Meet Kellie Conant of Parlor’s Handcrafted Ice Creams

Around the holidays in 2018, we were driving from Brandon’s hometown in Atlanta down to the Panhandle of Florida for a getaway.

On the 6-hour drive, we were laughing about the ridiculous line that forms out the door at this popular candy/ice cream shop in Rosemary Beach. We knew the place had to be a cash cow, but what was funny was they were just selling commercial ice cream and loads of candy. We started discussing opening our own ice cream shop down on the beach but with cleaner, homemade ingredients. We spent the entire 6 hours spit firing ideas and getting really excited about it.

From that day, we haven’t looked back. Brandon and I are both huge ice cream people.🍦🍦

We both grew up always having it in the freezer and sometimes Brandon would even eat it with his mom in place of dinner! We decided to start Parlor’s Handcrafted Ice Creams as a scoop cart in Dallas as a proof-of-concept. We picked Dallas instead of Florida for several reasons.

And here’s why . . .

After living in Dallas for 6 years, we felt that Dallas was missing a good old scooped ice cream shop that had ice cream that was made with high quality, local ingredients. Being big ice cream eaters, we never felt that there was ice cream in Dallas that met our high standards, so we thought, let’s create it ourselves!

At Parlor’s Handcrafted Ice Creams, it’s just Brandon and me making handcrafted ice creams every week from scratch. Scratch is often misconstrued in the ice cream world. Some companies call freezing their pre-made mixes and bases that they get from “Big-Dairies,” scratch ice cream. We truly handcraft our ice creams from the ground up. We buy our local 100% grass-fed milk, pasture-raised cream, local pasture-raised eggs, and organic sugar at the beginning of the week.

Then we mix it, pasteurize it, and freeze it a day or two later and then sell it at the end of the week. It’s literally as fresh as can be and it doesn’t have a bunch of junk in it! The cows that provide us with our milk get milked the day we pick it up. We make the ice cream the next day.

Essentially, it’s farm-to-spoon.

A ton of work goes into every batch, especially with it just being the two of us, but it’s worth it to us. We’ve created an extremely high-quality ice cream, and you can taste it in every bite!

Right now we’re selling at the Dallas Farmers Market on the weekend (well doing delivery and to-go pop-ups during this pandemic). We are just a “scoop cart” for now, but a scoop shop may or may not be in the works! We also have been doing lots of catering, events, and pop-ups all over Dallas since October 2019!

They rave about two things –

The number one thing so many of our customers get really excited about when they try our ice cream for the first time is that it reminds them of the ice cream they used to eat back in the day. We often hear quotes like “this tastes just like the ice cream my mom used to homemake for me!” or “wow this tastes just like the ice cream I ate at my favorite local ice cream parlor back in the day!” And that is EXACTLY what we are going for. There’s so many overly fancy flavors and ice creams made with too many unnecessary ingredients these days that people don’t realize how much they miss the classics. That’s what we’re trying to provide. Ice cream made the way it used to be made “back in the day.”

Okay and the other thing: our Milk & Cookies flavor. Enough said.

Let’s transition to Dallas:

What are 3 of your favorite places to go on the weekends here in the DFW area?

If you could have dinner with anyone in the world, either dead or alive, who would it be and where in DFW would you go to eat?

Probably Kobe Bryant and somewhere with a nice steak. Maybe Town Hearth or Al Biernat’s. He was an avid businessman/investor and a leader in so many ways and I could probably use a few pointers from him.