Adirondack Creamery, An American Dream

Can you imagine wanting to do one thing for a living so badly, you decided to give up dating, move to the sticks and work multiple jobs to make ends meet? Then, when success finally beckoned almost a decade later, can you imagine dedicating a chunk of your proceeds to make a political point?

Seems extreme, but that’s what Paul Nasrani, the founder of farm-to-freezer Adirondack Creamery, did. Nasrani bristles with the energy and intensity of someone who has managed—against long odds—to make his dream a reality.

But before we dig into Nasrani’s scoop du jour, let’s hop into the wayback machine and figure out what inspired him to create a line of ice cream that serves as an edible analogy of America’s melting pot. (In the classic Americana corner, we have Vanilla and Chocolate, in the international corner we have Syrian Date & Walnut and Kulfi-Pistachio Cardamom, in the gray zone we have Earl’s Chocolate Peanut Butter and Banana Chip.)

Nasrani, like many Americans, embodies the vast strata of the immigrant experience in his one person. His mother’s ancestors arrived on the Mayflower in 1620, his father came here from the Punjab region in the 1960s, following India’s partition. And like many Americans, Nasrani indulged in the most rustic of American pursuits as a child: He spent his summers working on a farm near his home in northeastern Pennsylvania.

“The farmer, Earl Whitebread, opened his farm and his home to me,” recalls Nasrani, over coffee at Honest Weight Food Co-op in Albany, one of the Adirondack Creamery’s first significant commercial customers. “He made homemade ice cream, using as many products as he could from the farm. He didn’t have a formal recipe, but it was unlike anything I’d ever had before.” 

Miles away in flavor and philosophy from the mass-market ice creams of his 1980s youth, this ice cream contained little more than Whitebread’s farm-raised cream, milk, egg yolks, plus sugar and wholesome flavors. No xanthan gum, corn syrup solids, polysorbate 80, mystery dyes or chemistry experiments in Whitebread’s pints. He decided, at Whitebread’s elbow, that he wanted to be an ice cream maker when he grew up.

In addition to spending his summers working at the farm, he and his family vacationed on Lake George, where old-fashioned ice cream, sans chemistry, was still a way of life. “Every night of the week when we were up there, my parents would let my sister and me get sundaes from a 100-yearold Silver Bay ice cream store,” he says. “Sitting there on hot evenings and digging into our sundaes with my family is one of my most cherished memories of childhood.”

As years passed, Nasrani continued to silently nurture his childhood dream, while implicitly acknowledging its impracticality by overtly pursuing other career paths. He’d become an ice cream maker when he retired, he told himself while studying accounting. By 30, he was the CFO of a mid-size legal services company. He was living the single life in New York City. No real complaints. Then 9/11 happened.

“I think everyone, but especially people in the city, took a harder look at their life choices after that,” he acknowledges. “I decided to revisit my love for making homemade ice cream in my tiny studio apartment. I had a Bloomingdale’s ice cream maker.” (Sheepish grin.)

It’s hard to recall a time during this century when artisanal ice cream, pickle and sausage makers weren’t valiantly competing for shelf space with corporate brands, but in 2002, the only ice cream folks churning out ice cream with “real” ingredients were Håagen-Daz and Ben & Jerry’s, Nasrani notes.

“So even though I was spending all of my free time making ice cream, I couldn’t keep up with the demands from my friends, family and co-workers,” he says. “They couldn’t get enough of it.” 

Vacations became opportunities to expand his palate and working knowledge of the biz. “I would research ice cream manufacturing companies in areas where I was vacationing, and I’d just go up to places and knock on the door,” Nasrani says. “People were incredibly open and would share their process and give me tours of their facilities.”

He discovered that, across the board, ice cream manufacturers struggled to make their business viable if they prioritized using locally, sustainably produced ingredients. “The industry’s scale had shift ed so dramatically and farmers couldn’t really sell their milk unless they did it by trailer load, not a practical option for a studio apartment,” Nasrani says.

And then, one day, he noticed that a mom-and-pop ice cream shop he’d been frequenting in Grand Central Station was closing and they were going to auction off their equipment that Sunday.

An impractical, highly inadvisable plan, lacking the logistical framework he learned in accounting school, began to coalesce in the back of his mind. A brand new machine would have cost $30,000. He won the bid with $3,500, which he paid with $800 in cash (the maximum an ATM would give him) and an IOU, along with a promise to get it out of the space by Monday at 9 a.m.

“I hauled the machine out, in my suit, on my way to work,” Nasrani says.

“My friend in the furniture business lent me his truck, which I then sent to my other friend’s house in New Jersey, because I talked him into storing the equipment in his garage until I came up with a solid plan.”

Then, determined not to think too hard about the 401(k)-busting implications of his decision, he quit his job and talked the CEO of Silver Bay into letting him set up his fancy “new” machine to make all of the ice cream for the old stand he frequented as a child. This was 2003.

“Yeah,” he nods, “I decided I’d live a very simple life in Lake George. I’d live in a small room above the ice cream store, I wouldn’t date, and I’d just devote all of my spare time and savings to ice cream.”

Th ankfully, life stymied some of Nasrani’s more bleak plans.

“A friend introduced me to her former roommate, thinking we’d hit it off, but I knew a Manhattan lawyer would never want to date an ice cream maker living in upstate New York,” he says. But as it turns out, this woman named Simi had had it up to here with self-aggrandizing fi nance guys. Fortunately, she had an open mind and an appetite for ice cream. Twelve years of marriage and two children (Kalil, 10, and Tayel, 7) later, their union is clearly the cherry on top of Nasrani’s sundae.

“I can’t overstate the difference my wife’s support through this process made,” he says, acknowledging that even with her salary, he had to work almost full-time as a freelance financial consultant while also getting the business off the ground. Adirondack Creamery followed the slow, painful, stop-and-start pattern of growth so familiar to most small business owners.

“Simi lived at her mom’s summer place on Glen Lake while I made ice cream for the store,” he recalls. “But we realized, at a certain point, that we either had to take the next step with the business or fold.” He started looking at factories in the Hudson Valley, meeting with economic development boards, and exploring whether any banks would be willing to help fi nance a multi-million-dollar ice cream operation.