microcreamery

The term microcreamery is a marketing gimmick. Using such words as "all natural", "small batch" and "hand-crafted" are meaningless since they are not defined from any food science perspective nor FDA guidelines. To qualify as "ice cream" a product must contain at least 10 percent milk fat and not less than 10 percent milk solids. Other commonly used marketing phrases that categorize ice cream in terms of quality are: "superpremium", "premium" and "economy". Higher quality products tend to have low overrun and higher fat content, but there are no guidelines. Therefore, claiming specific overrun or milk fat percentages to define "microcreamery" is specious at best and a complete falsehood at worst. Similarly, there are no manufacturing guidelines that categorize ice cream producers by number of gallons per year.

A creamery that produces and all natural, small batch, hand-crafted ice cream made with less than 20% overrun, and more than 16% butterfat. A micro creamery produces less than 1,000 gallons of ice cream a year and are much smaller than large-scale corporate creameries and are independently owned. Such creameries are generally characterized by their emphasis on the use of all natural ingredients, quality, flavor and production technique.