Every Fourth of July, Trent Sanders gathered in Kansas City, Missouri, with his family, who came in from Alaska. It was tradition for his grandfather to slow-churn vanilla ice cream, and they ate it after the fireworks show.
The tradition sparked Sanders’ love for the frozen treat, and he eventually found his way back to ice cream professionally with Irvey’s Ice Cream . He wants his ice cream to become an ingredient of fond memories, for customers of any age.
He's committed to quality, whether it’s out of a truck or in Kern's Food Hall, where it's been since April. All the ice cream is made daily on-site.
“We’re trying to create this concept where people know they’re going to get excellent customer service,” Sanders said. “One of our values is just going above and beyond to meet people’s needs. We are really service-oriented, and we just want people to have this new kind of experience with ice cream.”
Sanders took an unusual path into the business. He moved to Knoxville in 2020 and began buying and selling local produce. Through that, he began to buy local dairy products and eventually became an employee of the company he was buying from.
He helped them with their ice cream business, leading to him buying their ice cream machine. Sanders began experimenting with different creations, and he eventually opened his first food truck.
“We’re just able to get this like high-quality product out the window into the customer’s hand and have an ice cream shop brought out to a field and it’s on wheels,” Sanders said. “So that’s something that people really love.”
On the heels of the first food truck’s success, Sanders bought a second truck and later opened up inside Kern’s Food Hall. As a self-proclaimed “ice cream fanatic,” he wanted a place where he could control the temperature and texture of the ice cream.
“It’s really technical, but it allows us to scoop ice cream at like the ideal temperature. When it’s 100 degrees outside and you open up a freezer, it just kind of starts to get warm, not like in a messy kind of warm but it’s like the ice cream is just … it’s a little bit softer.”
Sanders’ business goes well beyond the usual scoop of ice cream. In addition to rotating his flavors, Irvey’s offers sorbets, floats, slushies, popsicles and even “boozy infusions,” which will come once it gets a liquor license.
Taking the idea of “options for everyone” even further, Irvey’s also offers 12 dairy-free flavors.
Sanders recalled a woman who came into her shop having not had ice cream in 10 years because of a health issue. To cement the occasion in her memory, Sanders had a staffer get a fresh tub of ice cream and scoop, and the woman was “glowing” as a result.
“That’s the level of service that we value, being able to meet all kinds of needs when people come in,” Sanders said. “We just value being able to serve everyone. And so we really prize lots of variety.”
As Sanders and Irvey’s Ice Cream continues to push boundaries in the world of ice cream, customer service remains at the forefront of his business. While he knows his ice cream isn’t the main event, it is a medium to make the event better.
“We’re never the center of attention,” Sanders said. “But we’re just the thing that I think helps amplify whatever else is going on. There’s always something better than ice cream going on. But it’s just that amplification of that really sweet thing at the moment that is happening.”
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Irvey’s Ice Cream, made daily on-site at Kern's Food Hall, is 'new kind of experience'
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