Great Barrington — For Matt Scott, ice cream is more than just food; it is a lifelong passion. The Glastonbury, Conn., native purchased SoCo Creamery, located at 5 Railroad Street, from previous owner Erik Bruun in April. However, Scott has kept quiet about the purchase until an interview with The Berkshire Edge on Friday, December 19.
According to its website, SoCo was founded in 2004 and was purchased by Bruun in 2015.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Scott worked at SoCo Creamery as its director of brand integrity and flavor master from August 2009 to October 2017. He went on to work as director of production at Ample Hills Creamery in Brooklyn, N.Y., from October 2017 to February 2020. From February 2020 to October 2020, he worked in Red Hook, N.Y., as the director of creamery operations for Dutchess Creamery. Scott then returned to work for Ample Hills Creamery as its director of production until January 2023. Starting in January 2023, he opened up his own consulting business, Optimal Ice Cream.
“All through the years, I stayed in touch with Erik,” Scott said. “He had talked over the years about the idea of getting back involved with the business, and everything aligned perfectly.”
Scott said he eventually moved back to Berkshire County with his family after a period of living in Brooklyn. “Along with my wife, I have a nine-year-old daughter and a five-year-old boy,” he said. “We were happy to be in Brooklyn, but the financial and space constraints of living in the city became kind of overwhelming. Living in a 900-square-foot apartment with four people and a dog, it got harder to rationalize over time. The reason we were living there was that I had a great job in Brooklyn. But as a consultant, I can work anywhere. Moving back here to Berkshire County allowed us to be in a lower-pressure environment so I could kind of get my feet underneath me as a consultant, and it all worked out well.”
Scott will continue to run his consulting business, Optimal Ice Cream, alongside SoCo. “With Optimal, I help folks who have smaller ice cream operations who are looking to scale their manufacturing,” he said. “I help them find the right equipment, do plant layouts, connect them with engineers, and provide site training for operators.”
Scott said he also helps to find co-manufacturers for ice cream businesses. “Not all of the brands that you see in the grocery store, not all of them are making their own ice cream,” he said. “Some might be based on the West Coast but also need to make ice cream on the East Coast in order to offset freight costs. Helping ice cream companies and brands to find each other for manufacturing partnerships in the right region, and helping them broker that transition, is a big part of what I do.”
“There are very few people who have negative feelings about ice cream,” Scott said when asked why he has spent so much of his career working in the ice cream industry. “I ended up in the ice cream field by chance when I took a job as a part-time delivery driver years ago. To me, ice cream is different from other foods that people eat for nutritional value. Ice cream is strictly for enjoyment. It’s a social thing to eat ice cream, and there is just something really appealing about it. I have kids who are crazy about ice cream, and I get to involve them in it.”
When asked what makes a good scoop of ice cream, Scott admitted, “Oh, that’s a tough question.”
“I’ve eaten ice cream professionally for over a decade, so my relationship is a little different than the average consumer’s relationship,” he explained. “My wife likes to joke that, whenever we go on vacation and get ice cream somewhere, I ruin everybody’s ice cream eating experience because I’ll be really analytical. I just enjoy it and consume it differently than most people.”
When asked what his favorite flavors are, Scott said, “That’s an even tougher question,” but eventually admitted he likes fruit-based flavors, including “tropical flavors and sorbet.”
As for the SoCo store itself, Scott said any changes would be minimal. “SoCo has been here in one form or another for over 20 years,” he said. “Being in a small community, there is always community ownership of the way a store is, and that’s certainly true of SoCo. The last thing I would want to do would be to make waves and disrupt what is already a successful and popular business. But there are some things that I would like to upgrade. For example, we have a lot of old equipment and old signage. Even our old packaging for ice cream pints needed to be upgraded, which is why I replaced them with bright-colored packaging.”
Scott said the store will be closed for a few weeks during the winter to install new countertops and new equipment. “I just want to, hopefully, improve the experience for the consumer and most definitely give the scoopers that we have here the tools to do their jobs more easily,” he said. “When I purchased the business, we had more wholesale accounts, but I walked away from some of them because the amount of effort versus reward ratio was not right in my mind. I shrank the business in order to get it back to its core. We’re not trying to take over the world or change who we are. We’re just going to focus on what we do well and try to make it better.”
“My wife, Caitlin, has helped me enormously with this,” Scott added. “I grossly underestimated how complex managing the retail store would be. My wife is the one who helped me with all the things that I’m not good at.”
For more information about SoCo Creamery, including operating hours, visit its website.
