Keynote and women’s panel focus on the female perspective of working in a male-dominated industry
Turning an idea into a product with staying power is a challenge, yet that is just what Nicki Schroeder, co-founder and CMO of High Road Craft Ice Cream has managed to do. Along with her husband, James Beard award-winning chef Keith Schroeder, the two set off to make ice cream by chefs for chefs.
In her FA&M keynote address, “Turning an Idea into a Brand,” Schroeder said, “My husband and I started off in 2010 with a blast freezer, a batch freezer, one hardening cabinet and one 30-gallon vat pasteurizer. He was freshly MBA’d and ready to go with an idea for making ice cream by chefs and for chefs. This idea is an important one because we were starting everything from scratch. Even today, 11 years later, we still make everything from scratch in-house.”
Schroder said that when they started out as manufacturers, “or makers,” it mattered deeply to make things by scratch. “Not a lot of manufacturers do this, and it’s something that we’ve learned along the way that if we were going to connect with our community and our customers, that this idea of being a maker mattered deeply.”
Having the right people in the right places and learning as they moved along was important to the couple. “This ethos of being a maker was the backbone of our company and our brands,” Schroeder explained.
In the beginning, High Road Craft Ice Cream was focused only on the culinary community. Fast-forward, and they worked with retailers and then realized that consumers are also chefs. “They do care about their ingredients. They care about what’s going in their bodies. They care about where their food comes from, and we realized this is important. This is an important celebration of being makers and creating these beautiful products for consumers as well as the culinary world. So this idea was something that we built High Road on,” she said.