The California Brand Behind Costco's Kirkland Signature Vanilla Ice Cream
Costco's Kirkland Signature super premium vanilla ice cream stands out thanks to its delectable texture, and while it wasn't included in the tastings for our ranking of 12 grocery store-bought vanilla ice creams, it would've certainly impressed. Customers swear it beats out other name brands — with a texture that's often compared to Trader Joe's vanilla ice cream, which our taste testers ranked second. Interestingly enough, the two are actually made by the same California brand: Humboldt Creamery.
Vanilla ice cream is classic for a reason — and Costco's super premium vanilla ice cream has a texture that lives up to its name. This ice cream is described as dense and ultra-creamy, with a subtle vanilla flavor that strikes just the perfect amount of sweetness. Plus, it's sold at roughly half the price per volume of name brands. Still, you have to wonder, what makes it so great? As demonstrated in the similarities with TJ's ice cream, that can be attested to who makes it.
Humboldt Creamery is a dairy co-op in Fortuna, California — a town in the county after which the creamery is named. The founder and owner, Rich Ghilarducci, was born there. According to him, Costco comes to Humboldt for all its ice cream because they believe the flavor of the milk is special. "They want all their ice cream in any of their product lines in the United States to come from milk out of Humboldt County," he said in a 2016 interview with North Coast Journal.
Read more: 23 Best Ice Cream Brands Ranked
What Makes Humboldt Creamery Special
Humboldt Creamery stands out for multiple reasons, one being that Ghilarducci miraculously avoided a corporate takeover. After filing for bankruptcy in 2009, a point at which the company was sold to a competitor and began selling its products through major retailers, Ghilarducci leaned on his finance background to win it back — and thankfully so. Humboldt Creamery has doubled in size and become one of the highest-grossing industries in the county since then. Not to mention, it did most of it organically.
"Instead of being acquired by somebody else, we did the flip side of that, and said we want to be the acquirer and bring those jobs back to Humboldt County," Ghilarduducci told North Coast Journal. Being a co-op, Humboldt Creamery relies on its network of local dairymen — and through the development of an organic program, a majority of those dairymen are now considered certified organic. Not only does this prove to be good for the livestock, the land, and the dairymen and their families, but it also proves to be good for the ice cream they sell.
Humboldt Creamery's ice cream comes from cows that were raised on organic diets, without the use of antibiotics or hormones, on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide-free pastures, and by inter-generational, dairy families that respect and care for them. All of this is inherent to the quality of what you get in those dense, creamy pints you buy from Costco — and the ice cream bars you get from the food court.
Read the original article on Tasting Table.
