10 questions with Jim Brown as 22-year career at Penn State Creamery comes to close

Over the last two decades, Jim Brown has brought his hospitality and high-energy to the Penn State Berkey Creamery, but now the sales and marketing manager has decided to call it a career.

Brown’s retirement announcement came in late May, and follows a 22-year stint at the Creamery. Since starting in 2005, he’s “played a key role in expanding the Creamery’s retail and wholesale operations while helping strengthen its reputation as one of Penn State’s most recognizable and sought-after places to visit on campus,” according to a university news article about his retirement.

His last day is Monday, and Brown took some time on Thursday to sit down with the Centre Daily Times and answer ten questions, including his favorite memory at the Creamery, what legacy he hopes he leaves, his favorite of the Creamery’s 120 different flavors and more.

Below are his answers, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Centre Daily Times: What is your favorite memory from the more than two decades that you’ve spent at the Creamery?

Brown: It has to be the people, and that’s also what I’m going to miss the most. The people here are from so many demographics, and I’m not just talking about the people that I work with, I’m not talking about the people at the university — I’m also talking about the vendors, the customers, the relationships, the partnerships and everybody else that I come into contact with. Tons of people, every day.

For instance, I never knew just how many people I impacted until the last month before my retirement. I had people coming in, emailing me, [Microsoft Teams]-ing me in some capacity, telling me, “Hey, I just heard that you’re retiring, and you know you’ll be sadly missed.” I guess I impacted more lives than I knew, and that is what I’m talking about — the relationships, the partnerships.

CDT: Do you have a favorite Creamery ice cream flavor, past or present?

Brown: I’m a chocolate man, and I absolutely love Death by Chocolate. Chocolate’s just great in general, but it’s not good enough compared to Death by Chocolate. It’s a triple chocolate, so it’s got everything a chocolate lover can eat — chocolate ice cream, a chocolate swirl, it’s got chocolate chips, fudge pieces. I mean, what more can you ask for than three types of chocolate, and making it that rich too?

CDT: Over the years, the Creamery has served scoops to some big names — who is the biggest name, or highest-profile name, that you recall serving in your time there?

Brown: This is a weird answer because it’s kind of subjective when you say the “biggest name.” So for us, over the years, the big names have always been related to Penn State football, other sports, things like that. So from coach Joe Paterno coming in with all the football players, to Todd Blackledge coming in with all of his sons. You’ve also more current players like Micah Parsons. I did an interview with him about what he likes about the Creamery and his favorite thing was actually our lemonade.

Another big name is actually Jeff Gordon — he brought the car here and parked it out front. ... The Fox Sports crew comes in here too, along with the College GameDay guys like Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit, all the guys on those programs, all the time on big football days.

CDT: Ice cream is attached to so many milestones — first dates, graduation celebrations, comforting someone after a tough exam. Is there one specific customer interaction over the years that reminded you your job was about way more than just dairy science?

Brown: When I first came here around 20 years plus ago, I took what was called the “ice cream short course,” and that’s one of the things that we still support. The ice cream short course is held by the food science department, which is in this building, and Dr. [Robert] Roberts, who is the current department head here, has done it for 30 or 40 years. There was this couple in the course that I happened just to befriend just because they were there. They came into the Creamery before they left after the ice cream short course and I ran into them and say, “Hey, you guys are from the ice cream short course right?” We all got to talking, and I asked what brought them to Penn State, and they said it was the Creamery.

I asked them where they lived next, and they said California. You’re telling me they came all the way from California just to see the Creamery? Well, they actually were visiting the Creamery on their anniversary, and they were both Penn State graduates. They met at Penn State, got married, have been married since and for their 25th anniversary they thought it would be awesome to come to the Creamery, where they had first originally met. It all started at the Creamery.

CDT: To your knowledge, has anyone ever actually managed to successfully convince a server to mix two different flavors on one cone? Aside from Bill Clinton, of course.

Brown: Absolutely not. And you know what, at almost every tour that I give, everybody that has talked to me over the years has asked me that question, or one like it. About President Clinton though, think about how intimidating it must’ve been for the student cashier to see President Clinton might walk through at the old Borland Lab, and he asks for two flavors. Of course, he’s going to get two flavors, especially since it’s just a student there. ... We don’t mix flavors for two main reasons: The biggest and first reason is to avoid cross-contamination, which we take very, very seriously, and the second is to just keep things moving efficiently.

Have you seen how long the line gets out there sometimes? Imagine how long it’d be if we let everyone mix and match flavors, it’d be wild.

CDT: If you could invent a flavor named to commemorate your retirement, what would the ingredients/flavors be, and what would you name it?

Brown: It would probably be something like “Forever Fun Fudge Brownie.” We don’t really name flavors after people anymore, or places or things, but I thought, “Wow, if I put ‘brownie’ in it then that would include my name without actually including my name,” in a bit of a loophole. I’m also a chocolate person, right? So you asked my favorite flavor and I said Death by Chocolate, so I would try something that has chocolate in it. “Fun” is in the name too because, as you know, we are all about having fun here.

CDT: What do you believe sets the Creamery’s ice cream apart from any of the other ice cream joints in the area, and why would you recommend that someone stop in?

Brown: First of all, the freshness of the ice cream. Our ice cream itself isn’t made with magical ingredients — our ice cream is made and sold very quickly. On average it’s four days from cow to cone, which is what we say here, and the reason for that is because the cows are right here on campus, the milk is received right here on campus and is delivered right here. The milk is processed into ice cream, the ice cream is frozen and dipped right here, and you can only find that in very, very few places. The second thing is the ambiance of the Creamery, and that it’s not only become a traditional place, but it’s also become a generational place. What I mean by that is that it’s great to have a tradition, but it’s even better that you create the generational tradition where grandparents tell their kids, and those parents tell their own kids — everyone knows about it regardless of age.

The last thing is the support of the academics. The actual mission statement that we have is to support the teaching, research and outreach programs of the food science department, College of Agriculture and university. That’s the very first thing in our mission statement, and that’s very important to us.

CDT: Outside of ice cream, what is your favorite Creamery product?

Brown: Got to be the chocolate milk and the cheddar cheese. Our chocolate milk is to die for. It’s a whole milk, and if you go out there into the world nowadays, and you look at the school sector to the retail sector, I’d say that 75% to 85% — if not more — of the chocolate milk people are drinking is either a skim or a 2% kind. Ours is a whole milk, and you can tell.

As for the cheese, over the years we’ve done a wonderful job in perfecting and improving our cheddar cheeses, and as of the last five to seven years, we’ve done a wonderful job in aging our cheeses too. We have different flavor levels, and I would say that my goal, if I was to continue on here and to continue the legacy of the Creamery, would be to make our cheddar cheeses as popular and as wanted as our ice cream, because I think we can.

CDT: In your experience, or from what your employees tell you, what is the easiest flavor of Creamery ice cream to scoop? What’s the hardest?

Brown: Well chocolates are very, very hard, and it’s because of the consistency of the chocolate, plus a lot of our chocolate flavors have pretty hard inclusions in them — peanut butter cup, chocolate pretzel — the hard inclusions can be tough. From the other standpoint, the vanilla flavors, for the most part, are the easier ones, but if you want to know what the absolute easiest one is, that would be our sorbet, it’s actually non-dairy. It’s the consistency of water, and so that makes it a lot softer than an actual dairy product that’s frozen.

CDT: What is the legacy that you hope to leave upon your retirement?

Brown: So my thought is this: The idea here is that we don’t sell ice cream and dairy products. The only way to be successful is to sell yourself, which sells your product, right? And my philosophy is if you create and paint an atmosphere where the people are having fun, like actually having fun, people want to come back. I think it’s more memorable to come back knowing that it was an enjoyable place, rather than it just being that it had awesome ice cream.

And so, all of my employees — especially my managers underneath me — all of them know that we have one big “F” word here, and that’s fun, F-U-N. I had a retirement party here this week, and the department head and the senior associate dean were here, and I told everybody that if I can leave a legacy here, it’s that we will continue to have fun and continue to promote goodwill. I think that’s it. I mean, making money, supporting the academics, having the customer get the flavor that they want — all that is terrific, but I want people to leave knowing that aside from the ice cream, that they had a great time at the Berkey Creamery.