Star Kay White celebrates 125 years in ice cream ingredients business
Star Kay White Inc., Congers, N.Y., celebrates its 125th anniversary this week on Valentine’s Day. Owned and operated by the Katzenstein family for five generations, its primary focus has been making top-quality ice cream flavor ingredients, such as vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, peppermint stick, marshmallow, graham cracker and rum raisin.
Star Extract Works was founded by David Katzenstein in 1890 in a small shop in lower Manhattan close by the Hudson River. The company was making and selling ice cream flavors at the southern tip of Manhattan in the same location where the World Trade Center North Tower stood. At that time, purchase orders still arrived by hand-written penny post cards, glass bottles were packed in wooden boxes with straw, and the company made its own oak barrels for vanilla extract, said Benjamin Katzenstein, CEO of Star Kay White.