Nightingale Ice Cream Sandwiches as “the classic”—one of the hundreds of variations that the couple have been selling online and in select retailers since 2015.
This week, Nightingale is making its national retail debut at Kroger stores across the country, with the potential to turn the cult following it built with flavors like Cookie Monster, Chocolate Blackout, and Banana Pudding into a freezer-aisle mainstay.
After Pollack rolled out her first sandwich, word got around Richmond quickly. “When Hannah created that first ice cream, she sold out,” says Meers, who is now married to Pollack. Customer demand turned into restaurateur demand, with local establishments enlisting Pollack to make sandwiches for their menus.
“I wasn’t really going into this trying to build an ice cream sandwich empire,” Pollack says. “We wanted to take desserts that people really love and turn that into an ice cream sandwich using the best ingredients that we can.” That’s the ethos she and Meers took into Nightingale when they began working on the brand full-time in 2015.
As they began selling Nightingale sandwiches to some local stores within the following year, they would hand-bag each sandwich in a brown bag that was hand-stamped and sealed with a hair straightener.
The couple sells eight flavors on their permanent lineup, but has used limited-edition flavors throughout the years like Miso Churro, Hot Honey Ham Biscuit and Baklava to help build broader buzz until, Pollack says, “people were just clamoring for the next flavor.”
Part of Nightingale’s appeal is its premium approach. The sandwiches are an indulgence—the company’s site proudly notes that its ice cream is made with 14% butterfat—and at roughly $4-$5 for a full-size bar and $6.99 for a four-pack of its smaller “chomps” sizes, its prices reflect its roots in elevating a longtime staple.
“We just don’t negotiate on the quality of the product,” Pollack says. Although it’s more work, she and Meers have managed to scale the business while maintaining its small-batch appeal by avoiding powders and syrups used by many mass-produced ice cream products.
“For our Chocolate Blackout, we make the ganache, the chocolate cake in-house,” she says. “For our banana pudding flavor, we get hundreds of thousands of pounds of bananas, ripen them, peel them, and puree them into the ice cream.”