Everyday Miracles
Last week I wanted to share with you my take on everyday miracles. But, it was Father’s Day. It had already been a busy week with the opening of our StuyTown location and I plain ran out of time to collect my thoughts.
I’ve been thinking about what exactly I want to say about this topic for at least two weeks. As I thought and over thought the perfect (to me) words, I’ve realized that I’m just procrastinating.
What’s below is an explanation of two recent miracles that have illustrated the magnitude of hope, intention, faith, and consistent action.
Behold, our ice cream hot chocolate...we've been making it with vanilla ice cream since before it became a viral concept.
The first was our StuyTown opportunity. At the end of last year, a food influencer visited our Time Out Market location to review the ice cream hot chocolate that we have been serving since 2018.
When her post went viral and we saw the impact of it on sales for the hot chocolate from our Time Out Market location, I more clearly understood that if we wanted people across the city to know about what we’re building, we’d need to have a Downtown location where they could access our concept.
This past winter, I shared with my James Beard Foundation Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership program cohorts that in 2025 we’d like to do this very thing—open a small Sugar Hill Creamery where people (who will never visit Harlem) could enjoy what we make everyday.
And then, a month ago, we got an email.
Here's our miracle.
StuyTown reached out to us to see if we could be their ice cream operator for their vintage ice cream truck.
Let me explain the miracle here.
The truck is located in the East Village on 14th Street between Avenues A and B.
Small Downtown location that we wanted. Check.
It didn’t require any build out or capital expense from us. Check.
Our “rent” is paid from a percentage of our sales. Check check check.
This is a miracle.
We get to test the Downtown market to see how they like our ice cream while building brand awareness and serving another small community like ours in Harlem with no more upfront expense than what we pay to make our ice cream and pay our staff.
I’ll say it again. This is a miracle.
The second miracle unfolded two weeks ago.
Here we are from left to right...Nick, Gabrielle Davenport BEM books & more co-founder, me, Nicole A. Taylor, and Danielle Davenport BEM books & more co-founder at yesterday's Juneteenth event.
We have been deliberating for weeks about what our Juneteenth ice cream flavor was going to be. Then, two weeks ago while I was feeling pretty sick, Nick walked into our room and asked if I knew Nicole A. Taylor. She is the author of Watermelon & Red Birds, the first cookbook celebrating Juneteenth food traditions.
He wanted to make an ice cream inspired by her Strawberry Sumac Cake.
I told him that I didn’t.
I checked Instagram to see if we had any mutual contacts. I wasn’t surprised that we did. I saw that one of them was one of my oldest friends Glory. Glory founded the Well-Read Black Girl online community and is the author of two and almost three books. I texted her to see if she knew Nicole well enough to make an e-intro so that we could talk about the possibility of collaborating on a flavor in the final hour of Juneteenth prep.
Here comes the miracle.
Nicole's book Watermelon & Red Birds
Before she could reply to me, we got an email from Gabrielle Davenport, co-founder of BEM books & more—a Brooklyn-based bookstore focused on Black food literature.
I ran into Gabrielle and her co-founder and sister Danielle at the Cherry Bombe conference and again at the Black Women in Food conference a couple of months ago.
In the James Beard Foundation program, I mentioned to my cohorts how I felt I needed to attend more conferences to better position our company within the food industry.
Hours after Nick asked me if I knew Nicole A. Taylor, Gabrielle emailed to share that BEM books was hosting a Juneteenth celebration with who?
Nicole A. Taylor.
I was so sick, but I felt the miracle of this serendipitous email.
I shared with her the idea that Nick and I discussed and asked if she, her sister, and Nicole would be open to us making it and serving it at the very Juneteenth event she was inviting us to.
They said yes.
We named our Juneteenth flavor "General Order No. 3." Here it is sandwiched between our passionfruit guava sorbet and our dark chocolate sorbet.
And just like that, we had our flavor with the blessing of our muse.
It may be easy to think of both of these events as luck or coincidence.
So often in our lives we dismiss unforeseen connections as one or the other.
But, I choose to believe that they were both miracles.
Miracles transcend strategy, calculation, and expectation. They happen through divine intervention in response to our desires and needs.
The belief in miracles is a belief that we are not the ones pulling all the strings to our lives. We are merely the actors.
I’m not sure what your relationship with faith is but I know that I would not have made it this far in my entrepreneurial journey without faith in God and more specifically Jesus.
Whatever your belief is, know that miracles are all around us happening to us and for us.
Pushing ourselves to see how things are happening for us instead of against us helps make seeing these miracles more clearly.
I hope you take a moment to acknowledge and give thanks for them when they are happening to you.
Sending my best for the week ahead. I hope you enjoy some ice cream even if it’s not ours.
Petrushka
Your Local Ice Cream Lady & Life/Business Coach