What started as a side hustle for a pair of Detroit twenty-somethings has become a mission to build craft ice cream—heavy on Michigan-made ingredients—to a national scale.
Five years after taking out payday loans to convert a used postal vehicle into a food truck, Deion Cao and Alexis Matteson now make enough Milk & Froth Ice Cream in their Eastern Market kitchen in Detroit to supply a second scoop shop. In November it opened downtown in the space where Prickly Pear served Southwestern fare from 1991 until its 2020 closure. Their other storefront launched in 2021 in the historic Buhl Building in downtown Detroit.
Instead of using a standard starting base, Deion Cao says, he and Alexis Matteson build around the ingredients, “with a blank canvas every single time.” | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
“The dirty little secret in the ice cream industry is that virtually no one actually makes ice cream,” Cao says, differentiating their product from those derived from bags of manufactured mix fed into machines along with artificial colors and flavors.
Taking a “first principles” approach to their recipes, Cao says they opted against using a standard starting base—whether fresh or prepackaged—from which various flavors are created. Rather, they build around the ingredients, “with a blank canvas every single time.” The pecan butter brittle, for example, starts with a pecan butter blended into custard and aged for two days before candied pecans are mixed in. Organic coconut cream leads to such vegan-friendly choices as roasted strawberry, milk chocolate, coffee and cream, and peppermint patty. Dairy varieties use milk and cream sourced from Northville’s Guernsey Farms Dairy.
“It’s really just understandable ingredients that you feel comfortable giving to your kids,” Matteson offers.
She readily concedes that it’s not exactly health food, but says it’s “loaded with good, hearty stuff, so you really don’t need a heaping scoop before you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m satisfied.’ And so we don’t want to overwhelm people.” Whether in a compostable bowl or house-made waffle cone, standard scoops are $5 and doubles are $8. Take-home pints are $9.
Those pints, placed in several area retailers, are what drew the duo to Ann Arbor: Their strongest sales came from the two Plum Market locations in town.
After months of scouting the city, they landed their S. Main spot because their broker happened to know to approach the property owner, Cao explains. “We got super lucky. This was not even listed when we found it.” The redesign features a striking salsa-colored motif, with the counter set diagonally, as the floor plan narrows toward a back patio they plan to refurbish in time for next summer.
Cao and Matteson, who met as Rocket Mortgage colleagues involved in Dan Gilbert’s philanthropic ventures, bring a tech startup background and mentality to the enterprise. “Right now, we’re aggressively scaling up, trying to get more capital so that we can invest in more machinery, invest in more talent,” says Cao. “We can eventually cut our prices down and compete with the big players.”
Columbus (OH)–based Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams is a comparison they welcome, as founder Jeni Britton has been “a huge inspiration for us,” Matteson says. “Jeni stopped in our shop downtown one time actually and tried the honeycomb. She had a second scoop, she loved it so much!”
As Cao puts it, “It’s like Michael Jordan saying you’ve got a good jump shot.”
Milk & Froth Ice Cream, 328 S. Main. Wed. & Thurs. 4 p.m.–10 p.m., Fri. 4 p.m.–11 p.m., Sat. 1 p.m.–11 p.m., Sun. 1 p.m.–10 p.m. Closed Mon. & Tues. milkandfroth.com
