The best ice cream in Toronto probably wouldn’t have survived if it wasn’t for a fudge recipe. Ed Francis’s mother’s fudge wasn’t the cheap stuff you make with icing sugar. It was real stovetop fudge, the kind you need to dote over with a thermometer. Ed made it properly. And because he did, his ice cream blew up.
He’s still lined up down the block — all weekend, every evening, all summer long, at his three parlours in the Beaches, Leslieville and Roncesvalle. As long as it isn’t raining, there are families standing outside of Ed’s Real Scoop, waiting for a cup or a cone. It’ll be 20 years next November since Ed Francis ditched the World Wide Web and gave the ice cream business a go. It was never a sure thing, selling ice cream in Canada, where it’s cold eight months of the year. He made it, though.
Ed knows better than practically anyone that ice cream fads tend to be shorter-lived than fast fashion. When Sweet Jesus opened up in Toronto, in the summer of 2015, Ed saw the lines. People wanted to take a picture of the lunatic monstrosities they churned out there, all gussied up with colourful gewgaws and stacked higher than the top of your head. The thing is, the ice cream wasn’t actually much good. “It’s all marketing,” Ed says. “The product is average — it’s soft serve rolled in candy and stuff.” And it’s the same with pretty much all of these trendy things.
Chapman’s is a national institution, but it’s also a family business. “I don’t think it could be any more of a family business,” he tells me. Ashley’s mother and father, Penny and David Chapman, started the company in 1973 in Markdale, Ont., when they bought the St. Clair Creamery where they had been working behind the counter and began to sell ice cream directly to grocery stores. Ashley, now 40, effectively runs the business, while his mom and dad still come into work five days a week.
Will any of it last? It’s hard to know whether a craze like Halo Top — a lower calorie alternative to traditional ice cream — will have staying power or will vanish into the ether of failed desserts. Ashley is naturally skeptical. “Guaranteed a lot of these things are going to die,” he says.