The Sweet Road to Ice Cream Success
Sure, it may be cliché to say that a lot of care goes into the food you’re eating, but when it comes to the ice creams made by Hallie Meyer, it’s accurate. Meyer is the mastermind behind the delectable Tripla Panna Ice Cream, a brand that got its start in the South Bronx.
At a time where many ice creams do their best to stand out with novel flavors, Tripla Panna (Italian for triple cream) is no slouch. Past all-from-scratch scoops include: PB Cornbread, a sweet corn ice cream with corn crumble, peanut butter and mulberry swirls, Pink Rock, a raspberry ice cream with raspberry swirl and pistachio brittle, and Mottley Macchiato, an espresso ice cream with coffee coated pecans and fudgy brownie pieces. But Tripla Panna’s true innovation comes from where the brand got its start—the Bronx public school system.
This may sound like an improbable beginning, but Meyer’s path into the realm of ice cream making is imaginative and relied heavily on the support she gave and received from the local community.
Meyer hails from a family with true culinary ingenuity—her father is NYC restaurateur Danny Meyer. “Making food is part of my DNA, “ she explains, “I’ve been cooking forever!” In 2015 and after graduating college, Meyer co-founded a meal delivery app for home cooked meals by local chefs. But in 2017, she decided to step away from the startup world to take a more active role in the community as a City Year AmeriCorps member. City Year teams are placed in high-need communities’ to support schools and enrich students’ experiences throughout the U.S. and around the world.
“I was a team leader in PS 154 in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx,” Meyer says, “We worked with students all day – from aiding with academics during the day and running the after-school programs.” In her desire to design an empowering and useful after-school activity, she and another teammate drew from their love of food to create a Friday Cooking Club. “The kids now had a solid hour and a half to do things with their hands, could easily relate to the topic and tie the foods they were learning about to their own identities,” Meyer explains.
While the sixty elementary students looked forward to Fridays because of the club, Meyer looked to more-than-willing locals to come in give kids hands-on demonstrations. A rotating cast of special guests included food entrepreneurs from Empanology, La Finca del Sur and Born Juice. These guests gave students insight to eating well and a glimpse into the idea of food as a career. Meyer, of course, introduced ice cream into the cooking club. “It may not be the healthiest of the foods we discussed,” laughs Meyer, “but they got to see what using fresh products like cream and fruit can produce. And the kids, of course, loved it.”
Camaraderie quickly formed with Meyer and the community in the South Bronx. Jason Alicea of Empanology was crafting food pop-ups at a local café, Mottley Kitchen, and invited Meyer to make her ice cream to round out the menu. “I completely sold out,” she says. “The pop-ups were an awesome way to further my relationship with the community.” It was a lot to juggle as Meyer continued to do her full-days at PS 154; she recalls running the few blocks between school and the café to scoop her creations.
Meyer also found herself making ice cream for other community-based programs. She made ice cream for a homework help session at the East Side House, for a community health care fair, both in the South Bronx, as well as scooping and selling out at the first Bronx Night Market. “All these events felt like a beautiful coming together of players in the community,” Meyer says. “I’m always amazed by the energy the community brings.”
Now that her year of service with City Year is complete, what’s next for Meyer? More ice cream. Meyer hopes to open her first Tripla Panna scoop shop in the summer of 2019, and she recently spent a month in Rome researching and working in gelaterias. But she hasn’t forgotten the students of PS 154—Cooking Club will continue with a new team at the helm and Meyer will drop in for a session on everyone’s favorite frozen dessert.
You can follow Meyer and her frozen concoctions on Instagram
