("All About You" by Basic Comfort plays) Celebrating vibrant people.

captivating places and remarkable things.

This is Living West Michigan.

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("Rest" by Basic Comfort plays) So one thing we do here at Hudsonville to ensure that all of our mix ins and our swirls are perfectly entirely throughout the container distributed well.

So we just cut it entirely in half using this knife.

Just like this.

And from there, it shows me a perfect swirl, all of of these bits and pieces all throughout, and a nice spiral.

Who works at a Hudsonville ice cream?

We have hundreds of employees here working all together to make a great ice cream product for our fans.

The role spread across multiple departments.

I work in research and development.

We also have a quality assurance and quality controls department and sales marketing, but production where all the magic happens.

Production makes our ice cream happen for us, and they do a great job.

So Hudsonville actually started as a dairy co op, way back in 1889.

We started making ice cream in 1926.

When our current owners bought Hudsonville, we moved here to Holland, about 2004.

I heard there was talk about changing the name to Holland ice cream, it just doesn’t quite have the same ring.

I think it comes a lot from, just being established in the community.

Hudsonville Ice cream is a brand that if if you were up in the area or surrounding areas you were used to, it’s just kind of the one and only brand you knew, so we thought that really continuing to have that heart as Hudsonville ice cream is what we wanted to continue.

We’ve been making ice cream for a really long time, I like to think we’re experts in the field.

It’s what makes for a good, you know, a quart of ice cream.

High quality ingredredients and great flavor.

So we spend a lot of time working on flavor development, and there’s a lot of reiterations that happen along the way.

And we work with a lot of key suppliers, mostly in the Midwest region, who help us source those fantastic high quality ingredients with great flavor.

Pint of ice cream a day keeps the doctor away, right?

That’s right.

What’s your favorite?

I love this question.

It’s so hard to answer, though.

I would go right here with mint deer tracks.

I think it’s fantastic.

Get out with spoons.

All right, here we go.

We all have our favorite ice creams right, but it’s always fun to try something new and see what’s out there.

Ice cream’s really innovative, so really leaning into, you know, how can we continue to develop and be competitive in the market?

It also allows our team members to be creative and come up with different things and kind of troubleshoot and come up with fun ideas.

It spans across many, many different roles to be a food scientist and to know what’s important to our consumer.

It starts at the very beginning with coming up with a great concept.

We make revision after revision just to get it just right, and then we can scale up once everybody loves it.

We know it’s gonna be a hit.

I take it into the lab where I make small batch benchtop samples.

I start small, so I start just tweaking the flavor.

First, let’s get the flavor just right.

It might take many iterations.

Sometimes I get it right on the first try, but I’ve been up to like version 20 before and still going And from there, we also want to get the color just right.

So make sure that the color matches the flavor.

We don’t want our mint ice cream to be orange.

That would be confusing.

I was thinking that exact color.

Let’s get the color right.

And then all of the ingredients, all of the mix ins.

We want mix ins in every single bite.

Brownies and your chocolate chips and your cookie dough and your Oreos or things like that, all of those pieces that you’re digging for, with your spoon, trying to get a bite of.

We want one in every bite.

So we’re making sure we have the right amount and just the right ingredient.

And our swirls.

I love caramel.

I know people love for fudge and strawberries, so we swirl in things, too, so it’s got a nice visual and makes for a nice pretty scoop, too.

(Music) Well, I’m not gonna give away any secret recipes, but definitely love and passion.

I like to put love and passion into every recipe, and starting with our cream, resource from local West Michigan farms for our cream and milk.

We have many freezers here, bigger than you can imagine, and they are all at different temperatures, just along the supply chain.

They need to hit different temperature points.

Ice cream is fun, right?

You eat it at birthdays and and anniversaries and celebrations, so really like to bring that to the community, and how can we celebrate the community with some really great ice cream.

So our Hudsonville brand is pretty Midwest focused yet, and we’re looking to expand, but focusing on serving our community in the local area.

Our little Debbie products line is available nationwide.

When we started, we were excited when we got to Lansing, and now we’re able to be found nationwide through our little Debbie line.

We like to attend the IDFA, which is the International Dairy Foods Association Ice Cream Technology Conference every year, where we’ve taken home a few of medals, also like to enter our ice cream into the world Dairy Expo, where we have also placed first place multiple years in a row.

What’s your favorite flavor?

My favorite flavor ever since I was a little girl, is our Traverse City cherry fudge, which you can get in a bar now, so that’s super good.

Yes.

And how is it coming up with new ideas like bars or.

Yeah, we have a really great product development team, taking kind of, you know, what’s hot in the marketplace and what is our team looking for?

What are our consumers and our fans are interested in, and doing our best to translate that into a really great product.

G ask you a tough question.

Do those Traverse City cherries really do from Traverse City?

They’re really from Traverse City.

They are.

Trying to keep it local.

What I just I love about Hudsonville, it’s just, yeah, it’s dedication to the community.

Inside our building, outside of our building, doing our best to make sure that we’re serving the Midwest community as best we can.

We’re very proud of the Hudsonville brand, and I just hope you love it.

We will.

Okay.

You ready?

Yeah.

When people ask me, what’s your favorite ice sculpture?

I would say it’s my next one, because that’s a challenge, and it’s something that we’re going to be designing for the first time, that’s really fun to me.

I’ve been trying to figure out who I am for my whole life.

And it’s been great.

It’s been a great journey.

When I first started out in my career, I was a chef and a cook and learned how to do all that, and I once found a gentleman that was doing ice sculpting at the place I worked at and was fascinated immediately.

So I would hang out with with him every day and clean his tools and did everything as an apprentice, and then that’s how I gradually got in.

And that’s how most people started going to the ice sculpting was kind of honing it down, specializing in one field.

Some people specialize in pastries or cold food, and I specialized in really cold food, the ice.

Ice sculpting has been something that has given us the freedom to express ourselves, to highlight, to show up at a party and create a centerpiece and have people come up to us.

So the wonderful thing about the ice sculptic that I realized during COVID was that it wasn’t so much the money that we were getting paid.

It was the intrinsic value of people coming in and saying, Great job.

You really made the party great, or we really enjoyed taking our photographs with it."

So to me, it’s more about the expression and what we could do for people.

And so when people say, "What do you do here, we try to create fun."

So the ice sculpting tools have changed quite a bit over the years.

We started out with chisels, heavy chisels that were from Japan.

The steel itself is multiple folded.

It’s the same steel they use for samurai swords.

But then, back in the late ’80s, there’s a gentleman that introduced dye grinders, power tools, really changed the game.

We were able to sand and smooth and do undercuts that we’ve never been able to do with a chisel.

You can’t get a chisel in underneath, but you can get this little sander on a stick in there and clean it right up.

We were buying ice from Muskegon they were using for fishing boats, which they didn’t care, it was just ice, and literally we’d get a block with like a fish or something in it or a piece of wood or whatever.

So we started manufacturing our own, and we’ve done that ever since, so much more control over the quality of the ice itself.

As much time and effort and energy we put into making a good sculpture, we want to make sure that the product we start with is amazing.

So when we start off with a block of ice, we already have that vision in our head of what it’s going to be be.

We’ve mapped it all out.

And I think the story is, is the sculpture is always there, you’re just removing what doesn’t belong.

And what’s neat about that is it’s clear.

It’s a clear block.

So I literally, now, when I look at it, I can see it, I can visualize it being in there, and I am just removing the excess around.

My number one most proud piece was a Ferris wheel that we did.

We did a double Ferris wheel that actually rotated.

It worked, it had 12 individual carts, and everything on the ferris wheel was ice, except for the motor that turned it.

And we did that for Ripley’s Believe It or Not, with Dean Cain back in the day.

We also did a full working pool table that we shot pool on.

But I think that’s probably the key one that’s really kicked us off into the animatronics and the motion sculptures, because most times people look at a sculpture, they don’t touch it, it’s just for visuals, and our whole television series was about sculptures that you could touch and interact with and have fun with.

So our studio now has been a labor of love.

over the last three years.

We’ve bought this building, we’ve stripped it out, and we’ve built it to be much more functional for ourselves, but also an art studio.

So we have murals and things all over the walls.

We’ve designed it even on the outside.

We have a giant zipper painted on the outside, because when we first looked at it, that’s all I could see, because the bricks overlapped as a zipper.

So we’ve really made this kind of a fun, interactive place with art throughout.

So wherever you walk, you’ll see some art, not just the ice, but paintings, murals, and sculptures.

The whole team has come together, and it’s been a really exciting time to see everybody being cohesive.

It’s a family unit, and that’s really what I want.

I want to have a successful business, but I also, coming up as a chef and going through that situation, anyone who’s been a chef over the years realizes how hard that is.

And so we’ve tried to get this town down, so the hours aren’t so exhausting.

You’re working in cold and wet environments.

We want to make sure that this is a fun and safe place for people to work, and that they look forward to coming to work and not dreading it.

Iced coffee.

West Michigan has actually been the key to our success.

When we first started out, we really had to work hard because ice sculpting wasn’t something that was done in Grand Rapids.

There was no other businesses, there was no people that were looking for ice sculpture.

So we had to start from ground up and talk people into buying frozen water.

And I think the people in West Michigan are much more discerning.

They have higher standards.

So because of the standards we had to live up to in West Michigan, it made us much more competitive in the Detroit market and nationwide, because the quality that West Michigan deserves is something that wasn’t being produced in the other cities.

So the future of ice sculpting, I think is really going more into interactive and playfulness and really fitting the need of the occasion.

So I think the future of ice sculpting really is going to be determined by the next artists that are coming down the pike, and we’re hoping that that will continue to evolve.

It’s been a revolution in the last 10 years going from little chisels and things like that and to full computerized CNC sculpting.

And now we’re doing a lot more with lighting LEDs projection imagery in the ice, and just kind of pushing that limit a little farther I’m Doreen Gardner, and I am the CEO founder of Papa’s Brittle.

I had no intentions of making peanut Brittle.

I actually one day swore I’d never make another batch of peanut brittle again as long as I live.

And here I am.

Okay, so which one is this?

This is the original.

This is what started it all.

This is the original one from your mom.

Mm hmm.

I get it.

You get it?

Yes, this is delicious.

Okay.

Next.

So, you are 72.

Yes.

You don’t look it.

How did you come upon this?

Because this is not my what you anticipated.

You thought you were retired.

Your mother had a recipe that she produced for over... By the time I picked it up, it had been 60 years that she had been making this peanut brittle and just simply giving it away And it was to the point that she had over 200 people on her list.

People begged her to be on her list.

Because it was that good?

it was that good.

In the fall of 2020, my mother’s health was failing, and she couldn’t no longer do it.

So she came to me and she said, "Doreen, I need you to do this."

And I’m like, I’m not doing it.

it."

And so we went back and forth, and then finally, one day, my dad comes in and he says, "You’re going to help your mom So I did it, but I was mad.

I mean, I was really, really mad, I was upsetset, you know, because I was involved in a lot of other things, heavy in church, I’m a minister, and you know, just doing other things.

And at that point, I swear I’d never make another batch of peanut brittle again, I’m done, it’s over Fast forward, a few months after that, my dad got sick, okay?

And he was terminal.

And one of the things he kept saying to me during that period of time was, please forgive me me all I ever wanted to do was to leave a legacy."

And I’ve told him, you know, you did, Dad.

You were a great father, and he was a good provider And so, after he passed, I got an invite to go into a black Entrepreneur Training Academy.

I got in the class, and the other thing was, well, you got to have a business."

I said, "I really don’t want a business, I just wanted to take the class.

Well, you got to have a business, okay, Granny’s brittle."

That’s the way I started it.

It was with Granny’s Brittle, trying to name it after my mother.

So I couldn’t find a good fit for a name for it, namely it after her.

But when we get to the end of the class, I’m the only one that doesn’t have all of their things done because I didn’t never came up with a name for the business.

The last day of class, one of the girls is friends with my daughter and had been over my mother’s house.

She’s telling me, she says, "Mama G. That’s what they called me.

And she says, Mama G, Why don’t you just call it Papa’s You know Papa was in the kitchen with Nana.

And I thought, oh my God, the legacy, and that’s when it all came together for me.

The picture just kind of fit.

and from that point on, it’s just It’s got legs and it’s taken off.

What’s the process of making that peanut brittle?

What does that look like?

It really is a tedious, especially the way that we’re making it right now, because because it’s by hand and it’s a lot of stirring.

It’s a lot of watching it and watching the temperatures because peanut brittle is very, people don’t realize they think it’s oh, it’s just a piece of candy.

No, it is very difficult to make the perfect batch of peanut britle.

It takes a lot of a lot of attention, attentiveness, a lot of stirring.

It’s got to be just right on the point, watching the temperatures, poor stir, poor stir, you know, and spread, because if it’s not perfect, it is not leaving this facility.

You’ve also won a number of grants and awards that helped you establish this building, because, again, you were in your home, then you were working out of a commercial kitchen, and now you’re here.

You were able to get this building through the Venture, the Black...

Yes, you.

Kalamazoo Forward Ventures.

So that is a group of all black investors that have formed this investment company and so I was really blessed to be one of the first people that they’ve supported here through this venture.

How much more can you make in a facility such as this?

Before we could do probably like 140 to 150 bags a day.

And so right now, we’re looking to be able to ramp up, and the goal is to get between 700 to 900 bags a shift.

In the fall of ’22 was when I won the award with Daymond John from Shark Tank, and his was the black Entrepreneur Day.

And that’s really big because that is a national.

They have tens of thousands of people that apply for it.

The first one was 2,500, that one was 25,000.

Oh, wow.

So it’s just been really a very exciting time and a journey that God has you on.

Okay, a question for you.

Are you still mad?

Because it’s.

Heck, no, I’m not mad.

I’m like, "Wait a minute.

You know, and it feels like, because that shift, at that point, it felt like that’s what I was created to do This has energized me.

And I think the peanut brittle, like people say, "Well, why are you look so young?

But peanut Brittle.

I think that’s the thing that’s keeping me going, keeping me young.

So that I know this is where I’m supposed to be.

Hello, West Michigan.

Welcome to Melina’s free fun forecast.

I’m Melina.

Today, we’re predicting perfect weather for adventure, all at no cost.

Let’s check the map for today’s time.

top picks right here on Melina’s free fun forecasts, where the fun is always free and the weather is always perfect.

Today, we’re diving into some of the most beautiful and tranquil outdoor spaces right here in our own backyard.

Whether you’re a seasoned hiker or you’re just looking for a peaceful walk, West Michigan has all the trails to cater to every kind of adventurer.

So let’s lace up our boots and check out some of the local favorites.

First up, let’s talk about the Hudsonville Nature Center.

Tucked away in Hudsonville, this peaceful 76 acre nature reserve offers a network of trails that wind through stunning woodlands and wetlands.

It’s the perfect spot to get away from the hustle and bustle.

One of the highlights here, the wildflowers During spring and summer, you’ll find the trails bursting with vibrant wildflowers, making it a photographer’s dream or just a serene place to pause and enjoy nature’s colors.

It’s a perfect spot for a leisurely walk or calming nature hike, and it’s all completely free.

The trails here are a mix of paved and natural paths, which makes it accessible for walkers, runners, and even bikers.

If you’re looking for a shorter loop, you can easily make your way around in 20 minutes, but there are longer routes, too, if you want to take your time.

Next, we’re headed to Allendale to explore the Grand Ravines.

With over 200 acres of woods, meadows, and ravines, this park feels like a hidden gem tucked just far enough away from the city, but still easy to get to.

One of the coolest features here is the suspension bridge, which offers amazing views of the ravine and the river below.

It’s definitely worth a stop for a great photo op.

And for all the dog lovers out there, Grand Ravines has a fantastic dog park.

The park features fenced, off leash trails, where your pup can run free while youc explore.

There’s also separate sections for small and large dogs and after a fun day of outdoor play, there’s even a dog wash station where you can rinse off those muddy paws before heading home.

Our final stop today is Riley Trails in Holland, set on over 300 acres of forest and rolling hills with a network of trails that offer a mix of landscapes, from towering pines to open mountain meadows It’s one of those places where, no matter which path you take, you’re guaranteed to find something beautiful.

It’s a perfect spot for hiking, but it’s also great for biking, especially since many of the trails are wide enough to accommodate both hikers and cyclists.

If you’re into mountain biking, Riley trails offers a great mix of terrain, with dirt paths, gentle slopes, and a few tougher sections If you’re not in the mood for a long hike or bike ride, you can always enjoy a shorter walk and take a break at one of the benches scattered throughout the park.

It’s a great way to just sit back, listen to the birds, and enjoy a little peace and quiet.

That’s it for today’s adventure.

We’ve explored three amazing spots where you can get outside and enjoy all the beauty this area has to offer.

And as always, for free.

From the peaceful woods of Hudsonville Nature Center to the scenic views at Grand Ravines and the versatile trails at Riley Trails, there’s something for every nature lover right here in West Michigan Oh, nice.

Keep going.

("Rest" by Basic Comfort plays) Have a good day!