Two university students have been busy in the Lund harbour this summer serving up a tasty treat to visitors and residents. Fresh ice cream; some of it even homemade, all of it a welcome addition to an area that was previously rather deserted when it came to frozen delights. The Peak travelled to the northern terminus of Highway 101 to get the inside scoop.
A teal green sandwich board at the foot of Lund boardwalk points upward to SassyMacks Ice Cream, the brainchild of Lund-area residents Jasmin Brown and Mackenzie Adamson. On June 23 the duo opened the stand on the patio adjacent to one of the area’s treasured hot spots, Nancy’s Bakery, and have since been serving up a rotating assortment of daily flavours. Ginger peach, apricot honey, chai, and even a peppered strawberry flavour containing a unique but very complimentary black pepper kick have been thrilling the taste buds of passersby for the past several weeks.
For Brown, the stand comes as the realization of her own childhood dream, and perhaps that of her father as well. “We made ice cream a lot when I was a kid and my dad always talked about ice cream shops so it pretty much stemmed from that,” she said. “And who doesn’t really like ice cream? My parents have their own business so I’ve always kind of kept that mindset of trying to find something to do [to support] yourself.”
For Adamson, the stand fills a void he often witnessed during his shifts at the neighbouring bakery. “I’ve been working at Nancy’s for a lot of summers and know that the ice cream in Lund is pretty sporadic,” he said. “I got the complaint twice a day going ‘where’s the ice cream?’ and there wasn’t any so this summer we kind of combined that. [Jasmin] wanted to make ice cream, I knew where we needed ice cream and here we are.”
In June when the stand opened, the rate of employment among students aged 20 to 24 was 63.2 per cent, its lowest since Statistics Canada began collecting comparable data in 1977. Brown and Adamson were not only lucky enough not to fall under the statistic this summer but also resourceful enough to rise above it with a solution.
“Even if you have a job that you’ve had summer after summer you don’t really know if you’re going to be able to come back to it,” said Brown. “But when it’s your own business you know exactly what’s going on and you know if you’re going to do it. It’s a sure thing in a sense, much more so than relying on an outside employer where there’s that nervous month before going back for the summer wondering whether you have a job.”
“It’s just fun to take pride in something that’s our business,” said Adamson. “You know, especially for our age it’s fun to actually have something this solid going already.”
Having second jobs makes staffing the stand a challenge on occasion, but the two make it work. Brown works five days a week as a wharf attendant, spending evenings in her parents’ kitchen replenishing the ice cream supply and weekends serving it at the cart. Adamson works an opposite schedule, maintaining two days a week at the bakery and spending the remainder as “the ice cream guy around Lund.” Brown’s brother Lucas fills in on occasion if needed, preferring to be paid in ice cream. “It’s funny,” she laughed. “He wants us just to order it in the big tubs for him.”
Of course, the duo’s unique take on a popular product is enjoyed by others as well. Word of mouth “spread like wildfire” among Lund locals and Savary Island residents and in just a few short weeks SassyMacks developed quite a devoted following.
In September, Brown and Adamson will resume their studies at University of Victoria—biology for her and geography for him—but they already have plans to re-open again next summer. They even hope to move toward an entirely homemade selection by then.
In the meantime, one thing remains for certain. Gone are the days of Lund’s long-standing ice cream void. That’s one problem that Brown and Adamson definitely seem to have licked.
