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06/10/2007
Moomers keeps on dishing it outPopular ice cream business set to expand
Bob and Jon Plummer stand in a new processing plant being built by Moomers Homemade Ice Cream to expand its product line to include milk. The store is in its 10th summer of scooping ice cream. TRAVERSE CITY — It's perhaps the ultimate testament to Bob and Nancy Plummer's business success that most of their customers don't call them by name: they're simply known as "Mr. and Mrs. Moomer.” The Plummers' popular Moomers Homemade Ice Cream shop on North Long Lake Road heads into its 10th year in business this summer, and the family plans to open a new creamery at their adjacent farm and extend the Moomers brand to a line of milk products. Not bad for a business that started by making change out of a shoe box in a rural location that doubters said would never work for an ice cream store. "They told us we were too far out of town,” Bob Plummer said. The Moomers name came from Nancy's nickname for calves in her husband's dairy herd, the "little moomers,” as she called them. Nancy was a long-time elementary school teacher before she retired to pursue a dream of opening an ice cream store; she never imagined its popularity would create, in effect, an entirely new family image. "I've totally lost my identity; I'm no longer Mrs. Plummer, which I was for 27 years while I was teaching,” she said with a laugh. "Now I'm Mrs. Moomer.” The shop, located about five miles west of downtown Traverse City, quickly became a gathering spot as its reputation for high-quality homemade ice cream spread. It's been a recipe for success, and the amount of ice cream produced has grown from around 4,200 gallons made in the first year to almost 30,000 gallons last year. It's also become a yearly destination for thousands of area school children who tour the ice cream store and neighboring dairy farm each spring and fall. "It's become known as the Moomers experience,” she said. Long Lake Township residents said the ice cream shop is a positive asset in the mixed rural and residential community. "I think they're doing a great business,” said Dorothy Goethels, a long-time neighbor. "It's a refreshing idea, especially compared to a fast food place.” Moomers' growth in commercial sales is equally impressive. The business has about three dozen commercial clients extending from Flint to the Upper Peninsula, including Munson Medical Center. And Moomers makes an exclusive ice cream flavor for Stafford's Bay View Inn near Petoskey. "The commercial accounts have really taken off, but this is still our main focus,” son Jon Plummer said of the ice cream store. "It's a fun business.” But the Moomers clan isn't content to simply graze off its ice cream success. Bob and Jon are busy constructing a new creamery at their family's small dairy farm. By mid-summer, they plan to produce a line of Moomers milk products they hope will become as popular as their ice cream, an effort designed to expand the farm's economic viability. "It's either do something outside the box to make (the farm) profitable ... or sell it to build houses,” Jon Plummer said. The senior Plummer said he's investing about $220,000 in equipment for the new creamery, not including the hundreds of hours of labor he and his son will put in to build the structure. Plummer plans to produce up to 100 gallons of milk per day at the creamery. It will utilize a "vat pasteurization” process that will pasteurize milk at around 160 degrees for a half-hour, compared to mass operations where milk is treated at a much higher temperature for a few seconds. It will be a small operation as milk plants go with about two dozen milking cows, but Plummer's goal is to get fresh milk to consumers within 24 hours of it coming from the cow. The milk will be sold at the ice cream store and other local outlets. "We're going to be as close to nature as we can be,” he said. "The whole idea of this is that we're doing something to make the farm work.” Family members said they've never worked harder; 15- to 16-hour days, seven days a week, aren't unusual, but they enjoy the business more than ever. "The best part about it is I get to work with my kids every day,” Plummer said. "I've never been happier.”
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