Maine Food Insider: Rococo Artisan Ice Cream looks to grow beyond Maine
Photo / Lori Valigra
Lauren Guptill, owner of Rococo Artisan Ice Cream in Kennebunkport, scooping a cone of 'real mint' ice cream for a patron. The shop's motto, 'ice cream without borders,” describes Guptill's use of unusual ingredient combinations, some from global sources, like Amarula pecan and goat cheese blackberry Chambord.
Lauren Guptill, who tripled Rococo Artisan Ice Cream’s locations last summer, is on the move again, this time scouting a location in Boston.
The ice cream shop owner, who started her company in 600 square feet of retail space in downtown Kennebunkport in 2012 at age 27, prides herself on being ahead of the pack in terms of creative, whimsical flavors. She said she used speculoos Belgian cookie butter in her ice cream more than a year before Häagen-Dazs and Trader Joe’s.
“The flavors are rooted in my living in Argentina and traveling a lot in my 20s,” Guptill, now 33, told Mainebiz in her crowded shop in Kennebunkport after unloading batches of ice cream made at the company’s commercial kitchen in Wells. “Our motto is ‘ice cream without borders,’ ice cream that is a celebration of cultures.” A small cone or cup costs $4.50.
The ice cream names on the company’s website alone make one feel like a world traveler: Amarula pecan, goat cheese blackberry Chambord, strawberry habanero, Nutella cranberry and guava rose. There’s also Maine whoopie pie and rhubarb sage. Flavors, said Guptill, are both whimsical and push boundaries, like the Rococo art movement of 18th century France, the shop’s namesake.
Rocketing to fame
Guptill started the business with a $35,000 bank loan and $7,000 of her own money. In short order, the shop’s unusual flavors caught on with tourists and locals alike. Guptill said the real bump up came in 2014, when she rocketed to national fame as Trip Adviser ranked Rococo the sixth best ice cream in the country.
At that time, the Kennebunkport shop, which housed the ice cream case, the kitchen, the storage area and everything else related to the business, was already too cramped. Guptill spent more than two years trying to find a commercial kitchen space, which she found in Wells last summer. There, she has 3,000 square feet, 2,000 for production and the remainder for storage.
Last July she also opened a second retail shop in Ogunquit, near where she lives. It is 1,000 square feet. Both were self-funded.
A different aspect of the business also opened last summer when she partnered with Bob’s Clam Hut in Kittery to take over and upgrade its ice cream window.
“Bob’s ice cream sales rose more than 33% in that first year,” said Guptill, who added that she is looking for more ice cream window partnerships going forward.
As for her own business, sales were up 38% with the new locations, to reach $600,000 in 2016. She’s expecting $800,000 in revenues this year. She has 33 mostly part-time employees. Guptill, a manager and two kitchen staff are full-time.
She’s also looking to do more flavor collaborations like a recent one with NibMor Chocolate of Kennebunk for an ice cream combining the chocolate with creamy coconut matcha (green tea powder).
And now, she is actively scouting for a location in Boston. Areas of interest include that city’s South End, Downtown Crossing and more upscale areas around Fenway. “I want to be in Boston by next summer,” she said, adding that the location will help create year-round business.
It’s not just about flavor
Gupta mixes a bit of gelato-making into her ice cream production. The ice cream scooping cabinet is a gelato case, which she said circulates air better than a traditional ice cream case and thus holds a more consistent temperature and better flavor in the ice cream.
She churns her ice cream slowly so it does not take in much air and is thick in consistency. The temperature in the case also is a few degrees warmer than that in a typical ice cream case to bring out the subtle flavors she uses.
“In our rhubarb sage ice cream, which is seasonal, you can taste the sage from the first to the last bite,” she said.
A head for business
Before starting Rococo, Guptill had a Spanish immersion business in Argentina for students traveling to that country. A seventh-generation Mainer whose family dates to the 1600s in Berwick, Gutill longed for the sense of community she had in Maine, and returned home in 2011 after running the Argentina business for four years.
She credits the U.S. Small Business Administration office in Portland with advice that helped her both sell the Argentina business and start her new one in Kennebunkport in an old barber shop.
She said she knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur, but hadn’t decided on what business until she visited the barber shop, and imagined an ice cream shop in it instead. And she remembered how much she enjoyed eating ice cream in Argentina, more so than in the United States. After her first year in business the shop was doing well, but she went back to Argentina to study how the Argentinians make ice cream. That knowledge is in the ice cream she makes now.
The business side came naturally to Guptill, who had honed her skills as a young child working in her paternal grandfather’s Hackmatack summer theater in Berwick. He started the theater in the 1970s after running a dairy farm and then selling his cows as the dairy business went downhill.
“I grew up working in the family business,” she said.
That family history of seasonal work also fit into her plan to initially run Rococo as a seasonal business, save up some money and travel in the off-season. It proved to be more work to close down the shop and reopen it, so she’s expanded and has a year-round business in shipping pints all around the country, though she said that’s not even 1% of her business. Most comes from the shops.
Said Guptill, “Now I want to work year round, and am eager to start the Boston location.”
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments