‘We Believe You Should Always Get a Double Scoop’

‘We Believe You Should
Always Get a Double Scoop’

Santa Barbara’s Homegrown
McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams
at 75 Years Young

By Leslie Dinaberg | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
May 2, 2024

Like many people who grew up in Santa Barbara, myself included, McConnell’s is part of the DNA of Michael Palmer’s childhood. And that lineage has continued. “I used to take my daughter down to Mission Street Ice Cream when she was little and I’d say, ‘You know what, maybe we should buy McConnell’s,’ ” laughed Palmer.

In 2011, Palmer (a longtime marketing executive and winemaker) and his partner/wife Eva Ein (a chef and former co-owner of Stella Mare’s and Le Café Stella, among other restaurants) did just that. Their home had burned down in the 2008 Tea Fire, and rather than rebuild it, they decided to build up something else entirely: an old dairy and the other holdings of McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams, which as Palmer said, “was probably headed toward bankruptcy.”

With an aim toward making the bottom line work while keeping the quality product intact — or as Palmer said, “When you see something that wants to be what it always was, you want to protect it” — the family rolled up their sleeves and got to work. 

It was a LOT of work. If you could look up “labor of love” in the ice cream division, you’d surely find McConnell’s as a top entry.

Now celebrating its 75th anniversary, the iconic ice cream brand is owned by the Palmer/Ein family, only the third family to own it. The brand was founded here in Santa Barbara by husband and wife Gordon “Mac” and Ernesteen “Ernie” McConnell way back in 1949. With a mindset somewhat similar to Ein and Palmer’s, the entrepreneurial McConnells had recently relocated to the Central Coast and were looking for a business idea when they found it one night — in a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

While the food industry at that time was in full industrial mode and dairies and creameries were using artificial flavors, colorings, and sweeteners to make their ice creams, the McConnells decided to start an ice cream company that stuck to the basics, going to regional farms and purveyors for their bounty of ingredients, such as fruit, nuts, produce, and grass-grazed milk and cream. Plus, they’d make their own inclusions and ditch the fillers, stabilizers, and preservatives that everybody else was incorporating with a vengeance. 

That ethos of keeping everything as local and as pure as possible and produce “the finest ice creams in the world,” as the McConnells did, is one that today’s owners — Michael and Eva — continue to stick with.

Mac and Ernie spent months developing an innovative mechanized version of the European French Pot process of making ice cream to go along with their own ice cream recipes. 

They opened the first McConnell’s ice cream shop in December 1950. The original location was at Mission and State Street, where Garrett’s Old-Fashioned Restaurant now resides. It was by all accounts an immediate success, and Santa Barbara families flocked to the store.

When Mac passed away in 1962, Ernie sold McConnell’s to an aptly named family, the McCoys.

Jim McCoy and his wife, Jeney McCoy, built on the company legacy and expanded distribution to new markets in Southern California. The McCoys purchased The Old Dairy in 1975, which became McConnell’s world headquarters, as it remains.

Built in 1934, The Old Dairy at 835 East Canon Perdido Street was the largest of 10 family-run dairies that once operated in Santa Barbara. For decades, Palmer explained, the dairy’s herd was pastured along San Ysidro Road in Montecito. Raw milk was transported from the farm to the creamery and processed into drinking milk, cream, yogurt, butter, and, of course, ice cream. Production continued at that facility through the McCoy family era, and by the early 1970s, The Old Dairy was focused exclusively on McConnell’s ice cream.

The Old Dairy had a major renovation in 2013 under Palmer and Ein’s ownership, and they created what was then considered state-of-the-art ice cream–making equipment. That same year, McConnell’s returned to where things all started, and the flagship McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams store opened at 728 State Street, less than a mile and a half from Mac and Ernie’s original location.

Additional scoop shops opened, with another Santa Barbara location on lower State Street, as well as in shops in Downtown Los Angeles, Studio City, Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Carlsbad, and San Luis Obispo.

But on the manufacturing side, in order to really become a national brand, Palmer realized that the existing dairy space just wasn’t up to the standards required. He began work on a new state-of-the-art facility with 10 times the capacity as The Old Dairy (which remains the company headquarters), just south of Santa Barbara in Oxnard.

It was an inflection point for the company. “Is the policy to lean into history and remain one of the very, very few high-end manufacturers that remains a manufacturer? Or is it going to be a co-labeled product like virtually everyone else?” said Palmer. “And so, Eva and I made the decision that for better or for worse at that point in McConnell’s history, and part of what makes the most sense, is that we are being adaptive.”

Also, he explained, “When you’re in the food business, you’re not really in the food business. You’re in the food safety business. We needed a modern facility to achieve what we wanted to achieve.”

Unlike most other ice cream brands, McConnell’s is also the manufacturer — meaning it makes the cream and is responsible for the ingredients that go into its products. McConnell’s is now sold in more than 2,000 stores throughout the U.S. and ships products nationwide. They also have a Pint of the Month Club. 

While they bought the company for consistency of the product, Palmer continued, “We elevated and honored McConnell’s with every recipe. We take care, and it’s a very risky product and ecosystem, and all we wanted was making sure that our customers of decades recognized that what we provided was McConnell’s. That’s our greatest sort of bang: the product itself.”

The work-in-progress Double Peanut Butter Chip he had me taste before packing was completed is indeed delicious and every bit as creamy as any ice cream I’ve ever had.

[Click to enlarge] Scenes from the McConnell’s dairy | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

On our tour of the dairy facility, Palmer walked me through a bit more of the history. Part of McConnell’s heritage is having partnerships that go back almost 60 years. One of the longstanding partnerships is with Guittard Chocolate Company, which is another family-run business and in fact is the oldest, continuously family-owned chocolate company in the United States, having opened in San Francisco in 1868.

“They are just as rigorous about their products as we are about ours. So it’s a real partnership, and they make special products for us,” said Palmer, adding, “When we first came in, you know, different products work well in different industry ingredients in the products they’re built into. So one chocolate might work really well in ice cream, but not so well in something else. … So Eva did a blind test. It took us weeks, and we tested 20 or 30 different chocolates. And at the end of that blind test, there were only two chocolates left. And the one she leaned into was the one that McConnell’s had been using for all those years — Guittard.” 

A quick whiff in the chocolate room of the dairy makes every one of my Charlie and the Chocolate Factory childhood dreams come true. 

That Guittard cocoa flavor and aroma also take center stage in McConnell’s Dutchman’s Chocolate ice cream, described as a milk chocolate lover’s ice cream for the age. It’s one of four beloved classic flavors being revived this spring as part of the 75th anniversary celebration, in retro-style pints featuring the iconic original 1949 packaging.

Though, as Palmer explained, old McConnell’s flavors never really die. They have a book of more than 100 flavors, and “part of this 75th anniversary research was going back into the anthology and finding flavors that we hadn’t done in a while that were favorites. And so we have a couple that people always talk about. … Flavors don’t ever get sort of cast aside; it’s more like they kind of go on vacation.”

Additional flavors joining Dutchman’s Chocolate in retro-style pints are Santa Barbara Strawberry (made with ripe Santa Barbara strawberry preserves); Black Coffee Chip (featuring dark roasted coffee from Handlebar Coffee Roasters); and Sweet Cream, a decadent, pure Central Coast ice cream crafted from grass-fed milk and cream, cage-free eggs, and pure cane sugar.

Offering us straight off the production line samples of the Sweet Cream (it is indeed incredibly rich and good), Palmer says that the high quality of the milk, eggs, and sugar is what makes McConnell’s taste so good. “These three ingredients have been the base for all of our ice cream flavors since 1949.”

In addition to the special anniversary packaging, as an added celebration for locals, McConnell’s is offering 49 percent off at all scoop shop locations on Tuesday, May 7, in commemoration of their 1949 origin date. There’s no better time to try a double scoop. 

Scooping Up Some Fun Facts About Ice Cream

– The ice cream cone, which allowed for ice cream to be more portable and a handheld snack, was first introduced at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904. 

– The average American eats roughly 20 pounds of ice cream each year, or about four gallons, according to the International Dairy Foods Association (IFDA). 

– According to an IDFA survey, most ice cream companies are family owned and have been in operation for more than 50 years.

– The world record for the tallest ice cream cone is 10 feet, 1.26 inches (3.08 meters) tall, set by Hennig-Olsen Is AS and Trond L. Wøien of Norway in 2015. The cone was made up of a wafer cone, chocolate lining, ice cream, and jam, and was transported by helicopter to be given to people attending the Tall Ships Race in the Port of Kristiansand, Norway.

– Vanilla is by far the most popular ice cream flavor. But chocolate ice cream was actually invented before vanilla.

– Some of the craziest ice cream flavors found around the world are foie gras; ranch dressing; jellyfish; haggis; roasted garlic; mint leaves with sea urchin meringues; mushy peas and fish; octopus; lobster; and mamushi snake. They used to serve avocado ice cream at the Avocado Festival in Carpinteria, which sounds pretty tame by comparison.

– The world record for the most ice cream eaten was 457 grams in under 30 seconds. Canadian Joel Hansen completed this on July 1, 2019. 

– The average number of licks to finish a scoop of ice is 50. But Dimitri Panciera of Italy set the world record in 2016 for the single largest scoop of ice cream at six feet, four inches tall and one foot, 10 inches wide. I’m guessing it would require a lot more than 50 licks to finish that one!