House of Flavors Restaurant in Ludington

Ludington is a pretty small town, so it might be surprising that it’s home to Michigan’s largest ice cream manufacturer, House of Flavors.

Every year, they make over 25–30 million gallons of ice cream at their Ludington plant.

They definitely don’t go through all of that ice cream at their restaurant. So, what do they do with it all?

They sell it to other brands – in fact, they are one of the top 10 private-label ice cream producers in the country.

A few stats to go with that – they make:

• 3,000+ ice cream flavors produced for up to 70 brands sold at nationally known stores, supermarket chains, and distributors
• Ashby’s Sterling is their own branded line (70+ flavors, 1,000+ locations in 30 states)
• They also produce sorbet, sherbet, frozen yogurt, and gelato
• Products ship across the U.S. and internationally

Private Label Ice Cream

If you’re wondering who House of Flavors sells all of that ice cream to, you won’t find out; private-label manufacturers typically don’t advertise who they produce for (those brands are under NDA.) But when a rare recall happens, the manufacturer’s name shows up on the FDA filing, and that’s how we get a peek behind the curtain.

It’s happened at least twice with House of Flavors. In 2014, an FDA recall on Aldi’s Belmont Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream listed House of Flavors as the manufacturer. In 2016, a recall on Purple Cow Limited Edition Cookie Butter Ice Cream (a Meijer store brand) was made by them.

Sidenote: Don’t assume that all Belmont or Purple Cow products in the freezer case came from House of Flavors because of the recalls. Private-label brands often work with several manufacturers, even to make the exact same product. Case in point: A 2018 Purple Cow recall Orange Cream Bars had nothing to do with House of Flavors – it was traced back to Fieldbrook Foods in New York, not Ludington.

They serve full breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a menu built around fresh roasted turkey, specialty sandwiches (the triple decker club is legendary), homemade soups, big salads loaded with Michigan cherries and bleu cheese, and wraps.

Lots of people come for a full meal and stay for dessert.

Tt’s completely cool to skip straight to the ice cream counter for scoops, sundaes, malts, and shakes, too.

Fun fact: In 2016, House of Flavors shut down eight blocks of downtown Ludington and built an ice cream sundae in a rain gutter that stretched nearly half a mile. That took 855 gallons of ice cream, 944 pounds of chocolate syrup, and 2,000 Michigan maraschino cherries.

Around 1,500 volunteers scooped it together and somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 people showed up to eat it.

Guinness confirmed it as the world’s longest ice cream dessert.

Here’s the kicker: they only held the record for about three months before MOO-ville Creamery in Nashville, Michigan built an even longer one. (So two stops on Michigan Creamery road trip have both held the same Guinness world record!)

The current record holder is the Spirit of Texas Festival at 4,549 feet (March 2018).