Boardwalk Frozen Treats and Baskin-Robbins partner to offer new ice cream and ice cream bars in major retail stores across the United States.

Our love affair with Kent’s Ice Cream of Fort Atkinson, Wis., started in the early 1990s just after we had purchased a classic car that needed work.

By most measures, ice cream is not a growing market. Production is declining, sales are stalled and manufacturers aren’t increasing prices by much. Yet there are more plants making ice cream.

Fans can like the Facebook page of their favorite ice cream brand and Tweet all day long about its flavors. But sometimes, to really understand a company’s mission, you have to meet face-to-face with the owners and watch how they make ice cream. That’s the approach Snoqualmie Ice Cream owner Barry Bettinger takes with his distributors. He invites them to tour the fully sustainable manufacturing plant in Maltby, Wash., and make ice cream. Once the visitors see the passion of the company’s 12 employees and the integrity in manufacturing a super-premium organic ice cream (19% butterfat and 15% overrun), they “get it,” Bettinger said.

Cornell University has a world-renown dairy science department. But alumnus Neal Gottlieb, the founder of Three Twins Ice Cream, graduated from the College of Human Ecology with a degree in consumer economics and housing. He did enroll in a milk quality course — for a day. He dropped the class because it conflicted with his rowing schedule. As for Cornell’s famed creamery, Gottlieb admits he was not a huge consumer of its dairy products, but he fondly remembers the 99-cent ice cream sandwiches.

Innovative marketing plus effective in-store merchandising and support of its private labels demonstrate that Safeway Inc. has made the leap from thinking about private label as merely a low-price alternative to have on its shelves to treating its private labels as CPG companies treat their brands. The result — private-label sales growth at Safeway is outpacing branded sales growth by a three-to-one margin.

Safeway Inc. takes the mystery out of making ice cream. At its Bellevue, Wash., ice cream plant, silos, pasteurizers, stainless steel tubing, flavor vats, fillers and other equipment are all labeled as to their contents or function. There is even a label above a hand-crank pencil sharpener. That was put there either for the benefit of a younger generation raised on hand-held devices (instead of pencil and paper) or else it was an expression of an engineer’s sense of humor.

As the only alcohol-infused ice cream parlor in Arizona, Lee’s Cream Liqueur is making a name for itself. The owner and creator of the 823-square-foot parlor is Lee Turner, a systems engineer by day and a dairy processor by night. The self-proclaimed ice cream enthusiast describes her treats as a cross between ice cream and gelato. The shop is located in Old Town Scottsdale in what Turner calls the “restaurant district.”