In the 16 years since Marissa Keenan started Sweet Peaks Ice Cream, she’s changed the way several communities experience ice cream. Her flavors, the stories she’s telling and the experience she’s cultivated have shaped summers and childhoods.
“I usually hire 16 year olds. When I do onboarding and training, I ask all my scoopers, ‘Tell me about your first experience with ice cream or something really memorable?’ When we first started, it was Dairy Queen and the grocery store. All of a sudden, these 16 year olds, the first time they ever had ice cream is Sweet Peaks. How amazing is that? That’s incredible.”
Keenan’s own first memories are of making special sundaes in the kitchen of the Big Fork Inn, where she lived as a child, and the blue bowls her grandfather filled with mint ice cream every night after dinner.
She still has a tone of awe in her voice as she recalls visits to her family back east and going on excursions to little scoop shops. “You would stand in line, you’d go get a scoop. It was very much a social thing.”
So, after studying creative writing at college, she returned to the valley and asked herself, “What do you want in a place? What do we not have? How do you create an impact?”
She came back to the blue bowls and the little social scoop shops.
“That makes sense. That would be a contribution, right? What are you gonna leave? Honestly, what are you gonna do? Okay, ice cream.”
Early on, the stories she told with her flavors had a tendency to look backward.
“I love nostalgia,” Keenan said. “People really gravitate towards nostalgic flavors. Like cookies and cream, or the little creamsicle cups that you had at school? Those things still strike a chord with people?
“In the beginning, there was still this level of incredible excitement, because we hadn’t done anything. Everything was available. You learn what people actually want and then you also pave the way.’”
“So now, I think the opportunity is to see what’s available and who we want to work with, and to create more stories,” she added. “It’s about community.”
This spring, Sweet Peaks partnered with United We Eat, a project of the refugee and immigrant resettlement nonprofit Soft Landing Missoula. United We Eat brings new members of the community to kitchens in Missoula to share their food and culinary talents. The collaboration yielded several inspiring flavors, including a spiced mole with caramelized plantains and pepitas, and a salted tahini date and a middle eastern carrot halwa. The custom flavors were sold at all the Sweet Peaks locations and some of the proceeds were donated to Soft Landing Missoula.
“Those things are what Sweet Peaks should be and is about,” she said. “It’s a gift at this point after 16 years to be able to have consumers’ confidence. That gives us an opportunity for creativity.”
She also recently reached out to Mariah Gladstone, of Indigikitchen, looking for information and knowledge about local Montana ingredients and authentic Indigenous flavors.
“I reached out to her and said, ‘Would you be interested in helping me and educating me?’ So she met me and brought a bag of things found in Montana.”
An earnest excitement emerges as Keenan describes the items Gladstone had collected for her.
“She brought me frozen service berries and choke cherries, braided sweet grass, cedar that she makes into tea, and she just sat there and told me, ‘These are all the things we work with.”
“I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface on all the possibilities,” Keenan continued. “That’s how I, and my team, stays creatively engaged. What can we do next that has a story and has intention?”
That enthusiasm extends to all the creative producers and distributors she gets to work with from around Montana.
“I feel like we find more and more product, and as the expanse of farmers and producers and bakeries and distilleries come up, we get to highlight it,” she said. “Which is awesome. The goal is to highlight others and also to be able to utilize great product that’s available.”
But despite her enthusiasm for using her ice cream as a canvas for pushing creative boundaries, Marissa is always able to reach back into nostalgia when creating flavors and pry loose something valuable. And, of course, delicious.
Enter the River Float, one of Sweet Peak’s most popular summer seasonals. A swirl of marionberry jam is laced through a honey-sweetened and buttery vanilla ice cream that also features tiny pockets of cornbread perfectly dispersed throughout. It’s a sublime homage to getting out on the rivers with friends across the Treasure State.
“When overnight camping, which so many of us do in Montana, I will pack ice cream in dry ice on overnight trips, and it’s just one of those unexpected things,” Keenan said. “This flavor is inspired by doing cornbread in a dutch oven on the side of the river. You’ve got local berries, ice cream that you’ve brought in with dry ice, and when you put it all together it creates this amazing, delicious experience. To me, an overnight river float needs something that’s a little bit unexpected.”
Which brings us back, yet again, to one of the things Marissa does best: telling stories with unpredictable turns that still feel cozy and familiar. Drawing inspiration from her community and creating future nostalgia.
“You have to keep filling the sprinkles back in the jar,” she said. “Like, what brings you happiness?”