Our Story
A Lifelong Dream
Our Founder, Paul N. Nasrani found his passion for ice cream on a small Pennsylvania farm during summers of his youth. At the end of a long day, he could always find the energy to help churn a batch of fresh homemade ice cream. The flavors, taste, and quality were unrivalled and Paul’s dream of creating a company to share this wonderful ice cream with the world was hatched.
Paul’s professional career began in accounting and finance in New York City and he eventually became CFO of a mid-size corporation. However, the ice cream dream never left him and in 2002 he began producing homemade premium ice creams in a tiny Manhattan studio apartment. He produced far more than he could eat himself and began to share it with co-workers and friends. The response was tremendous and soon a much larger ice cream freezer was necessary to meet demand. To learn more about ice cream production, Paul spent his vacations visiting every ice cream shop he could find to speak with the proprietor and attending dairy programs at Penn State and Cornell Universities.
On a cold winter Sunday while passing through Grand Central Station, he stopped at an ice cream/custard shop and found an auction underway. A few hours later he was pushing a commercial batch freezer out onto 42nd street. It did not take long for the rest of the story to unfold and within a year Paul left his finance career to make ice cream in the North Country and pursue his dream of sharing his ice cream with the world.
Paul Nasrani at Silver Bay, 1972
Early Operations
With a major piece of equipment now on hand, it was only a matter of finding a place to start producing ice cream. He recalled enjoying ice cream nightly at Silver Bay (www.silverbay.org) during family vacations. The Silver Bay Store is a century old historic building which featured ice cream made on the premises in the 1940’s and the early 1960’s. In 2004 with the founding of Adirondack Creamery, Paul brought ice cream making back to the Silver Bay Store and produced ice cream for over 300 guests a night. There Paul also developed and ran programs for children to make ice cream with a hand crank machine.
In the following summers, Adirondack Creamery worked with Silver Bay to form internship positions which brought international students majoring in dairy/food science to spend the summer developing ice cream flavors, producing ice cream and working in the Store.
Expansion and Getting “Closer to the Cow”
Paul always knew that the closer to the cow you could keep the ice cream, the better it would be.
After several seasons of operation on Lake George, Adirondack Creamery still lacked the ability to produce on a large scale its own ice cream base and to access milk directly from family farms. Fortunately, in 2006, Adirondack Creamery moved into Boice Brothers in Kingston, NY, a family-owned dairy established in 1914. The expansion enabled Adirondack Creamery to source milk and cream from local farmers, produce its own ice cream base using a simple recipe of cream, milk, sugar and egg yolks and offer its delicious ice cream for sale in New York City. In addition, after years working behind a desk, Paul finally learned how to run an ice cream factory, as shown in this video.
As demand continued to grow, Adirondack Creamery expanded its production capacity at a dairy facility in the western Adirondacks which also increased its capabilities to directly access milk and cream from local family-owned farms. Today our flavors can be found at many locations, hopefully at one near you
Family Owned and Operated
Adirondack Creamery continues to be an independent owner-operator company and the majority of our ingredient suppliers, distributors, and farmers are independent family owned businesses.*
*We are proud and privileged to use milk and cream from local small family farms, one of which is featured in the photo above and on our home page. The Lee Dairy Farm, in Boonville NY was established in 1948 and is operated by three sisters, Mary, Cindy, and Judy who are granddaughters of the founder. Their herd is a combination of Holstein and Jersey cows that are pasture fed except when the fields are covered with snow and ice. They produce milk that is rBST free, extremely clean, and has a butterfat is higher than industry average. Their cows are treated like family and receive individual attention which results in happy cows producing high quality milk.