When I was 10 years old, I was running by my grandmother.
She was standing in the kitchen stirring a pot and I was over at
her house a lot.
She stopped me in my tracks and she said, "Jeni, you're so lucky
because you can be whatever you want to be.
You can be a doctor, you can be a lawyer, you can be an astronaut.
It wasn't like that for me.
You know, you're really lucky."
And I was like, "Thanks, Grandma!"
And I just darted off.
But I remember, when I ran out the door to go outside, in that
moment, I thought, "Well, if that's true, then I'll be an ice cream
maker." I started making ice cream when I was studying art at Ohio
State University and I figured out that ice cream is like this
perfect canvas for telling stories and scent and flavor sort of
blooms in ice cream.
We had a chocolate merchant and a spice merchant and all sorts of
incredible ingredients — wines, cheeses — that I got to play with for
four years, I was open for four years.
Closed that business and then opened Jeni's back in the same market
in 2002, and the rest is history.
There's one called Bangkok Peanut.
That was inspired by a Thai woman in the North Market.
And it's coconut milk and peanut and cayenne.
That was one of my early flavors and it's still one of our most
popular to this day.
I mean, that's going on, I don't know, going on 25 years, I guess.
Oh, my first, first, first flavors were, I mean, Salty Caramel, which
I learned from a French chef that I had worked for just prior to
opening my first shop in 1996.
And people would drive in from the surrounding states to get it.
Wildberry Lavender, which is a flavor that we still have that I've
been making since then.
Chocolate was an interesting one because I had to work really hard on
chocolate. Chocolate will dry out the ice cream if you add a lot to
it. So a lot of ice cream makers struggle with making a really dark
chocolate that's actually super full-flavored.
So I worked on that for many years and finally figured that one out.
I actually don't love the idea that our ice cream is expensive.
I just think that our ice cream is what it needs to be.
If we want this kind of ice cream, we have to pay people who make,
grow, produce the ingredients for it.
And it's really the only way to get it. It
really is about is it worth it and is it better?
And can you taste all the nuances?
And is the cream lush and creamy, and is it everything you ever hoped
for? Then, I think it's worth it.
And I think that's what people are after.
Starting in Columbus, Ohio was just one of the best things that we
could have done.
If I'd had to start on High Street or whatever, I just
wouldn't have been able to make rent.
I had a lot to learn, I had to learn about all that stuff, but also
because we have access, of course, to agriculture and all the
ingredients we could ever use.
But then the other thing is we can ship from Columbus, Ohio.
It's within a day's drive of like 60% of the population of North
America.
I've never, first of all, met a farmer who doesn't want to grow or
even involve some of the neighboring farms, and we're nowhere near
the place yet where we need to worry about when we're going to run
out of like farms who will grow strawberries for us.
We're not even close to that.
We love working directly with our farmers.
We have a whole team of people at Jeni's whose job it is just to keep
these relationships going.
We celebrate them.
We love them, whether it's a goat cheese maker from Cleveland, Ohio
or our whiskey distiller right down the street from us or our growers
or our dairy families.
So, I think that's just why we exist as a company first.
And so we do that first.
And it's true of our own team as well, taking care of those people
first so that we can take care of everybody else.
People are drawn to our ice creams because, people — and I'm the same
way, and I've worked the counter for so many years — sort of see
themselves in their flavors, you know?
So, if you're a chocolate person, or a whiskey-nut person or a
tart-sherbet kind of person, it's like a reflection of you.
So it's really fun to come to Jeni's and to taste all the flavors,
even if you end up with your old standby, because that's just like
your flavor, which we know that's what you're doing.
But ice cream is very personal for people.