Icecream Social goes large!: to feed the whole of Victoria all of the icecream it could ever eat!

Icecream Social started with the most delicious sort of bang right at the tail end of 2014. We started making all natural icecream using fresh local ingredients in the Goldfields of Victoria. We make flavours that range from the traditional to the avant garde, inspired by local produce, by best quality chocolate and by David Bowie alike. 

For the past six months, we’ve been roaming the streets in our old-school icecream truck, dispensing frosty treats to the deserving and the undeserving alike. We’ve been churning part time at the Elphinstone pub, but we’ve outgrown our digs.

We’ve got a new, bigger, home in the Castlemaine Woollen Mills complex. And now we need your help so that we can expand production, sell direct to the public and finesse our van. With your help, Icecream Social will be able to feed the whole of Victoria all of the icecream it could ever eat! 

We need freezers! One big storage freezer (around $1500) and one display freezer so we can sell directly out of our space in Castlemaine (around $2500). 

Then we’ll need to put in some money into our honourable, but slightly elderly van, so we can bring our flavours to Melbourne more often! $2000 should get her running sweet.

If you’all are so nice as to give us more than $6000, we’ll use that to spruce up our packaging, pay our graphic designer to make us some spunky labels, and put in inventory and accounting and point of sale systems. 

Icecream Social is made up of three comrades in ‘cream, Helen Addison-Smith, Craig MacDonald and Tim Ratcliffe.

Helen owned each peach organic cafe in East Brunswick, and was a co-owner of Loafer Bread in North Fitzroy. Since she hit the heights of Castlemaine, she has baked for the Theatre Royal, and worked here and there and everywhere for Growing Abundance. She’s the one who dreams up the icecream flavours.

Craig MacDonald runs the Garage Art Foundry in Elphinstone, and is a sculptor with a completely healthly interest in rockets and explosions. He has miraculously been getting artists to pay their bills for the last twenty years. He is the one who dreams up machines and vehicles that the icecream gets made with and sold out of.

Tim Ratcliffe is an actor, director and festival worker. He deals with human waste and audience members with equal aplomb. He’s the one that gets our icecream out there in the world and into your mouth.

Our biggest challenge is how to deal with the seasonal nature of icecream eating.

Being able to develop take home packs means that our customers will still be able enjoy eating our icecream at home in the colder months, in front of the fire, or in bed with a friend or two.

Being able to sell directly out of our factory means that we can develop season-specific flavours for the hard core icecream lovers. Sticky date icecream, anyone?

And finally, if can make our van super-dooper, and even add another van to our flotilla, we’ll be able to hit summer hard, and get so much icecream to so many mouths during summer that we might even take a nice rest in winter time.