NEWS
Summit Creamery is Now Open!
A big crowd showed up for the grand opening of Summit Creamery.
Thursday afternoon there was a lot of activity at the corner of Grey Road and Shearers Road.
An hour before the 4 p.m. Grand Opening, owner Brian Helfich took a couple of minutes away from the last-minute preparations to answer a few questions. It turns out we weren’t the only ones to show up early. Evidently people had been stopping in all afternoon after seeing the new sign and the balloons that were visible to drivers on Shearers Road.
Earlier in the afternoon, Brian Helfrich and members of Team Summit were still getting things ready.
“We are opening a creamery…we don’t quite know what to expect, but we have heard that there is a palpable energy about the Creamery. And we couldn’t ask for a more beautiful day. It is 86 and sunny. If you drew up a day to open an ice cream store, it would be today.”
No strangers to opening businesses, Summit owners pivoted to ice creams, and News of Davidson asked what caused this, noting that it is evidently not all about coffee.
“This is as much about Davidson as it is about the Summit brand. We are pretty relentlessly pursuing the Summit Coffee brand. We have gotten bigger; we are in Georgia and South Carolina. When this opportunity landed on our plate, it was a fun challenge to commit more energy to Davidson. It’s where almost all of us live. It is where we are raising our families. Summit has spent the last six months leaning into focusing on creating moments of joy for our customers. And while we are doing that through coffee, it’s so much easier to do that through ice cream.”
We joked with Brian that ice cream is also a much better product to serve to children. That led to the following: “That’s exactly right. I bought Summit before I had kids, and now I have two kids. We used to come to this ice cream store every week when it was open. We fell in love with the product, the location, just the awesome organic small local thing. Which is what made me fall in love with Summit Coffee in the first place. I bought it when it was just the single shop in downtown Davidson, and this has given me all the nostalgic vibes of when I started the business 14 years ago.”
And all the while we were talking with Brian, other members of “Team Summit” continued working on all the details to be ready to open the new business. It was also abundantly clear that he had been hard at work before being interrupted to answer questions. A few paint spots on his hands were the same color as the freshly painted exterior trim on the building. And then there was the flour. Yes, there was a large bag of flour sitting out in front. A quick glance around led to the deduction that he had used standard baking flour to “line out” roughly 12 parking spaces in the gravel lot.
Hannah, the manager, was all smiles before the crowd arrived.
Brian said that there had been a lot of conversation about getting into the ice cream business. “When we do anything, we go all in. We had a lot of conversations for weeks about whether we wanted to do this. It is, to your earlier question, a pivot from what we are doing. As I brought it up with the team, I wasn’t totally sure this is what we wanted to do. It was the excitement from the entire team to take this on as a project…I’m going to have to ask you guys to create a new brand, do more marketing, more design work, you are even going to be hanging awnings,” as he pointed to one of the last projects underway in the final preparations.
When asked if there were any remaining comments to News of Davidson readers, Brian said “We are excited just to learn a bit more about this business. Our understanding is as frequent customers, and what we learned in the transition (with the previous owners). And so for the first few months we are going to try to be in a learning phase. ‘What do our customers want?’ We’ve made a couple of tweaks, based on our experiences as customers. We added a kid’s size. We have free sprinkles. And we added some coffee drinks, of course, for Summit.”
“We have no grand ambitions for this business beyond having an awesome creamery in Davidson…we just really want to spend the summer serving ice cream.”
At 4:00 p.m., there were already dozens in line to get a taste of the frozen delicacies offered on the Summit Creamery menu, and the people kept coming.
The menu looks like this.
Two scoops $6.00
Kids cup $4.00
Waffle Cone $1.00
Sprinkles are free
Today’s flavors included:
Vanilla
Chocolate
Butter (Pecan) Is Good
Life’s A Peach
Stroop Dogg – Salted Caramel ice cream and stroopwafel chunks
HBD to You! – Cake Batter ice cream and tons of sprinkles
Glacier Gulp – Summit Coffee, Oreo, Chocolate, and Brownie
Strawberry Fields
Cookies “N Cream
Lemon Blueberry Cheesecake
Banana Pudding – Banana ice cream, Nilla wafers, and marshmallow
Cookie Dough
Chocolate Oreo Cheesecake
Mint Chip
Chocolate (vegan)
Cookies ‘N Cream (vegan)
Lemon Poppyseed (vegan)
Blueberry Crisp (vegan)
But this is Summit, so there is a beverage menu too.
Nitro Cold Brew $5.50
Vanilla Cream Cold Brew $6.25
Root Beer Float (any flavor) $7.00
Milkshake (any flavor) $8.00
The shop is a roughly 900 square foot building that was built in 1943. Since there is no inside seating, it is exclusively a walk-up service window. There is, however, a lot of outdoor seating on the 1.5-acre parcel. Should the designated spots in the front and side of the building be taken, there are also ample spaces in the back.
They accept cash and credit. The address is 1827 Shearers Road, Davidson.
Hours of operation are Thursday and Friday 4 – 9 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 1 – 9 p.m. They are closed Monday – Wednesday.
Oh, and a warning that the incredible olfactory sense stimulation from the waffle cones might make it difficult to order your ice cream in a cup.