Churning the Tide
The rise of Victoria’s craft ice cream culture
woRds and iMages by siMon oGden
Autumn Maxwell, of Victoria’s Cold Comfort Ice Cream, is sunny and soft-spoken in conversation, but there is scrappy entrepreneurship in her DNA. Her great-grandmother, Laurè Maigret, owned her own taxi company in Ladner—which fronted for her thriving business as a bootlegger during BC’s prohibition. If creativity and hustle are indeed genetic, we may have Laurè to thank for the birth of Victoria’s rich ice cream culture.
Since Cold Comfort’s modest launch in 2010, several other small-batch natural ice cream companies have arrived, including Kid Sister, 49 Below, and Parachute. In this growing market, Cold Comfort concoctions distinguish themselves by their bold culinary profiles, inventively playing with flavour affinities and surprising combinations. This is testament to Maxwell’s early training as a chef.
Maxwell grew up in Port McNeill on the top of the Island, and moved to Fernwood at fifteen. She credits an early apprenticeship with Chef Candice Hartley—a local legend—for her basic kitchen skills. “She was terrifying, but had a really warm heart,” says Maxwell. “She gave me the language of flavours, kitchen etiquette, basic knife skills, the importance of mise en place.”
After a stretch in gold-exploration camps in Nunavut, “setting up a kitchen on the edge of a frozen lake and cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a camp full of rough, grisly guys,” Maxwell shifted to the front of house at Devour, the dearly departed Broughton Street bistro. It was at this point that she started messing around with ice cream at home, bringing some into Devour to share. It delighted the owners so much that it ended up on the dessert menu, where it was so well received that she started a home delivery service—the dawning of Cold Comfort in 2010.
“It was just me for the first three years, a lot of late nights, without much of a plan in place."
“It was just me for the first three years, a lot of late nights, without much of a plan in place. Just a lot of encouragement from friends and family.” In 2013, Maxwell moved into a cute little brick-and-mortar space in Fernwood, on North Park Street just off Cook, and the business started to bloom. “Now I have the most wonderful team working with me, and I feel I’m able to take the back burner a bit more.” The shop added a smartly curated inventory of general-store items to help the neighbourhood through the pandemic, and still offers an eclectic selection of wares in addition to cones, pints, and, famously, sandwiches. These include a fun selection of non-alcoholic cocktails and Scout tinned seafood (IYKYK).
There is a healthy dose of philanthropy in Maxwell’s business philosophy, too. Cold Comfort regularly donates extra product to the neighbourhood’s Our Place Society and contributes to local charitable organizations throughout the year. She launched the Cold Comfort Trades, Health Care, and Arts Scholarship in 2018 to support Indigenous high school grads heading into the culinary arts. Maxwell’s love for her community is as important to her as her product.
Rock Bay is another Victoria neighbourhood with a flourishing sense of community. When Parachute Ice Cream opened on Bridge Street in 2016, it was an affordable spot as a side project for owners Robyn Larocque and Kevin Fung. Larocque had started making ice cream at her main business, the Victoria Pie Co. in the Hudson Market (a natural pairing), and its popularity sparked a conversation with Fung, owner of Umi Sushi Express in Mayfair Shopping Centre, that led to the opening in Rock Bay, and recently a second location on Goldstream Avenue in Langford.
Parachute is snuggled into an old lumber-milling plant that is now home to artist studios, galleries, and a coffee roastery. “Part of the charm for us is that it’s a little hole in the wall,” says Fung. “The building is a maze—none of the passageways are straight. It’s full of artists: potters, leatherworkers, candlemakers, carpenters. There was a woman whose entire business was making tea cozies.”
Fung handles operations while Larocque heads up recipe development. Parachute’s rich style combines the dense smoothness of gelato with the high milk fat of ice cream, “taking the most decadent aspects of both,” as Fung puts it. You don’t have to search further than the shop’s first flavour, their signature lemon cream, to understand why this is a lucrative idea.
Taking inspiration from growler fills at local breweries—like Hoyne Brewing across the street—Parachute’s adorable glass jars for take-home pints are returnable for a discount on your next purchase. During development, Larocque and Fung had a look at the current ice cream styles on offer in Victoria, like the subtle flavours and sandwich program of Cold Comfort, and Kid Sister’s Latin American popsicles, and consciously avoided direct crossover, which is both smart business and right neighbourly. The packaging program is a big part of that. Fung reports that the jar-return program is a resounding success: “We get a mountain of jars returned daily—it’s very labour-intensive,” he says with a chuckle.
Victorian ice cream fans now have an enormous amount of choice. Both Parachute and Cold Comfort offer extensive and creative vegan options. Parachute works with McClintock’s Farm in the Comox Valley to produce water buffalo ice cream. “Really the only way to get a single-origin product is to go with non-cow milk. The water buffalo milk we use is free-range, from a single farm with a single farmer—Gerry,” says Fung. It’s also significantly lower in milk fat, so it’s easier on customers with light dairy sensitivities.
Victoria now has a legitimate ice cream culture to satisfy, augmenting our niche beer, cocktail, coffee, and donut scenes.
Both companies have expanded into wholesale recently, increasing availability but stretching their small kitchens to the limit. But Victoria now has a legitimate ice cream culture to satisfy, augmenting our niche beer, cocktail, coffee, and donut scenes. “I think a lot of success in business is luck—the cost of entry is to work hard and take a risk,” says Fung. “We’ve been lucky: the people in Victoria are kind and supportive of small business.”
It’s clear from the popularity of Cold Comfort and Parachute that creativity is also high on the list of ingredients for success. Parachute recently featured a lineup of Taylor Swift–inspired flavours, like Lavender Haze, Midnights, and Enchanted. And August is “cocktail month” at Cold Comfort, boasting piña colada pies, gin & tonic ice cream (with local Sheringham gin and Rootside tonic), and Manhattan sundaes, with bourbon ice cream, vermouth sauce, and aromatic bitters. Great-Grandmother Laurè would undoubtedly be proud.
