https://insiderlouisville.com/economy/s ... -in-house/Local ice creamery and scoop shop chain The Comfy Cow has quietly taken steps during the past six months or more in an effort to return the business back to its former stature following some tumbles in 2017 and 2018.
“Comfy Cow invested in the community, and the community invested in Comfy Cow,” said Earl “Chip” Hamm, a local attorney and investor who assumed ownership this time last year.
That relationship changed starting in May 2017 when Comfy Cow’s then-owners, Tim and Roy Koons-McGee, issued an apology for ice cream shortages that lasted for weeks; some locations only had a few flavors on hand as the company struggled to juggle churning out enough ice cream for its shops and its grocery wholesale business.
The next blow came a few months later in August when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required Comfy Cow to toss out large batches of its ice cream and deep clean its equipment because of concerns about an E. coli contamination, further setting the company’s production back. Shortly after, the business closed its own production facility and outsourced the ice cream making to an unnamed company.
After Hamm took ownership, he shuttered Comfy Cow’s New Albany scoop shop, and in September, the Jeffersonville location closed, but the month before, he’d made a significant reversal and brought ice cream production back in-house.
“We can be more imaginative, flexible, nibble,” Hamm told Insider last week, adding “everything’s gotten better.”