Just five years ago, Jeff Sommers was teaching seventh- and eighth-graders English at Sheridan Global Arts and Communications School in Northeast Minneapolis. His wife, Lara Hammel, was practicing law. Today, they’re up to their elbows in butterfat and branding work for their St. Paul shop, Izzy’s Ice Cream Café.
Sommers and Hammel don’t have a romantic tale to explain their move into ice cream. Sommers wanted to earn money when he wasn’t teaching, and they both wished their neighborhood, Merriam Park, had a walk-to destination for well-made treats. For a decade, Sommers and his sister, Callie, ran the family’s state fair hot dog stand. That experience, he says, “gave Lara and me the confidence to go into the food business.”
In July 2000, the couple sold the first scoop of Izzy’s super-premium handmade ice cream. “Super-premium” refers to ice cream with a butterfat content of more than 14 percent; Izzy’s comes in at 16 percent. Since then, they’ve developed wholesale accounts with more than 20 restaurants, added a line of ice cream at Kowalski’s grocery stores, and hired Callie to make most of the product. (The name “Izzy’s,” by the way, was chosen because it was fun and kid friendly.)
“Before we opened, we decided we were going to build value into everything we did,” says Sommers, who quit teaching in 2001. That includes the “Izzy scoop,” a scooplet of ice cream a little bigger than a cherry that adorns the top of every cone. Izzy’s has also introduced a number of unusual flavors, such as Norwegian Chai, which is made from chai tea from the TeaSource in St. Paul’s Highland Park and cardamom toast from Edina-based Wuollet Bakery.
In 2001, Izzy’s opened a second location in downtown Minneapolis’s Medical Arts Building; a year later, it began running an ice cream kiosk at Marshall Field’s downtown Minneapolis store. Both closed last year. But Field’s still sells Izzy’s ice cream in its Marketplace section, and company profits have been increasing between 2 percent and 5 percent annually, according to Sommers. Ice cream catering is now the fastest-growing part of the business.
Now the couple is branching out into another business. Based on their hiring experience and those of other business owners, Sommers and Hammel believe that there’s an “enormous gap” between what teens know and need to know about succeeding in the workplace. So they are putting together a new business called Teen Work, which will train young people in the ways of finding and keeping a job. If the idea works, Sommers and Hammel plan to make Teen Work franchise ready.
