#ample hills

Ample Hills had previously been using a batch freezer: Put in seven gallons of liquid, wait 10 minutes, get 10 gallons of ice cream. The Cherry-Burrell was a continuous freezer, which extrudes 125 gallons an hour — a step up from the batch. Many small ice cream companies lose product when they make adjustments from batch to continuous freezers, but it was particularly challenging for Ample’s thick ice cream mixed with “inclusions” (things like the cake chunks in the Ooey Gooey Butter Cake). In a batch freezer, you can just pour the liquid out of a bucket and scrape it with a spatula, no matter how thick it is. With a continuous freezer, if it’s too thick it won’t move through the system. The tweaking of the recipes went on for at least six months. “I don’t think we could actually do any ice cream without a ton of waste,” says Cuscuna.

Good news, everyone.