A man rushes through two glass doors, heads to the back of the MSU Dairy Store and grabs a bottled water out of a fridge holding half gallons of ice cream, yogurt and milk. He sets a dollar on the counter and yells to a worker, “I got a class to teach, thanks.” Meanwhile, five women sit around a table eating ice cream, laughing and taking in the scent of freshly pressed waffle cones. There is a line of people waiting for their grilled cheese sandwiches, toasted bagels with butter or the chance to sample one of the 27 different flavors of the store’s hand-dipped ice cream.
The Dairy Store has been in its present location since 1997 and has been a campus staple for students and faculty seeking an afternoon snack. The store also is home to many regulars, who workers have grown familiar with.
“One customer comes in here every day, he hands us a dollar and we know he wants a large Diet Coke,” elementary education junior Lauren Dein said.
Since she began working at the store two years ago, Dein has heard various life stories from customers.
“We hear a lot of ‘I came here in 1955 and I remember when’ or ‘I drove 500 miles to get your chocolate cheese,’” she said.
But people come back to the store both for the memories and the ice cream, Dairy Plant Manager John Engstrom said.
They are people like Kit and Jack Steffen from South Carolina, who drove around looking for the Dairy Store’s current location to buy ice cream.
Kit Steffen, a 1950 graduate, remembered how wonderful the ice cream was - even though back then the store didn’t have the coffee truffle flavor she was enjoying.
“They didn’t have nearly all these flavors so I probably had anything with chocolate,” Kit Steffen said.
While vanilla is the highest selling flavor, mint chocolate chip is second - and the best quality, Engstrom said.
“This is the place to get (mint chocolate chip),” he said. “If there is a place making it better, I will go out there and change mine. I just want to do the best I can.”
Engstrom and his team of four full-time students are committed to making a perfect product.
John Partridge, faculty adviser for the dairy food complex, said the store has “one of the most modern facilities in the country.” Boasting a 50-gallon ice cream blender, a 500-gallon cream holding tank, two 2,000-gallon milk tanks and huge freezers holding ice cream at 20 degrees below zero.
Partridge, who was part of the team that produced Ben and Jerry’s first tub of ice cream, said the products produced at the Dairy Plant could be matched with anyone in the country. But, the Dairy Store chooses not to sell its products off campus because it’s not its intention to compete with industry.
“Not a week goes by where some store or restaurant doesn’t ask to sell our product,” Engstrom said.
But the purpose of the dairy plant is to provide a teaching and research facility for professors, students and ice cream producers, but the store makes revenue to run the plant and to improve the quality of ice cream.
“I definitely have not gotten sick of it,” accounting junior and store employee Katie Parrish said.
Parrish has been working at ice cream stores since she was 15 and said she still gets cravings for the treat - but the Dairy Store’s ice cream is different.
As Dein put it, “It’s MSU’s - it’s ours, that makes it cooler.”
