What’s going on this week with the Penny Ice Creamery? Tonight we are hosting a fundraiser at the Downtown shop for Alay, a UCSC student group focused on personal expression. 10% of sales from 5:30pm to close will go to the group. Tomorrow Dishcrawl, a progressive tasting event, will finish its night at the Penny downtown around 9 o’clock. If you’re curious, there’s more about Dishcrawl at the the aptly named dishcrawl.com. Thursday a new Edible Monterey Bay comes out, and we’re always curious to see what interesting epicurean adventures they’ve gotten into. Finally, Free Ice Cream First Friday is coming up, keep an eye on our Facebook page for details.

Dear Friends of The Penny Ice Creamery,

As calendar year two of the Penny draws to a close we want to thank you for continuing to grow with us. We had a simply amazing time this year and you all played a big part of that. First off, we have to thank you for voting us Santa Cruz’s favorite ice cream in the Good Times, Santa Cruz Weekly, and Sentinel! This is an incredible honor and we will continue to do our absolute best to validate your trust. Of course you couldn’t stop there, and went and named us “Coolest Cold Treat” in all of the Bay Area, where we were nominated alongside some of our ice cream heroes including BiRite and Three Twins!

Meantime back at the ranch we were keeping our heads down and getting busy in the kitchen. We orchestrated our first annual “Pint of the Month Club” (French Prune & Alambic Brandy, Nasturtium & Huckleberry, Tonka Bean, Vadouvan, Sheep Milk Yogurt, Elderflower Cherry, Black Currant & White Chocolate, Chocolate Raspberry Tobacco, Fig & Wort, Salted Butter Caramel, Medjool Date, Black Winter Truffle!), which was great fun. Our one regret is that we couldn’t share these super small batches with more people, so this year we’ll be trying some new things to get more people involved with our exotic flavor adventures.

On the sourcing side, our farm relationships continue to grow and deepen. We had an awesome time working with Frog Hollow on our Peach Partay ice cream and stone fruit seminar through the Santa Cruz Farmers Market Foodshed Project, and we partnered up with Dirty Girl Produce at the Eat Real Festival in Oakland to talk ice cream and strawberries. Maintaining our commitment to sustainability through farm visit verification continues to be a top priority, and this year we were all over the place including a visit to the cows that supply our milk and cream at the Moretti Family Dairy.

Looking forward to 2013 we’re excited to be opening the cutest darn scoop shop you ever saw in Pleasure Point, right between Pink Godzilla Sushi and our friends at Verve. Look for it to open in the first or second month of the year. We’ll continue to be at all your favorite events (yeah, we’ve already got our spot staked out for Earth Day) so we look forward to seeing you all over Santa Cruz County!

We love being your ice creamery, and wish you the very best in 2013!

Sincerely,

Kendra & Zach
The Penny Ice Creamery

A Favorite Moment of 2012

We will be closed New Years Eve and New Years Day this year. We will miss our Penny friends, but our families are going to be stoked to have us home for two consecutive days!

When Kendra and I started this business, one of our primary guiding principles was the intention to have a “net regenerative impact” on our community. We identified early on that this needed to start within the community we most directly impact: that of our employees. As everyone knows, how health care is administered in this country has been a source of much debate over the last few years. Costs have continually risen, responsibility for this has been assigned all over the place, but the thing that hasn’t changed is that health care is something everyone needs sooner or later.

It’s taken us longer than we wanted, in part because the target has been moving so rapidly, and in part because, as any small business owner will tell you, there’s always something(s) that needs your immediate attention. Despite the challenges, we are pleased to say that as of December of this year, we are now offering health care coverage to our employees.

We feel that this represents a milestone for us as part of our commitment to become the best business we can. In an industry where “benefits” often means “staff meal”, we want to do our best to demonstrate how it is possible to run a business that is truly sustaining to its people, its communities, and its planet.

Have you seen the wonderful documentary short about the Penny put together by XRATS Productions? Check it out:

We make delicious ice cream, not websites. That said, we felt it was time to upgrade from the site Zach made by hand (!) to something a little more twenty-first century. Please pardon the baking powder while we get it fully cooked!