12 Years of True & 12

Today marks 12 years of True & 12 handmade ice cream.

We opened our doors rather spontaneously on May 22nd 2014, which makes this our 12^th year and 13th ice cream season.

I had originally planned to write a neat little list: 12 things I’ve learned in 12 years of business. It sounded orderly. Manageable. Almost wise.

But the truth is so much less tidy than that.

The truth is: the list is longer, messier, and still actively being written. And perhaps the most honest thing I can say after all this time is that: we are still learning.

Last week, we were speaking with a journalist about ice cream, and I found myself drifting back to the early days. To the beginning of everything.

I shared the following story with her, and I will share it with you now too.

Back in 2013, after we signed the contract to the space, we set up a small transitory office, just a little desk and 2 chairs in the middle of the quiet rubble of our new Baustelle. This little “office” became our temporary headquarters for doubt, coffee, hope, and the occasional existential crisis about permits. Everything around the desk had been stripped down to possibility: including the walls.

(fun fact: the space used to be a cell phone shop with einfache Gipswände and approximately 900 strategically placed steckdosen. All of which had to be torn out, along with the walls themselves, in order to gain us a much needed extra 30 cm of space)

We held many meetings in that little “office,” most of them wrapped in some variation of uncertainty and hesitation.

There was the first accountant, who confidently informed us that Munich already had more than enough ice cream shops. The neighbour, who suggested (with equal confidence) that we might have better luck selling hot dogs instead (true story). The first meeting with SWM where we learned that we needed to buy a massive amount more electricity off of the city of Munich to have the production run. The first construction worker who told us the space was far too small for what we wanted to do (“how are you even going to fit a ice cream vitrine in here”).

In this graveyard of outsider opinion, we carried on anyway.

While waiting months on end for approvals and permits (mostly the nutzungsänderung), I learned a valuable lesson.

Patience really is a virtue.

A virtue I not naturally possess.

In the middle of all this chaos, we began ordering equipment.

The vitrine, the ice cream machine, the pasteuriser, two freezers: the expensive, irreversible pieces first, as if committing early might somehow steady everything else.

Then came the kleinigkeiten: workbenches, a high-power mixer, a dishwasher, and 3 fridges. The quieter necessities. The things that would turn our empty shell into a vibrant little open kitchen.

Here we learned another valuable lesson: that people, through the filter of their own preconceptions of what an Eisdiele should look like, will confidently misunderstand what you are trying to build.

I called a company for cooling equipment and mentioned we had already bought 2 freezers but now needed 3 fridges.

There was a pause on the line.

Then the salesman - possibly the original inventor of mansplaining – said

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re opening an ice cream parlour, you’ll need more freezers, and not fridges.”

(The only benefit to phone calls, is that the person on the other end cannot hear me rolling my eyes)

I explained, that while I realized ice cream is quite committed to being frozen, we needed fridges for fresh milk and fresh cream.

Another pause followed… “But… no one does that. You just use UHT-milk. You can store that anywhere.”

And that, really, is where the story begins.

Because what I quickly discovered is that actually almost no one does this.

(ok to specify, in 2014 no one was doing that!) (a lot has changed, perhaps a blog post for another day)

I had taken that fact for granted, largely because the entire centre of our ice cream universe was the use of fresh ingredients. This was what would set us apart (aside from other things).

And on a more personal level, I did not grow up in a place (or a culture) that relied on UHT milk. We always had fresh milk, so it never occurred to me that anything else might be the default.

Only later did it properly register: UHT milk is significantly cheaper (not just per pack) also in the long run. It doesn’t require refrigeration, which, for obvious (to us) reasons, is expensive. And unlike fresh milk and fresh cream, it has a long shelf life that makes planning… much easier!

Which then raised the question: if most parlors are apparently not buying fridges to store fresh milk, then what on earth are they using instead of fresh cream?

Well… I’ll spare you the details (unless you want to know?)

Here I learned yet another valuable life lesson. A lot of people prefer convenience and consistency over complexity and craft.

Convenience and consistency are scalable and, in many ways, this is actually completely reasonable.

We however, are not reasonable. 

And I pride myself of being consistently inconsistent. Nature isn’t uniform, so why should natural ice cream be?

And so, we did what all irrationally determined people facing terrible customer service eventually do: we bought (the fridges) somewhere else.

So, for 12 years now, we have been committed to our original goal: an insistence on fresh ingredients, starting with fresh milk and fresh cream. Not UHT milk, not Pflanzenfette, not pre-mixed powder bases. Truly artisan small batch ice cream made using the scenic route. With our own recipes. From scratch.

It sounds simple. Obvious. Almost inevitable.

But it isn’t.

It is a series of small, slightly inconvenient and exorbitantly expensive decisions, made again and again, long before anyone is watching.

And maybe that is what twelve years have really taught me: that the things worth doing are rarely the easiest ones.

The road is long, and paved with well-intended advice from people who have never had to walk it.

keep carrying on anyway.

And thank you to everyone who has supported us through 12 years.And to those who keep us going with your kind messages in our inbox — to those who come in with a huge smile on their face, to those who visit us several times a day, to those who take a moment to say something kind to us in person, and to those who appreciate the labour of love that goes into this product.

It means more than you know.