First-time visitors to the ice cream manufacturing facility operated by Graeter’s Ice Cream — attached to the company’s Cincinnati headquarters on Regina Graeter Way — might be a little surprised when they step inside. For one thing, they would observe a lot more employees hustling and bustling around than they would spot in a typical ice cream plant. They also would spy numerous somewhat peculiar-looking stainless-steel stations, distributed across four and a half rows, housing stainless-steel buckets.
Those station-and-bucket combinations are vat freezers, or modernized French Pots, and they are the main reason the plant employs so many people. Graeter’s has relied on the labor-intensive French Pot process since the company’s founding almost 150 years ago by Louis C. Graeter. (See the Process Profile). The process, which creates just 2 gallons of ice cream per batch, results in “a creaminess that’s completely unlike any other ice cream,” according to Graeter’s.