After three long years of planning, permitting and construction, on July 13 Fox Meadows Creamery held a grand opening for its second ice cream shop, located on East Main Street in Leola where the Vinola’s restaurant used to be. The shop sells drinks, milkshakes and ice cream that is made on site, and it also offers other food items at lunchtime and houses a country store filled with a wide variety of goods from other small local businesses.
Chad Fox, one of the owners of the family business, told The Lancaster Patriot that he and his brother Corey had shared the dream of turning their farm’s milk into ice cream for a long time. Homemade ice cream was a big part of their childhood, he explained. Any given summer would find them sitting on their grandparents’ back porch, enjoying fresh ice cream and experimenting with different fruit flavors.
They also have always shared a love for small business, since their father raised them to appreciate entrepreneurship. Fox said that when he was in fifth grade, he and his brother were given some land so they could grow their own pumpkins from seeds, learning to care for the land and their harvest and learning what it took to sell their goods and earn a profit.
Those skills were put to good use in 2015, when the brothers opened the first Fox Meadows Creamery in Ephrata, just one field down the road from Fox Meadows Farm. They, along with their wives, sisters Andrea and Krista, have been able to use their different gifts to complement each other and run a successful ice cream business as well as the farm.
The Fox family has farmed in Lancaster since the 1950s, when Chad’s grandparents, Richard and Faye Fox, first purchased land west of Ephrata. Under their son, Bob, the family business shifted away from multipurpose farming to focus on dairy production. Bob worked on improving the genetics and comfort of the cows, while also producing crops like alfalfa, corn and soybeans as feed for the animals.
The Foxes have always been concerned with raising the standards of their farm. They started no-till farming fairly early on, since it is good for the land and produces a better yield, and they employ other responsible farming techniques like streambank fencing and riparian buffers. Their goal is to be good stewards of the land, of their animals and of the gifts that have been given to them by God. “We want to be fruitful with that and be a blessing to the community,” Chad Fox explained.
The two creameries have given the Foxes a chance to engage with their community in a more direct way, to enjoy the pleasure of serving guests and to create a greater awareness of where food comes from. Each creamery offers educational materials on the process of making ice cream, on the value of drinking milk, and on farming, and both locations have windows into the production rooms so patrons can watch artisans make the ice cream from milk brought in from Fox Meadows Farm. “We like to call ourselves a cow-to-cone creamery,” Fox said. “The ice cream starts with milk from our cows and then we transform that into ice cream.”
The shops offer 25 flavors of ice cream at any given time, changing up a few items on the menu each month and offering seasonal flavors, like the summer’s fresh peach and Caribbean breeze, which contains mango, guava and passionfruit. The upcoming autumn options will bring back customer favorites like pumpkin patch cheesecake and pumpkin creme brulee. Staple flavors include Madagascan vanilla, Wilbur chocolate, sea salted caramel and chocolate peanut butter bliss.
In addition to selling Fox Meadows’ own ice cream, floats and milkshakes, each creamery supports other small businesses through its country market, which sells local items like baked goods, snack foods, candy, canned goods, cheese and eggs as well as jewelry, accessories and gifts. The creameries also offer a full lunch menu that includes paninis, sandwiches, wraps, salads and soups and features handcrafted burgers made from local beef.
The Foxes are excited to offer these services in Leola and have another opportunity to provide value to the people around them. “We really love the Leola community. It’s got really strong values and is just a really hard-working community, so it felt like a really great fit for the way we approach life, and it was really an opportunity to continue to expand the brand and have a chance to serve more people,” Fox said.
Their business motto is “We refresh through delicious handcrafted food. We inspire through memorable experiences,” but at the heart of the company is the mission to bring joy through Christlike service. “One way that we strive to live out our faith is to really serve our guests in a Christlike manner, just through our hospitality. Sometimes even just something as simple as a smile or going above and beyond to serve a child,” he said. They are not just in the ice cream business, he explained — they are in the people business. “We also love raising up our team and raising up the next generation of leaders. So that’s a big part of really why we started the creamery.”
Fox Meadows Creamery is open from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. The business is also available for some catering and offers two-and-a-half gallon containers or single-serve cups for events.
Freelance writer Diane Boone has been writing for The Lancaster Patriot since May 2021. She can be reached at diane@thelancasterpatriot.com.
