Genuine Ice Cream is churning out small-batch, handmade ice cream at the corner of North 7th Avenue and West Peach Street in Bozeman. In a pink-themed shop, across from the iconic pink Bozeman, Montana mural, brimming with mountain flowers, is the place where customers flock to cool off on summer evenings or discover nostalgic flavors the rest of the year.
“We are named Genuine Ice Cream for a reason,” says General Manager Kyra Hart. “It is just genuinely good ice cream with genuine ingredients. We don’t use any artificial colors or ingredients.”
Owner and CEO Ellie Darr shares, “We pride ourselves in making pretty much everything that goes into our ice creams. We’re not making Oreos, we’re not making Butter Fingers, those sorts of things, but all of the other cookies and cakes and sauces and fruit purees. We’re making all of that in-house.”
“We choose to take some of those classics that people grew up with and just make them the best they can be. Give them little twists,” she adds.
Honey lavender is one of those flavors. “We’re steeping real lavender flowers, making milk with that, and then turning that into the ice cream. So, it’s now an extract. It doesn’t have that traditional soapy flavor,” Kyra explains.
Genuine Ice Cream’s most popular flavors include milk and cookies, and “cinnamon cookie dough is one that people just absolutely go crazy for,” along with malted chocolate chip and pistachio.
“Our menu obviously has scoops and you can put them in a cup or a cone. We’ve got homemade waffle cones that we make fresh every day,” Kyra continues. The menu also includes sundaes, shakes, and floats made with root beer, orange soda, cream soda, or huckleberry soda.
“We’re doing cold brew floats. We’re using Ghost Town Coffee for that, and they have just such an amazing product that we’re obviously honored to have it because it’s so great.”
Ellie admitted that before getting into the ice cream business, “I wanted to open my own bakery, and I had moved away from Bozeman and was living in Crested Butte, Colorado. I worked in a donut and ice cream shop down there, and I was their donut maker, and I made all of the cookies and the cakes and things like that that go into their ice cream. And during my time there, they taught me little bits about the ice cream side of things.”
When Ellie came to Bozeman to attend school at MSU, she took a job at Genuine Ice Cream as a production manager. “At the time, Genuine Ice Cream was a small wholesale business. It was me and two other girls, and we didn’t have any retail presence at that time,” she shares of working in a small space.
“Over my first winter with the company, I helped develop the retail side of the business. And we ended up opening our first seasonal store in the spring of 2018, which was located in a trailer in front of the Lark Hotel. We operated there for the 2018, 2019, and 2020 summer seasons. I ultimately bought the business in early 2020, and then we opened our first year-round brick and mortar store in June of 2020.”
While operating out of the trailer, Ellie believed that customers knew of them as the “ice cream down in the trailer” and never really knowing what the name of the business. After rebranding and relocating to a brick-and-mortar spot, Genuine Ice Cream gained its own identity.
The move provided not only a new identification but also more space to create and operate. Production Manager Kim Scanlon develops the new flavors. Ellie believes she has a blank slate to create any flavor and is willing to work with chefs and businesses to create custom ice cream.
They have worked with Mark Leberger of Georgettes Galettes to create a choke cherry ice cream. Mark uses the ice cream to make his waffle cookie ice cream sandwiches.
“We’ve got so much good background knowledge just from making so many different flavors that when people bring those kinds of ideas to us, we usually have a pretty good starting point,” Ellie says.
“I’m proud of the product we make, and I’m unbelievably proud of the service that we provide with that. Good customer service for customers is the heart of any successful business.”
While serving ice cream is one of the keys to success at Genuine Ice Cream, Kyra believes their product sells itself. “It’s very hard to be grumpy in a store that smells like waffle cones. And then you know that your ice cream is waiting for you at the end of the counter.”
