Kris Swanberg, owner of Nice
Cream (Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune)
A few years ago, Kris Swanberg, having been laid-off
from her job as a Chicago Public School teacher, remembered she received an ice
cream maker as a wedding gift. The Chicago mom fished it out of her kitchen
cabinet and eventually started a new career.
Today Swanberg’s Nice Cream — on offer at local Whole
Foods and farmers markets — is considered a star of Chicago’s rich and beloved
artisanal ice cream scene, one that could be shut down entirely by state rules,
she recently learned.
She says that a couple of
weeks ago a representative from the Illinois Department of Public Health came
to Logan Square Kitchen and informed her she’d have to shut down if she did not
get something called “a dairy license.”
Swanberg and others in her
field had operated for years now without ever hearing of such a thing and,
indeed, they say, the City’s Department of Business Affairs and Consumer
Protection, to whom they applied for business licenses, never informed them
they would need one to operate.
To get this license Swanberg
wrote, in an email, she would have to:
“Work out of our own space.
Currently we work out of the Logan Square Kitchen.”
“Have our product tested once
a month for bacterial levels.”
“Change all of our packaging
and labels to meet state standards.”
“Purchase a pasteurizer,
which from what the state tells me will be about $40,000 or use a pre-made ice
cream mix.”
Swanberg says that the IDPH officer who visited told
her that her ice cream probably wouldn’t pass the bacteria tests if she
continued to use fresh strawberries. Instead the officer suggested she use “strawberry
syrup,” Swanberg said.
IDPH spokesperson Melanie
Arnold said that it isn’t illegal to use real strawberries but that IDPH
“does not encourage it simply because when you try and clean a strawberry to
make sure it doesn’t have any bacteria, it kind of deteriorates.”
The department’s Dairy
Equipment Specialist, Don Wilding, said that other ice cream producers
use irradiated strawberries. He says look good but he can’t vouch for the
taste.
Swanberg could continue to work without a license,
Wilding said, if she used a premade ice cream mix that is usually formulated
with stabilizers and other additives — the kind of thing typically used at
Dairy Queens, Wilding noted.
Still, Swanberg feels that using strawberry syrup and
a premade soft serve mix might not attract the same customers who buy her
product made from fresh organic cream blended with local and often organic
produce like basil and strawberries she picks herself.
The department could not confirm the $40,000 price
tag on a pasteurizing machine. But it did confirm that, even if she uses
pasteurized milk and boils all of her ingredients together, she would then need
to pasteurize it in this special machine again.
Although the state is focusing on Swanberg first,
other artisanal ice cream makers in Chicago are concerned they might be
next.
“I have to be worried. I am in too deep to cut my
losses now,” said a fellow ice cream maker who asked that her name not be used.
“This is my life and passion, so I don’t want to be shut down.
“Our biggest thing is wondering whether or not there
is a way, considering the organic and local food movement, to change the
regulations so that small local producers are not being regulated in the same
ways as massive creameries — I mean, this is what they enforce for Haagen Dazs.”
Indeed, IDPH confirmed that these small operations
are governed by the very same rules that apply to billion dollar ice cream
companies. And although Illinois recently passed the
The Illinois Local Food Entrepreneur and Cottage Food Operation Act, (currently
awaiting Gov. Pat Quinn's signature) which suggests that the different
sets of rules should govern tiny food operations and giant corporations, the
bill does not apply to ice cream.
Until she gets her license, Swanberg says she must
stop putting product on the shelf. She hopes to meet with her fellow ice cream
makers to figure out a plan that can allow them to deliver the same quality
while abiding by state rules.
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