Ice Cream Enters The 21st Century


By John E. Mitchell

The usual routine is that Ben and Bill's closes it doors in January, not to open again until March. Anyone in Bar Harbor craving a mid-winter snack of the store's hand-dipped chocolate or delicious homemade ice cream is out of luck for a couple months. This March, however, the store will come out of hibernation with an innovation that not only satisfies the sweet teeth in Bar Harbor, but also offers the rest of the world a chance to dig in. Ben
and Bill's will unleash a new website (www.benandbills.com) allowing anyone to order the store's sweets, including its unique ice cream, online. And the store plans to stay open year round to accommodate the web ordering.

Manager Jeff Young, who is overseeing the launch of the new website, says it was really the result of popular demand. "We get a lot of people requesting a website. People from all over, it's a mix. Everybody asks if we have a website yet and we were asked a lot this year, so we figured we would get it going."

Currently, there are four Ben and Bill's locations—the Bar Harbor store has siblings in the Massachusetts towns of Northampton, Oak Bluff, and Flameout. The Bar Harbor location, though it is the leader in ice cream, is actually the newest of the four stores. At the same time, it is a long-established Maine fixture. The store has managed this unusual feat by being passed down in the same family, the Coggins clan. Once known as Trahan Candies, Ben and Bill purchased it from their uncle 22 years ago to join with their Massachusetts candy stores, which were already in existence.

Young became part of the business 15 years ago, when he signed on while seeking a new career. He had previously worked outside around power lines, but some unhappy medical news demanded a change in his line of work. "I came down with melanoma and the doctor said I should get out of the sun. So I went to culinary school and I was going to open up a restaurant. My wife works here, too, a year longer than I have, and they decided
they wanted to put ice cream in and asked me if I would make it one night a week. It wound up seven nights a week!"

Fifteen years later, Ben and Bill's offers 78 ice cream flavors thanks to Young. Among these delights are such rotating seasonal favorites as raspberry, pumpkin pie, and pecan pie, as well as year round winner called Mousse Droppings! "It's a chocolate mousse with malted milk balls. I've had that eight or ten years, once it came in it stayed. It sells well, that one's really rich. People like it - the old people get a real kick out of it when they come in, just out of the name, you know. Yeah, they giggle over that!"

Among Ben and Bill's most popular flavors, Young names mint chip, peanut butter cup, blueberry, and lobster. Yep, you read that right—lobster! This unique creation is a butter-based ice cream with real lobster meat in it. "It's good," assures Young. "People like it!"

Young is always experimenting with new flavors, but the lobster ice cream wasn't created by routine curiosity. Instead, it was store's way of combating some ugly rumors that had been going around town and proving a point.

"We did the lobster because there are other ice cream stores in Bar Harbor," Young explains, "and rumors started going around that we weren't making our own ice cream. I got with Mr. Coggins and said we ought to do something about that because it's not right, we work hard at what we do. So we decided to come up with something that nobody else would have. That happened about eight years now."

The lobster ice cream has turned into a popular and one-of-a-kind calling card for Ben and Bill's, which currently only offers the flavor at the Bar Harbor and Falmouth store. "I had one lady come in to get some and I happened to be out of it and she said "Well if I can't get that I don't want anything!" and she left! We're the only ones that make that."

Soon, all that is going to change. With the upcoming website, lobster ice cream will be available to anyone with a curious taste bud who logs on. If Young's suspicions are correct, lobster ice cream— indeed all of Ben and Bill's homemade flavors—will be taking the web by storm.

"I think it's really going to boom," says Young. "I'll be surprised if it doesn't. I've already got phone calls from a lot of people that have just seen what we've got up there now and can't wait for us to get it done. We make our own ice cream and we use the best of the best, that's why people want it so much."

Ice cream is sent next day air, packed in dry ice.