Today we’d like to introduce you to Suzanne Varecka.
Hi Suzanne, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Honey & Mackie’s is a local ice cream and French fry shop in Plymouth, MN.
Honey & Mackie’s is locally owned and operated by people who LOVE ice cream and want to bring a homemade, hard ice cream option to their community. For over 8.5 years, we have been serving up 169, and growing, flavors of ice cream. We make our ice cream in small batches with the highest-quality, locally sourced cream. Paired with our cream, we proudly source a Tahitian & Madagascar blended double fold vanilla bean to bring out the best in our flavors. What better food to pair with your sweet ice cream treat than salty, seasoned fries? That’s why we offer fresh French fries, house made dipping sauces and 6 varieties of specialty fries. Specialty fries range from Truffle fries to Cowboy Fries, and Chili Cheese fries to loaded baked potato fries. Always mindful of other small businesses, local/regional farmers are used to source the potatoes for our hand-cut fresh French fries and our chili is the tasty recipe developed by local St. Paul fire chief, Captain Ken.
Honey & Mackie’s prides ourselves on offering high quality ice cream and fresh fries in a family friendly environment. Our menu and flavors are designed to be approachable yet offer an adventure for those interested in culinary experiences such as our Pumpkin Crunch and Blueberry Basil ice cream, or our Acai Bowl and Cosmopolitan Sorbets. You will find 24 varieties of ice cream flavors to choose from each day, and we always offer several dairy free options. Expect to find your ‘favorites’ like Cookies & Cream, Salted Caramel, Chocolate Gold, Strawberry, Cookies Dough and Vanilla in our dipping cabinets regularly, while the other 16 flavors rotate on a regular basis.
We are very active in the community. We regularly participating in many business, city, and school sponsored activities.
Our mission is to lead with gratitude, remember that it’s ‘just ice cream’ and foster an environment where family & friends come to visit with each other or take a breather from the busyness of today’s world. Whether it’s a first date or 50th wedding anniversary, a daddy-daughter weekly tradition or a post-game treat, whether a bribe to rake leaves or shovel the snow from your driveway, we are excited and grateful to be a part of the memories made with our ice cream.
Just as important as serving the highest quality of ice cream, is the development of our Honey & Mackie’s team members. For many, this is their first job, and we don’t take the responsibility of welcoming these young adults in to the work world lightly. A lot of time and training goes in to making sure our team members feel confident in their skills and decision making abilities. Our goal is to develop every team member to be an inquisitive, productive and involved member of the community. All of our shift leaders are promoted from within the company, as they ‘re given a chance to learn & develop communication styles that allow them to lead with integrity and discipline.
The lockdowns of 2020 inspired our best-selling gift idea to date: our Holiday Sampler. Comprised of 12 festive flavors, each in a 5.5oz cup, this sleekly packaged ice cream flight makes for a unique and exciting holiday gift or treat. Last year we saw families using our sampler as a countdown to winter break, we saw the sampler in girls-night-in taste tests, as co-worker and hostess gifts, but the ‘sweetest’ of them all was seeing people ship our Holiday Samplers to families members across the country so they could meet on a zoom call and taste the ice creams together.
We are excited for the future, as we work to bring our pints of ice cream to retailers and grocery stores for all to taste!
And while we’ve never been focused on being the best ice cream, we continuously strive to be your FAVORITE ice cream!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The road to where we’re at now has been far from smooth. However, it is in the bumps, the twists and the turns that we’ve learned the most.
Before I get in to details of some of our struggles, I would be remiss if I didn’t start off by mentioning that the people of Minnesota are amazing!
Honey & Mackie’s would not have made it through the past eight years without the humbling and generous support of our community. We are BEYOND grateful for the kindness and grace the community has shown us, particularly over the last year and a half. Not only has the community’s support encouraged us to keep going when it would have been 100x easier to throw in the towel, but it has also shown our young and impressionable team members that collective goodness is out there. (I very clearly remember a comment on one of our social media posts stating that we would be opening with limited hours in May 2020. The comment suggested that we close, that ice cream and French fries will never work because they ‘don’t travel well’. The comment said that to remain open during covid was simply going to run our business in to the ground. While this comment was certainly jarring to read, I had faith that our community would rally around us. I replied that for years Honey & Mackie’s has been an integral part of the community, we’ve regularly supported schools, churches, businesses, sports teams and fundraisers/community causes, and I had confidence that the members of those communities would, in turn, support Honey & Mackie’s during our most challenging time. And they did. The community, our community, came out in droves to support us. And many days over the last eighteen months we have been brought to tears as we witness the of the kindness and support.
Now to get to the struggles of a small business: Similar to many small business, the first year was all about settling in and get in to a rhythm. Years 2-7 allowed us to hone in on what we do well and focus on brand growth. Year eight for us began with the Covid shutdown. As a landlocked retail space, we were forced to get really creative as we navigated the MN covid & safety guidelines. When all of the businesses next to us closed, we utilized the open parking lot to transform our store in to a drive-thru. We moved an ordering/hostess podium out to the curb and strung our electronics out the door we typically for an entrance. Armed with an A-frame sign and point of sale, this podium became out ‘drive up order window’. Twenty five feet away, at the door we typically used as an exit, we set up the ‘pick up window’. Suddenly, we had news crews out to film and interview our team because of how we had found a clever way to meet our community’s ‘need’ for ice cream during this stressful time. 🙂
We’ve since been through a few different iterations of our ice cream shop; from a to-go shop to a winter wonderland walk -through retail shop, we have learned that coming up with ways to ‘stay alive’ can be a fun and creative process. When the covid restrictions stopped us from giving samples, we turned to the Holiday Sampler. While the Sampler was originally meant to fill in the sample gap restriction, (we initially envisioned that one would sample the flavors in our Holiday Sampler and ultimately purchase a pint or two of their favorite flavor), the Sampler grew legs of it’s own and took off as a ‘cool/sweet’ gift (pun intended).
Still today, the road is not smooth. While we’ve figured out how to make it through the covid restrictions, we are currently navigating everything from supply chain delays and issues (there were weeks this summer when we couldn’t get spoons or cups), we’ve seen unheard of price increases on many ingredients (some more than 260% of pre-covid prices) and staffing shortages. Yet, we know from our past that this is the time to learn, to grow, to adapt and get creative. We remain hopeful that the best is yet to come.
We’ve been impressed with Honey & Mackie’s , but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We specialize in premium ice cream and hand cut fries. We are known for getting creative with our flavors (Game of Cones contest, custom BMW flavor, currently doing a Squid Games flavor 🙂 ). The quality of our ingredients, and our resulting product, is what really sets us apart: Quality, and our customer service. We foster a work environment where people are excited to come in and you’ll see a smiling face behind the counter when your come arrive.
Brand wise, we are honored to have received the Silver Medal for Minnesota’s Best Ice Cream, grateful for the accolade from MN Monthly Magazine, humbled to have been awarded Best Frozen Treat in the Twin Cities in the iHeart Cities 97 Sweetest Sixteen bracket, and overwhelmed by the countess nomination from the City of Plymouth and surrounding community. But, as cheesy as it sounds, the thing that makes us MOST proud aren’t awards or accolade, the thing that makes us MOST proud are the smiles on people’s faces when they see the Honey & Mackie’s logo and know that they are in for a great treat. Our hearts swell when kids at the school fairs start bouncing up & down, giddy to see out cart roll up. We are most proud when we see the excitement in people’s eyes as they check out our flavor board. Those are the moments when we are most proud of our brand and of our ice cream.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
We are grateful for the amazing local brands that we have, and continue to, work with. Last summer we created a Ball Park ice cream using Utepils local brew to create an beer based ice cream. Then we loaded it up with salty pretzels, peanut butter and honey. One taste of our Ball Park ice cream immediately brought you back to a ball field on a hot summer day. Additionally, we currently use Northland Vodka, hockey great Mark Parrish’s brand, to create our Lemon Drop ice Cream and Cosmo Sorbet. This past summer, food critic, columnist and regular on many local food network segment, Lindsay Guentzel, supplied all of the Gluten Free Monster Cookies for our ice cream sandwiches. They were such a hit that even making them by the dozens, we regularly sold out.
We would do collaborations and are not afraid to take risks. Please reach out if you have an idea or interested in collaborating.
You also can support us by showing up. By that we mean not only coming to get ice cream and fries, but also considering us to cater your next event, telling your friends about us and following along on our social media platforms when possible.
Pricing:
- $4 for a single scoop (approx 7 oz)
- $5.75 w=for a double (approx 12 oz)
- $6.95 0r 2/$13 Pints
- $3.75 for regular fries (serves 2-3)
- $5.75 for Specialty fries (serves 2-4)
Contact Info:
- Website: www.honeyandmackies.shopsettings.com
- Instagram: HoneyandMackies
- Facebook: Honey & Mackie’s
- Twitter: HoneyandMackies
Image Credits
Suzanne Varecka
