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Everyone Comes to MacKay’s

by Cinda Chavich

It’s a breezy southern Alberta afternoon and Chrissie (Christina) MacKay is in her element.

“I scooped for years – I got bursitis from scooping,” the sprightly octogenarian admits as we step into the small town street where moms and tots, old fishing pals, truck drivers and giggly girls on dates queue up for a cone.

The matriarch of the MacKay clan greets old friends, and introduces herself easily to new ones, as we make our way to a bench outside her family’s busy ice cream shop.

“MacKay’s is sort of a tourist attraction,” she notes with a smile. “There are 15,000 people in Cochrane now, and it’s still growing but people are pretty much the same. People are pretty happy here.” And they do seem happy, despite the fact that they’re doing something that most people despise. They’re waiting in line.

I did time in the MacKay’s line is emblazoned on the colorful t-shirts for sale next to the double-sided counter where a team of teenagers takes orders. Those who’ve made it to the front of the line are gazing toward the ceiling, some obviously overwhelmed by today’s 50+ choices on the changeable wooden board.

“The maximum wait is 15 minutes, usually only around five to seven,” says Robyn MacKay who, with her sister Rhona, now runs MacKay’s Cochrane Ice Cream with friendly efficiency. “People are surprised by that, but there are usually 12-14 people behind the counter.”

The world beats a path to MAcKay’s door.

MacKay’s shop has been a fixture in Cochrane, a small town just west of Calgary, for more than 60 years. It draws locals and tourists, busloads of seniors and school kids, even Hollywood actors who come to this scenic strip of Alberta to make classic westerns. Brad Pitt has licked a creamy MacKay’s cone, as have Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve.

Day trippers come by car, motorcycle and bicycle. Many stay to shop in the little boutiques, gift and antique shops in the town’s restored historic storefronts.

It may have been a while since you’ve seen chunky maple walnut or Saskatoon berry ice cream on offer, but they’re here, along with lavender, Chai tea, and Mayan chocolate, spiced with cinnamon and cayenne. There’s ice cream with chewy Grape Nuts cereal, and flavours like avocado, black cherry, carrot cake, mochaccino, licorice and orange swirled tiger stripe. But chocolate is still the best seller, followed by vanilla and strawberry.

No traffic? No problem.

The building on Cochrane’s main street where the MacKays have been scooping their homemade ice cream since 1948 was once the Red and White store. Historic photos cover the back wall, along with bits of ephemera from those dry goods days. But the picture that Chrissie points out to me is a shot of her striding down Banff Avenue with her new husband, James MacKay, in 1946.

When the 19-year-old Scottish war bride arrived in Alberta, there was a week of sightseeing in the Rockies before the couple opened J.A. MacKay, General Merchant, serving the town of 500 with almost everything. “My Dad was a butcher, and we had a meat counter and a huge cooler,” says Robyn, idly toying with the old dispenser that once held butcher’s twine. “We sold jeans and clothing, we had a Wonder Bra display, a little toy department and the best candy counter in the whole world.”

The train station was across the street and the main road from Calgary to Banff passed right in front of their door. Business was good until a new highway bypassed Cochrane’s main street and Jimmy MacKay needed a new gimmick to draw customers into town.

He found his mother’s recipe for vanilla ice cream, dusted off the old hand crank machine, and started making the frozen confection from scratch. He pushed the town council to change the local bylaws to allow stores to open on Sundays.

And a stop after church at MacKay’s for ice cream became the thing to do.

For years general merchandise shared space with ice cream freezers but by the early 1960s, ice cream won out. “He just morphed into it,” says Robyn, casting her mind back to the day that he hung the ice cream sign out front. “He’d come up with more flavours, get another freezer and take another row of groceries out.”

Jimmy’s ice cream was so popular, he made batch after batch, all day long. Some people came every Sunday. “Your dad always made it, he was the great inventor, the mad scientist,” adds Chrissie wryly. “He had frozen yogurt 35 years ago and it flopped. A lady wanted chicken soup ice cream and he threw in a package of chicken noodle soup mix – it was horrid. Dill pickle was a one batch item.”

One generation after another.

After more than half a century of scooping, the MacKays say they’ve watched a new generation of customers grow before their eyes. “A lot of families watched us grow up, now we’re watching their kids grow up,” says Rhona.

They celebrate with families who arrive with new babies, and mourn with those who no longer have a mate to take them out for ice cream. Wedding parties routinely stop by for a cool treat in full regalia, because there’s still something sweet and romantic about sharing ice cream. “We have a wedding a week come into the store,” says Robyn. “Three of my scoopers were students who had their first date in the store. We even had a couple marry out front, because that’s where they met six years before. Then they came in and had ice cream. It’s like Corner Gas, or like a soap opera. The strangest thing is divorce because they come in with new partners and you’re never sure what to say.”

You’d be hard pressed to find a Calgarian who hasn’t enjoyed MacKay’s ice cream at least once. It’s now sold in specialty food stores and restaurants, served in simple scoop shops and on the menu at the city’s top restaurants.

Quality from step one.

Across the tracks from the colourful shop, Rhona dons the white coat and hair net of the food processing world and takes me into her domain, “the plant.”

Three young women are working here, including Rhona’s daughter Joelle, filling the small Taylor and Emery ice cream freezers with ingredients. This is where every tub of ice cream is made, one 4.5-L batch at a time.

On average, a single scoop of MacKay’s ice cream has 330 calories. The chocolate-dipped waffle cone adds more. “Our ice cream is 18 per cent butterfat,” Rhona explains, noting supermarket ice cream can be as low as 10 per cent butterfat. But that’s what makes this ice cream so delicious. It’s their natural ice cream base, created to their specific recipe by a local dairy, and the real fruit and other authentic ingredients they add.

Overrun, or how much air is incorporated into the ice cream, also affects quality. The usual commercial product has an overrun of 100% to 120%, more than doubling the volume. MacKay’s overrun is just 60%, making their ice cream exceptionally dense and creamy.

When their father died suddenly 25 years ago it was a challenge for the young sisters to replicate his popular product. “He died with the recipe in his head,” says Rhona. They struggled with dairies that supplied them with inferior products, but after both sisters completed ice cream courses at Guelph and Penn State, they created their own base recipe. “Now we’re supplying restaurants and we’re able to make some of the funkiest custom flavours for them,” she says, pointing to the Shiraz with white chocolate devised for a local wine shop.

To replicate the Jaeger Bomb cocktail, Rhona flavoured ice creams with Red Bull and Jaegermeister, then swirled them together. She’s developed green tea, young coconut and durian-flavoured ice creams for Asian customers. Her Thai Chili flavour is coconut ice cream, rippled with peanut and chilies. She hasn’t tried garlic but is working with beer.

There are nearly 300 recipes on their books and Rhona cycles through flavours, according to orders and seasons. On any given day, she makes about 100 11-litre tubs, or more than 5,000 scoops of ice cream.

The lineup’s part of the experience.

For anyone who’s ever been to Cochrane, lining up at MacKay’s is one of those been there, done that and yes, got the T-shirt, experiences. Hot, sunny, summer days are the busiest but the weather doesn’t really seem to matter. The queue often doubles back through the shop and out onto the wide sidewalk. Lineups here have even been known to stop traffic on Main Street. People don’t like lineups but they seem okay with this one. There’s an infectious, festive atmosphere. Maybe it’s the anticipation. Maybe it’s the fact that an afternoon drive for an ice cream is one of those simple joys that cross all ages, incomes and cultures. Maybe it’s chatty and personable Chrissie MacKay, who just seems to love walking that line and reminding her customers that the best things are always worth waiting for.

“It’s an interesting business, a happy business,” she says, catching a drip of melting chocolate with her tongue. “Everybody loves ice cream.”

Especially MacKay’s. West

Do you have a McKay’s story? Or maybe there’s legendary old-time store near where you live. If you post it at westmagazine.ca, you could win an iPod Shuffle or other prizes. Deadline is midnight, June 30, 2009.