By Matthew M. Thomas
revised – August 15, 2024
For Vermonters, the quickest way to start a fight or elicit an opinion is to declare where one can get the best maple creemee in the State. But what exactly is a creemee and from where does the name originate? In the past, some journalists and interested commentators have weighed in with their opinions, but few seem to have actually researched the question and looked at what the historical record might offer. So, with that in mind, I dug a little deeper and this is what I found.
Although many readers of this website are familiar with the creemee, it is important to first clarify and describe what exactly a creemee is and is not. A creemee is a kind of soft-serve ice milk (even though it is called ice cream) made from a liquid milk-based mix that includes sweeteners, flavorings, stabilizers, and emulsifiers and can be found in a variety of flavors. The mix goes into a specially designed machine that turns and chills the mix, adding air and forming small ice crystals, giving soft serve its smooth and creamy texture that is firm but not as hard as traditional ice cream with its larger ice crystals. Soft-serve machines are then able to dispense the ice-milk into a dish or cone in on-demand single servings.
In some cases, the flavoring is added by the manufacturers of the purchased mix, Un other cases, the flavoring is added by the machine on an individual basis as it is drawn from the machine’s freezing and turning drum before dispensing. What makes creemees, and any soft-serve ice-milk, different from traditional hard or hand-dipped ice cream is that creemees have a lower milk-fat content, have substantially more air by volume, and usually does not contain egg, unless it is frozen custard. Creemees are usually 5-8% milk fat, whereas ice cream is at least 10% and usually closer to 20% milk fat.
Having established what a creemee is (soft-served ice-milk), the real questions of interest here are where does the name creemee come from, and what are the origins of the maple flavored creemee that is so unique to Vermont? The spelling of the name itself is somewhat of a mixed bag. While the most common spelling is creemee with two Es and no hyphen, over the years the name has been spelled a variety of ways, ranging from creamie to creamee to cree-mee. As far the “correct” spelling goes, it seems that as long as it sounds the same, you can spell it any number of ways. For example, the Rutland County Maple Producers used three different spellings in the early years of selling their creemees at the Vermont State Fair.
It has sometimes been written in Vermont that the creemee name is unique to Vermont and that it is unclear where the creemee name originated. Some have offered a more romantic suggestion that the source for creemee came from neighboring French-speaking Quebec where the words for ice cream are crème glacée, from which a shortened contraction could get you cree-mee or creemee. However, a little historical research points us to a far less romantic origin to the name creemee. Additionally, it turns out that creemee soft serve ice cream was hardly unique to Vermont and that the creemee name has been around in Vermont and many other places in the United States for over 70 years.
Let’s start with the beginnings of soft serve. Looking at the history of soft-serve ice milk machines, we see that they were first invented in the late 1930s. By the early 1940s, there were a handful of soft-serve stores in the mid-west states. Following the end of World War II, soft-serve stands begin to appear in much greater numbers, usually as small, seasonal walk-up stands.
Interestingly, until the late 1940s, some states and local communities had regulations prohibiting the sale of soft-serve ice milk in individual servings. Some ice cream manufacturers were concerned that lower priced ice milk, with its lower milk-fat content was falsely being sold as ice cream, which by law had to have at least 10% milkfat. To protect their interests, across the country in places like Minnesota, Alabama, Hawaii and Florida, the ice cream lobby promoted rules that required all ice milk to be sold only in clearly labeled packages declaring the contents to be ice milk. Whether it was intentional is not clear, but such packaging and labeling rules had the results of preventing the sale of ice milk in individual cones or bowls to customers. A growing interest in the popular soft-serve stands, fueled by technological improvements in soft-serve machines encouraged business interests to push for changes in the ice- milk regulations and change the rules that previously only allowed ice-cream (based on milk-fat levels) to be sold in individual servings.
As a result, a soft-serve explosion began around 1950 and continued for the next couple of years, when a handful of entrepreneurial businessmen promoted the opening of franchised soft-serve stands under names like Dari-Freeze, Tastee Freez, Dairy Queen, and most notably, Cree-Mee. In 1947 there were a few hundred soft serve stands around the country, but by 1955 there were estimated to be over 10,000 stands in operation. The Freez-King Company, also known as the Harlee Manufacturing Company, out of Chicago, Illinois promoted the Cree-Mee name as one of its soft-serve stand brand names. President and owner of the Freez-King Company, Leo Maranz stated that he opened his first franchise in March 1951 and by the end of 1955 he himself would have 1425 stands, including several Cree-Mee stands in Vermont.
The first Vermont stands with Cree-Mee in their name opened in June and August of 1951 in Vergennes as the Cree-Mee Custard Store, in Manchester as Bischoff’s Cree-Mee Stand, and Cree-Mee of Burlington.
By 1952 there was also the Cree-Mee Park-Side Drive In north of Brattleboro, Lovella’s Cree-Mee on the Barre-Montpelier Rd., and perhaps a few others.
Through the rest of 1950s a few more Cree-Mee franchises opened in Vermont and, like the brand names of Kleenex for facial tissues or Band-Aid for adhesive bandages, Creem-Mee brand soft-serve was common and ubiquitous enough to take on the role as the universal term for soft-serve ice-milk in Vermont. As much as Vermonters love to think of the creemee as their own home-grown invention, the truth is far less romantic.
The creemee had its start elsewhere in the United States and has been a frozen desert staple in Vermont for over 70 years. Things get a little more interesting when looking at the origins of the maple flavored creemee, which is a flavor that is truly unique to Vermont. Initially, the flavors offered for creemees in the 1950s and 1960s were limited to vanilla and chocolate. Sometimes pineapple was on the menu as well as a weekly special flavor. However, there is no indication that maple was ever offered as a creemee flavor in Vermont (or anywhere else) until the 1980s.
The maple creemee was introduced by the Rutland County Maple Producers (RCMP) at their stand at the Vermont State Fair in Rutland in 1981. The first place I found mention of this detail was in a September 5, 2007, letter to the editor of the Rutland Daily Herald written by Pam Green, a Rutland County maple producer and member of the International Maple Hall of Fame. Wanting to know more, I contacted Pam Green and asked where she learned of the date and details of this event and if she could tell me more. Pam graciously shared that she learned of the RCMP origins of the maple creemee from the late Wilson “Bill” Clark, long-time Rutland County maple producer, past president of the Vermont Maple Sugarmakers Association and collector of Vermont maple heritage. Bill Clark told Pam Green of how, in 1981, C. Blake Roy, a recently retired maple marketing specialist for the Vermont Department of Agriculture, suggested the RCMP sell a maple flavored creemee at the Vermont State Fair. Taking Blake’s brainchild to the next step, Clark and RCMP president, Truman Young, brought the idea along with a few gallons of B Grade maple syrup to Tom Seward at Seward’s Dairy in Rutland, Vermont.
My next step was to try to get first-hand information that took me as close to the participants and events as I could. Unfortunately, C. Roy Blake had passed away in 1986 and Bill Clark died in 2021. Thankfully I was able to get in touch with Tom Seward, who confirmed the story shared by Pam Green and added important details. Tom told me that at that time, the RCMP had their own creemee machine at their Vermont State Fair stand and Seward’s had been providing the RCMP with the mix for making their vanilla creemees which were served with syrup poured on top.
According to Tom, the RCMP contacted Seward’s Dairy with the maple flavored creemee idea in 1980 or 1981. At the time, the Dairy was making their own vanilla and chocolate flavored creemee mixes for sale to creemee vendors in two and a half gallon bags. To make the maple flavored mix they used the recipe for the 5% fat content vanilla and replaced the liquid sugar in the recipe with maple syrup.
Tom went on to tell me, it was a special product made in small batches, 300 gallons at a time put up into 600 one half gallon containers. The Dairy mixed in the syrup at the end of the mixing process when it was all in the pasteurization vat. It was heated to 165F for 30 minutes then cooled in a tank and packaged into paper containers or bags. It was pasteurized and had a 21-day shelf life, long enough to last for the duration of the fair. For the RCMP’s maple flavored mix, it was requested that they put the mix into ½ gallon paper containers rather than the normal 2.5 gallon creemee mix bags. The paper containers were easier to handle by volunteers at the RCMP stand than the heavier and saggy 2.5 gallon bags.
The RCMP’s maple creemee was an instant hit, and by the second year they were being asked to make a second batch, since the first was selling out. At the end of the Vermont Fair, if there was still some mix left over, The RCMP took what little they had, froze it, and brought it to the Eastern States Expo to sell maple creemees. As a result, the specially made maple flavored mix was always used up and none went to waste. Seward’s made this maple mix only for the RCMP, continuing until around 1988.
There is one slight bump in the road for this narrative which was brought to my attention by Corinne Cooper, President of the Berlin, Vermont Historical Society. After reading an earlier version of this article and doing a little research of her own, Ms. Cooper discovered that the “Friendly Craft Shop” operated by Mrs. Nellie Spooner in Marshfield, Vermont was advertising the sale of a maple frozen custard in the summer of 1952.
So far, follow-up investigations suggest that the Friendly Craft Shop frozen custard stand was short-lived, with advertisements only appearing in the newspaper for the 1952 season and Mrs. Spooner offering her custard machine for sale a few years later. This early example of maple flavored frozen soft serve in the custard style is worth remembering, but I don’t think it stands up to test of having made a significant or lasting impact sufficient to warrant giving it credit as the origin of the maple flavored creemee.
In the end, the history of the Vermont maple creemee is perhaps not as romantic as one might expect. The creemee has been around for over 70 years in Vermont and the rest of the United States and thanks to some creative minds in the Rutland County Maple Producers, the maple creemee has been a delight since 1981.