Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams

Jeni Britton Bauer is the founder and chief creative officer of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams.

Before she started Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, Jeni Britton Bauer attended Ohio State University, and studied art history and fine art. While in college, one of her friends was a graduate student in the chemistry department, and gave her vials of scented chemicals which led her to gathering essential oils, making her own perfume, and selling her perfumes for a few years.[2]

Britton Bauer experimented with the scentless but spicy essential oil of cayenne pepper, and decided to mush it into chocolate ice cream to make a spicy frozen chocolate. She realized that ice cream was "the perfect carrier of scent," and she immediately started making many other flavors of ice cream with essential oils. Two weeks later, she decided that she wanted to make scented ice cream as a business, and dropped out of Ohio State.[2]

Britton Bauer teamed up with one of her friends, and attempted multiple times to open up a stall in the North Market area of Columbus. However, the market constantly rejected them because it did not believe that an ice cream store had a place at their market. It was only until PBS aired a feature about ice cream being sold at a market that the North Market reconsidered.[2]

As a result, in 1996, Britton Bauer opened the first prototype store in the North Market area of Columbus, and she called it Scream Ice Creams. Some of the first few flavors were Salty Caramel, Wildberry Lavender, and Hot Chocolate. After making her own ice cream for four years, Britton Bauer closed Scream, and decided to attend the ice cream short course at Penn State.[2]

Britton Bauer had served one flavor a day at Scream, but realized, when a coffee shop was out of her favorite orange scone, that such a limited selection could be disappointing for customers. Afterwards, she realized Scream's mistakes and wrote a new business plan. Britton Bauer got a job at the North Market, and proposed opening a new ice cream store at the market for nearly a year without success. Meanwhile, her boyfriend bought her an Italian gelato machine that she could not afford at the time, and began making her own ice cream again at home.[2]

Later, the first Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams opened in 2002, also in the North Market, which was different from Scream in several ways. While Scream offered its customers only one flavor at a time, Jeni's offered customers several flavors. From opening day of Jeni's, the store was incredibly popular. Within the first year, her boyfriend's brother joined the company, making him the third member of the company in addition to Jeni and then-boyfriend now-husband Charlie. [2]

Three years later, in 2005, a state regulator alerted Jeni's that they didn't have a proper license that was required to sell ice cream in a market. As a result, Britton Bauer and her colleagues realized that they needed to open a brand new ice cream production facility instead of making the ice cream in the market. In 2006, Jeni opened her first store out of the market, and continued to expand into other locations in the area. In 2009, after Jeni, Charlie, and Charlie's brother realized that they needed a CEO, their close friend John Lowe quit his job at General Electric to become the company's first and only CEO.[2]

As of March 2020, "Scoop Shops" are located in:

Jeni's ice cream is also distributed in over 3,000 high-end groceries and markets nationwide, as well as through mail order.[6]

Jeni's Ice Cream received a positive review on the "Hot and Spicy" episode of Food Network's show The Best Thing I Ever Ate (2010).[7] It was reviewed in The Washington Post (2011),[8] The Huffington Post (2012),[9] and US News & World Report who ranked it #1 in America in 2012.[10] The Chicago Tribune (2011) said "Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams is gaining a national reputation for producing superior desserts made of milk sourced from a family farm in Ohio's Appalachian region."[11] Time magazine said it "has a large cult following among Ohio émigrés and ice cream geeks."[12]

The Atlantic positively reviewed it saying "Jeni's flavors are not successful simply because they are irreverent and ground-breaking. They work because a great deal of effort has gone into their crafting--what at first glance seems whimsical, upon first bite is proven artisanal."[13] It has also been positively reviewed in The New York Times (2011),[14] and by Today (2012).[15] In 2007, the New York Times said Jeni's had "surpassed the creativity of all other ice cream makers with its versions like goat cheese and Cognac fig sauce."[16]

In 2012, Jeni's Ice Cream received a sofi Gold Award in the "Dessert or Dessert Topping" category for Lemon Frozen Yogurt.[17] In 2013, Jeni's won another sofi Gold Award in the "Outstanding Product Line" category.[18] Beginning with her early days at Scream and continuing to the present, Britton Bauer's ice cream has incorporated products local to Columbus and Ohio, including milk, fruit, and whiskey.[2][19]

Fast Company named Jeni Britton Bauer one of the Most Creative People in Business in 2018.[20] In 2019, Inc. listed Jeni's as #2329 on its Inc. 5000 list.[21]

Britton Bauer received an honorary doctorate in business administration from Ohio State, the university she had attended but left in her sophomore year to pursue a career in ice cream, after serving as the commencement speaker at the summer 2016 graduation.[22] [23]

In 2011, Jeni Britton Bauer published her first cookbook, Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home, which became a New York Times bestseller and the Wall Street Journal called the "homemade-ice cream-making Bible." Britton Bauer won a James Beard Foundation Award, the highest honor for writing about culinary arts and food, for her cookbook.[24] The book was also nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards Best Food & Cookbooks that year.[25]

Britton Bauer published Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream Desserts in 2014 "to provide an audience with the tools to craft their own ice cream-based creations".[26]

In March 2019, Britton Bauer published her third cookbook, The Artisanal Kitchen: Perfect Homemade Ice Cream: The Best Make-It Yourself Ice Creams, Sorbets, Sundaes, and Other Desserts.[27]

• How I Built This - Live Episode! Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams: Jeni Britton Bauer (audio interview)