Cottage country ice cream business just found a new home in Toronto
Nearly four years after making a major splash in Ontario cottage country, an ice cream business operated by a pair of sisters has found a new home in Toronto.
Back in the summers of 2021 and 2022, sisters Chloe and Sydney Carron, with their business Bar32, had the ice cream bar market cornered in Port Carling, Muskoka. Selling chocolate-covered bars of homemade ice cream from a converted horse trailer, delivering by boat and eventually launching a Toronto pop-up, the girls made an immediate name for themselves — a true summer business success story.
Chloe tells blogTO that neither she nor her sister had a real passion for cooking when they began building it, though. Rather, they were bolstered by "pandemic boredom," a desire to build a business of their own, and the "fortuitous inheritance" of their grandparents' 25-year-old commercial ice cream machine.
"We started experimenting with flavours, and somewhere along the way decided it would be way more fun to turn the mixes into ice cream bars. Once we landed on that idea, the business side of things followed," Chloe says.
So, they settled on a name (32 referring to the freezing point of water in Fahrenheit), purchased and revamped an old horse trailer, and set their sights on satisfying the sweet tooths of cottagers in need of cooling off.
Everything at Bar32 is made completely from scratch by Chloe and Sydney themselves. From mixing the ice creams to filling the moulds and, finally, hand-dipping each bar in chocolate, it's a process that Chloe describes as "genuinely labour-intensive," but she notes, "that's exactly the point."
After just two fruitful summers, Chloe and Sydney left the ice cream hustle behind in favour of full-time jobs (boo!) back in the city.
But they always knew that it wasn't the end of Bar32 — not really.
"Life got busy, but honestly, BAR32 never really left our minds," Chloe tells blogTO. "We'd still get stopped on the street by customers asking when we were coming back. At some point, the answer just became: okay, let's actually do it."
This summer, they actually did it, returning to Rosedale for a summer-long pop-up at The Lobby by Heaps Estrin, where they had operated back in 2022.
Along with the new digs, the business model has gotten an upgrade, too. Coffee, made with beans from Detour, is now also a part of the operation. In addition to ice cream, customers can now tuck into capuccinos, espresso and even an afogato, wherein a shot of espresso is poured over either a scoop of Bar32 ice cream or an ice cream bar.
Aside from the location and the coffee, not much has changed at Bar32. Chloe and Sydney are still churning out bars of their from-scratch ice cream (the current lineup includes salted caramel, pistachio, raspberry and mango, to name a few), and to many of the same community members they first connected with in Port Perry.
"There's something special about reopening in the same space, in the same neighbourhood, and watching people walk in with this look of recognition — especially the ones who used to come here as kids when it was an ice cream shop years before us. We've heard so many stories from people reconnecting with those memories, and that never gets old," Chloe says.
You can visit Bar32 at 3 Macpherson Ave.
