By bob Strohm
bstrohm@wbcowqel.com
For the past year Mark’s Homemade Ice Cream has been by order only if someone wanted to try their ice cream. That is about to change beginning this coming year as the ice cream company has purchased a truck to serve up their frozen concoctions.
Starting his business with an ice cream maker last January, Mark Pfeifer has been making his ice cream out of the Trillium Event Center with hopes to either find a brick and mortar shop, or a vehicle to reach more people with his ice cream. Pfeifer achieved the latter of those goals at this point when his company purchased an equipment truck from the Holmes Township Volunteer Fire Department.
Pfeifer described his new truck purchase.
“We were considering going with a brick and mortar, or getting something mobile like this,” Pfeifer explained. “The Holmes Township Fire Department was looking to sell this, and it is a cool looking truck that fits our needs. It is much cheaper than buying a building at this point, so we figured we will go with the mobile unit.”
“It is just a big box truck essentially,” Pfeifer continued. “We gutted the inside so it is the original open box in the back. We are going to cut the windows out and that is where we will serve ice cream out of in the summer.”
While there will be some remodeling done to the truck to be able to serve ice cream, Pfeifer noted that they plan to keep the truck fire engine red, but plan to add some new paint to the truck with the Mark’s Homemade Ice Cream logo. Pfeifer explained where he hopes to serve up his cool refreshing treats.
“We want to go to heritage festivals that are pretty local. We are looking for businesses or companies who would want to partner with us,” Pfeifer said. “We could park in their parking lot, scoop ice cream there. Come to their lunch hour that way the employees could come out and get ice cream, find a place downtown where people eat pretty regularly that way people know where we are, go to where people are essentially.”
While he won’t have all of his flavors available Pfeifer noted that he will carry six to eight flavors of ice cream at a time and rotate a few out to change things up.
While they have a truck at the moment to serve up ice cream, Pfeifer still hopes that someday Mark’s Homemade Ice Cream will have a brick and mortar location.
“We hope that we can own a building eventually. Currently, we still produce our ice cream at Trillium Event Center like we did last season. We are still going to be doing that this next season and scooping out of our truck, but eventually we would like to have our own facility where we can produce and sell the ice cream at the same location.”
Pfeifer noted that with the truck scheduled to be ready to go in the spring, he looks forward to being able to serve ice cream to the masses the most.