Photography by Stephen Buchanan
It has always been a dream of the Cohen family to own an ice cream shop. They bought the Annapolis Ice Cream Company, located downtown on Main Street, several years ago and kept the name. But they didn’t have plans to stop there. The Cohens expanded and rebranded more stores—in West Annapolis, Edgewater, and beyond as Always Ice Cream Company.
“We are careful with what we open,” says Adam Cohen, who co-owns the business with his brother Mark, and father Ross. “We are not going to take on more than we can handle.” The family kept the familiar Annapolis Ice Cream name at the Main Street location, but rebranded the new stores as Always Ice Cream.
Along the way, the Cohens have not only come up with some original ice cream flavors—S’mores and Cotton Candy for instance—they also gave the places a “Sleek, modern design.” The company’s website explains that the family had no interest in replicating what they described as the “same old-style ice cream parlor.”
“We went to California and looked for modern themes,” Adam says. “We went into coffee shops and ice cream stores. We decided on a black and white theme. We wanted a more modern, millennial atmosphere.”
We recently talked to the brothers about what makes the business different, selling their product to restaurants and, potentially, grocery stores, and favorite customer flavors.
Photography by Stephen Buchanan
Adam, what separates your place from other ice cream businesses?
Most people say it’s homemade ice cream. We make it inhouse and we try to use as many fresh ingredients as possible. We use very few flavoring extracts. Our strawberry ice cream is actual strawberries blended into ice cream. No strawberry flavoring. A lot of places say they are homemade. They could be, they might not be. A couple of our vendors have tried to sell us products for ice cream. Cookie dough extra flavoring that you throw in cookie dough or strawberry liquids that enhance the flavor. You can save money, but we don’t use them. There are other places that are much cheaper, but we are considered a super-premium product with the butterfat and ingredients we use.
What are your top sellers?
We have a Cookie Monster [flavor] with blue ice cream, Oreos, cookie dough, and chocolate chips. It’s for the cookie lover. If you like cookies, you are going to love this ice cream. Any cookie you can get is in the ice cream. It’s amazing and a great mix. That’s probably our most popular. Our Mint Chocolate Chip sells like crazy. It’s really creamy and rich. You get the chocolate and mint in one bite, and you’re like, “Woo, this is good!”
Mark, why did you decide to buy an ice cream place?
We always wanted to own an ice cream store. We wanted a business for our family’s future. We went to the beach every year in the Outer Banks. We went to all the ice cream stores down there and we loved it.
What was behind the thinking of multiple stores?
When we started in our business, we wanted to expand. We thought of a different brand. We bought Annapolis Ice Cream Company and kept the name. But we always wanted to open modern ice cream stores. We wanted to do something different than the old-fashion mom-and-pop ice cream companies.
Photography by Stephen Buchanan
Do you plan to open more stores?
We are comfortable where we are at. We want to start selling our ice cream in grocery stores. Our dream is to sell pints to grocery stores. It’s a lot to do. We are trying to figure it out. It’s a lot to go through the health department process. We need to get nutrition labels and go through inspections. Hopefully, next year we can do it. That’s a goal of ours. We do sell to 45 restaurants.
Adam, you say that you’re tired of seeing the same, old style of ice parlors. What do you mean by that?
When we are talking about an ice cream parlor, we are talking about the design and layout. When you go into an old school parlor like downtown, it has bright lights and gold roofs. It has tile flooring. We wanted to change that. We are more like a modern millennial type of ice cream shop. It’s more of the visual that makes us more of a modern shop.
Mark, why did you want to expand so quickly at the outset?
We saw that the place downtown was so popular. Everyone loves ice cream downtown, right? We figured there weren’t many hard ice cream stores in the area. You have a lot of soft serve places and juice bars in the area. We thought it was a good time to take our recipes and expand our ice cream business.
Adam, how did it go?
I think we have a great staff in place. We have three amazing ice cream makers that make ice cream all day for us. We have three great managers at all the locations. We got a great guy who does all the sales stuff for us, and another who is out there all day, every day, delivering to restaurants and stocking our stores. Without these people, we couldn’t handle all of this. With them, everything is possible.
