Ice Cream as Performance Art: Humphry Slocombe

By Lorrie Baumann

The best ice cream tasted by this year’s sofi™ Award judges was Humphry Slocombe’s Black Sesame. It’s one of a dizzying array of flavors offered by San Francisco, California, entrepreneurs Jake Godby and Sean Vahey, co-Founders of Humphry Slocombe. Godby, a pastry chef by training, is also the company’s Chef, while Vahey, who has a background in food and beverage management, also serves as its Marketing Director.

The Black Sesame flavor includes toasted black sesame seeds with sesame oil added to amp up the flavor even more. The rest of the current lineup includes flavors like POG Sorbet, which combines passion fruit, orange and guava in a nondairy sorbet; Matchadoodle, an ice cream made with green tea from Kyoto and snickerdoodle cookies made in-house; Blueberry Boy Bait, which offers brown sugar streusel stirred into a blueberry ice cream and Dirty Chai, a chai ice cream with espresso in it. The adult-oriented flavors were Godby’s idea, Vahey says. “We didn’t necessarily pigeonhole it as ice cream for adults,” he said. “We just happen to have adult tastes.”

“I just don’t know how to do anything else,” Godby adds. “The ice cream that we make is to my taste. I just didn’t see the reason to duplicate what other people were already doing very well. We were very fortunate that there was a market for what we were making, but we were going to make what we do either way.”

The two originally founded their business in December of 2008 with the thought that what they were starting was going to be just a quirky little ice cream shop in San Francisco’s Mission District. “We’re just being ourselves. We’re lucky that people liked us. This was not test-marketed,” Godby says. “We had no clue that it would blow up the way it did. And it did — it blew up hot.”

It took the business partners two years of wading through bureaucracy and working with contractors to get their doors open, and on their opening day, there was still a sawhorse in their lobby, and Vahey was sweeping up sawdust off the floor. “Most ice cream stores are pink and they’re soft and they’re cute. We are not cute,” Vahey says. “There’s nothing about Jake or I that’s cute or adorable. We’re intense and in-your-face, just like the ice cream. When you came into our shop, you had an experience.”
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Vahey and Godby had eight flavors of ice creams in the case in those days, and they were rotating flavors every day. Customers could sample any or all of the flavors before committing to a whole scoop. “Every ice cream had a story, and that wasn’t happening anywhere,” Vahey says. “We were bringing you into our world.”

“We couldn’t keep up with the demand; the lines were getting longer and longer,” Godby adds.

One of the proprietors’ first surprises was their customer’s apparent fondness for strawberries. Their culinary approach to ice cream required fresh ingredients and seasonal flavors, and their customers were asking for strawberry ice cream in the dead of winter, when there were no strawberries to be found. Finally, when spring came around and strawberries came onto the market, Godby made the ice cream that so many had been requesting, and he called it Here’s Your Damn Strawberry, which is the name by which the flavor is known today at Humphry Slocombe.

The pair didn’t have any marketing budget, but social media was just getting under way, so they made the most of it with posts that created a sensory experience. “We were going to put our faces and our voices into our marketing,” Godby says. We were doing tons of image-heavy ice cream and food porn, and that resonated with a lot of people.”

Today, the packaging for their retail pints reflects that same desire to bring customers into the world of Humphry Slocombe. Packages include a little of Godby and Vahey’s story, and there’s a quote on every carton. “It’s about staying true to ourselves. …You’re still getting that experience. It doesn’t get lost in translation,” Vahey says. “Of course it’s super fun to come into our store, but we want you to have that when you pick up a pint of our ice cream too. At the end of the day, it’s about the ice cream. It’s a unique high quality ice cream that we want you to remember.”