Elmhurst 1925 Moves Beyond Beverages With Elmhurst Creamery Launch

Plant-based beverage brand Elmhurst 1925 is making its first foray beyond drinks with the launch of an oat milk-based soft serve mix. The line will be released under a new sub-brand called Elmhurst Creamery, which will house all future plant-based food innovations as the brands gears up for expansion into new categories.

The Elmhurst Creamery New Fashioned Soft-Serve Ice Cream Mix is a dairy-free, liquid ice cream base available in chocolate and vanilla flavors, which consumers can prepare using any home ice cream maker. The product, which uses oats as a base, is sold online at a suggested retail price of $9.98 per 16 oz. carton and will likely hit retailers in 2021, Mahmoud said. The soft serve base will also soon be available to foodservice operators, which account for about 20% of the brand’s business.

According to Heba Mahmoud, VP of marketing at Elmhurst, the brand felt it was ready to extend into food after receiving consumer “validation” for its line of plant-based milks. At the same time, the company wanted to stay close, at least for now, to its existing line of beverages and creamers.

“What inspired us to enter the category is we’ve kind of mastered the plant milk game,” Mahmoud said. “Essentially, we said we have to play in ice cream. Our products are too good to not be able to make a really creamy better-for-you, cleaner version of an ice cream.”

While brands like Oatly and So Delicious offer hard-packed oat milk-based ice cream, Elmhurst saw an opportunity to innovate in soft serve, a space that it felt hadn’t seen much innovation, Mahmoud said. As consumers look for more activities at home, the product also gives the brand a way to offer a more experiential engagement, Mahmoud said. For those shoppers that don’t own their own ice cream making equipment, the company is also bundling the product with low cost ice cream-making bowls and machines on its website.

According to Shashank Guar, VP of innovation at Elmhurst, the soft serve took about a year to create, as the brand uses a patent pending process to include a high volume of oats in its ice cream while still maintaining a creamy liquid consistency. For sustainability and cost efficiency, the brand also wanted to create a product that could be shipped ambient. The line has a one year shelf life when kept unopened at room temperature.

Elmhurst has plans to expand into additional plant-based categories, in addition to adding more ice cream offerings, Mahmoud said, but will first allow the soft serve to “gain its footing in the market and let the product and concept validate itself.” New food products will also be launched under the Elmhurst Creamery sub-brand, which is being used for the brand’s move into food, a transition Mahmoud said has been “definitely not easy.”

“I think we want to find that fine line that makes sense for us,” Mahmoud said. “It’s really going to come down to a branding exercise more than anything. It is very difficult and I think for us to succeed, we just have to be prepared to give each innovation its time to shine separately.”

As Elmhurst takes on additional alt-dairy categories, Mahmoud said it will gain “new perspective” from the brand’s new general manager, Richie Betancourt, who joined in March as VP of foodservice after seven years with dairy conglomerate Dean Foods. Betancourt has taken over the role after former GM and CMO Peter Truby stepped down from his position earlier this summer. Mahmoud said the addition of Betancourt “aligns well” with Elmhurst’s history, as it too moved from being a dairy brand over to plant-based products, and his experience will bring insight into initiatives from the dairy industry that Elmhurst can apply to its own business.

Elmhurst has developed a track record of fast-tracking innovation: earlier this year launching oat lattes, smoothie bases and oat creamers, and this month it also expanded its oat creamers line with three seasonal flavors. This rapid innovation pipeline is a response to the quickly growing plant-based category, as Guar said the brand is “always trying to figure out the next big thing.” He added that plant-based brands face pressure to “innovate quickly to sustain in the market.”

“Here at Elmhurst, ‘too fast’ is relative. It’s fairly subjective, actually,” Mahmoud said. “We have the capability to provide something better, so I do think we’re going to continue to take this fast approach to innovation. It’s working out for us pretty well and it’s exciting.”