Midwesterners are now enjoying Tucson’s own Isabella’s Ice Cream, available at outposts of the St. Louis-based Schnucks grocery chain.
In late June Isabella’s shipped 12,000 pints of ice cream in eight different flavors to Schnucks, which rolled it out in a dozen stores in August, said Schnucks dairy manager Steve Zielinski.
“Considering the price point, it’s doing very well. I’m very happy with it,” said Zielinski, who discovered Isabella’s Ice Cream when he came to visit his daughter — University of Arizona art professor Angie Zielinski — in Tucson.
Zielinski said Schnucks sells pints of Isabella’s for $4.49 apiece, the going rate, he said, for what he called super premium ice cream. The ice cream is available in 13 of the company’s 100 stores that are spread over five Midwestern states, he said.
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“It seems to be selling well at the stores,” said Kristel Johnson, who owns and runs Isabella’s with her husband Dominic. “The thing that is interesting is that nobody knows who we are. It’s a total blind new product sitting (in the freezer).”
The Schnucks’ sales comes amid a flurry of fast-paced deals that moved Isabella’s over the past two years from an ice cream truck operation to a wholesaler.
In Tucson its ice creams are sold at Maynards Market & Kitchen, Rincon Market and Whole Foods Markets, which awarded the Johnsons a $6,000 local producer loan to create a single-serve carton that could lead to the ice cream being sold in Whole Foods locations outside the state.
“We’ve been really blessed. It’s been baby steps along the way and then suddenly leaps,” Kristel Johnson said.
The next leap: Opening a scoop counter inside the newly renovated and reopened Rincon Market, 2513 E. Sixth Street. Johnson said the counter, which she hopes will be up and running by the end of the month, will be designed to look like the couple’s all-electric 1927 Ford Model T ice cream truck that has been their signature since starting the company four years ago.
The Model T was a regular fixture at food truck roundups, Second Saturdays Downtown and private catered events.
The couple now has two trucks and produces their ice cream from a spacious warehouse near the old 17th Street Market.
They also sell their ice cream in a handful of restaurants in Tucson (Renee’s Organic Oven, Diablo Burger, Lerua’s Mexican Food, Seis Kitchen & Catering) and in the Phoenix area, including special bonbons made for the Phoenician Resort.
Isabella’s Ice Cream also is available at AJ’s Fine Foods and Food Conspiracy Co-op.
