Bright Ice, the St. Petersburg-based small-batch ice creamery that prides itself on serving “delicious, bold, and natural flavors,” will be taking up residence at 19750 Wellen Park Blvd in downtown Wellen Park next spring, according to co-owner Steven Garrahan,
“We’re really excited to be down in Wellen Park. It’s a phenomenal community,” Garrahan tells What Now Tampa. “The buildout and the growth down there is just incredible and when I talked to the events coordinator, all the events they have coming up – starting in January – in the whole community, it’s just a really exciting community to be a part of, and we’re very happy to be a part of it, for that reason.”
While a rapidly growing and thriving community is generally enough to entice business owners to an area, Garrahan is particularly intrigued with what Wellen Park represents, explaining, “The developer has developed the whole downtown area with this 80-acre lake, so it’s very wellness-based and very outdoor-based, and it just falls in line with what the Bright Ice brand is, which is to celebrate the Florida lifestyle.”
Garrahan and co-founder Kurt Drake opened the first Bright Ice in St. Petersburg in 2019, followed by two more locations in Downtown Tampa and Pinellas Park in 2021. The company exclusively uses milk from Florida dairy cows, makes the vast majority of its speciality ingredients and toppings in-house, and eschews artificial flavors and colorings, all of which has earned it the distinction of a “super-premium” ice cream brand according to the Food and Drug Administration.
What’s more, the founders have stuck to an ethos of developing “bold” flavors, but nothing that plays more to novelty than actual deliciousness.
In a 2021 interview with the Orlando Business Journal, Garrahan said, “When we introduce new flavors, you’ll see a pattern of how we don’t do anything like goat cheese, jalapeño, or hibiscus. We strive for unique flavor profiles, but we don’t do funky.”
The result is an extensive menu of savory and sweet concoctions including Caramelized Bananas with Peanut Butter and Honey, Key Lime Pie, Espresso with Kahlua, and Lemon with Crystallized Ginger, as well as more traditional favorites such as Mint with Chocolate Chunks, Cookies and Cream, Warm Vanilla, and Sea Salt Caramel, with a vegan Chocolate and a vegan Caramel with Caramel Coconut Oreos to boot.
“It’s a more natural experience,” says Garrahan.
