PrintMoo-ve over, cows - goat's milk is in style
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Goats just may be the new cows. At least that’s the epicurean hunch that’s made a success of LaLoo’s Goat’s Milk Ice Cream Company, a small cottage industry launched by Laura Howard in 2004. A former Hollywood executive who produced Charlize Theron’s first U.S. commercial (for the men’s deodorant Lynx), Howard relocated to Northern California’s Petaluma with her Arabian horse, Joaquin, to change her pace of life and join the slow food movement. She remembers: “I had just moved in and was only living here for a week, and my horse was very unhappy at the change. He was wearing a groove in the field where he was running back and forth along the fence line, he was so lonely. So I got him a goat and he calmed right down.”
Howard soon suspected that goats would be good for more than equine companionship. So she bought seven more, along with a small freezer truck on eBay, and launched LaLoo’s from her garage in Sonoma County. Nowadays, she buys the goat’s milk from the dairy down the road (with 700 goats) to keep up with the demand for her ice cream at Wild Oats and Whole Foods Markets, which distribute LaLoo’s nationwide. It looks like Howard’s initial $25,000 investment is about to pay off.
For the taster, it already has. One bite into her most popular flavor — Black Mission Fig — and I understand what all the fuss is about. I swear I can taste the creamy tang that can only come from goats who have spent leisurely afternoons grazing on a diet of lush green grass and berries across Sonoma County’s rolling hills, not to mention the delectable pieces of fig ripened in the Pacific sunshine. Even better: Rich as it is, Howard’s handmade natural goat’s milk ice cream has less than half of the fat of cow’s milk ice cream and fewer calories, and it isn’t artificially flavored or partially hydrogenated.
LaLoo's Deep Chocolate
Other gourmand-designed flavors include Deep Chocolate (made with San Francisco’s own Scharffen Berger dark chocolate), Rumplemint (named after Howard’s sustainability-obsessed husband and made with dark chocolate and fresh organic garden mint), Vanilla Snowflake (considered to be the holy grail of LaLoo’s ice creams), Strawberry Darling (with a swirl of balsamic vinegar), and the seasonal Pumpkin Spice (singer Lisa Loeb’s favorite). And don’t forget the frozen yogurt flavors, including Cajeta de Leche (with a swirl of traditional Mexican caramel) and Forestberry (which blends raspberries with LaLoo’s probiotic cultured yogurt for an extra boost to your health).
Howard used to do it all herself — milk the goats and cook the milk, flavor it, freeze it, and deliver it. “I was making deliveries all around the Bay Area,” she says. “You know you’re an entrepreneur when it’s 5 a.m. and you’re the only girl in a loading dock with big Pepsi trucks and Frito-Lay distributors, and you walk into a grocery store with big freezer gloves on to put stuff on a shelf. And you do it as fast as you can because you know you have to get to the next stores before 9 a.m.”
These days, she still works from her garage, but now she has the help of five employees and her husband. Even though her business model may be spare, Howard has no regrets about leaving her Hollywood life behind. “The difference for me is that time sort of evaporated [while I was living] in L.A., and time is elasticized in Petaluma. I mean, I really feel like I get the most out of every day and my life is not whizzing by me,” she says. “I really am living my life.”
For more information (and to even order online), visit LaLoo’s at www.goatmilkicecream.com.
