small, and really do whatever it is that they do really, really well,” Farzanegan says. (Small-batch journalism is apparently not off the table.) That means the Dairy Lab’s coffee ice cream is made with SK Coffee in the Twin Cities and Underwood Coffee in Duluth, the kind of single-origin, small-batch roasters who take great pride in sourcing their beans and actually go to the places where they’re grown. Farzanegan relates to that ethos. “I mean, we’re not going to meet the cows and stuff—I would,” he chuckles.
Often, collaborations come from a dessert or flavor profile the restaurant is known for. When the Dairy Lab partnered with Marty’s Deli this summer, the Marty’s team came in with a list of ideas that they thought would be cool to do; after some back and forth, they landed on a flavor made with Marty’s oatmeal cream pies. Other times, the ice cream starts with a funny name and works backwards.“I woke up at 3 in the morning and had this ‘Santa’s Secret’ stuck in my head as a funny name for a flavor,” Farzanegan says, a flavor that eventually came to exist with bourbon ice cream, cookies, and caramel.
Such was the case with Racky Road. We didn’t have a great grasp of what ingredients represent an upstart journalism outlet, but we left plenty of names on the cutting room floor. (Perhaps there’s still time in the future for “Chasing Scoops.”) Farzanegan and his team figured out the flavor profile of our Rocky Road rip—a malted chocolate ice cream base with brownie chunks, vanilla marshmallow fluff, and pretzel toffee brittle. The brownies were baked by That Good Brownie in St. Paul, the five-time Minnesota State Fair blue ribbon winner.
“And I partner with my friends a lot,” adds Farzanegan, who happens to be friends with many of the Twin Cities’ most exciting local chefs and restaurant owners: Peter Bian and Linda Cao from Saturday Dumpling Club; Alex Althoff, Sarah Julson, and Nat Moser from Dahlia; Jeffery Rogers and Breanna Evans from Wrecktangle. Minnesota Dairy Lab actually has a partnership with Wrecktangle; the pizza shop has invested in the Dairy Lab and owns the Northeast commissary space where the ice cream is made.
It’s kind of like the small-batch ice cream brand ties together the Twin Cities food scene—you could play six degrees of separation from Minnesota Dairy Lab pretty easily.
“I want nothing more than for that to be the case,” Farzanegan says. “Community is so important to me and to the food industry in general. And the Twin Cities have a really, for the most part, warm community that supports and promotes each other. We want to embrace that.”
You can order Minnesota Dairy Lab pints online—including Racky Road—for pickup at Minnesota Dairy Lab’s Northeast kitchen, or find select pints at vendors around town.
