Ice cream aficionados scream for the frosty treat year-round, but our state’s blistering July and August temps make summer peak ice cream-enjoyment season.
Providing a combo of smooth, sweet and cold in every lick or spoonful, the dessert soothes, refreshes and satiates sugar cravings like nothing else can. Check out these favorite Alabama shops that make their own ice cream.
Milky Moo’s Deli & Creamery
113 East College Street, Enterprise
While current owners Elizabeth Shanks and her husband bought Milky Moo’s three years ago, the ice cream shop in downtown Enterprise celebrates its 21st birthday this year. Its menu of more than 100 different hand-crafted, homemade flavors, earn it the love of locals and beyond. It was named “Best Ice Cream Parlor” in the state by the Guide to Alabama in 2025.
Milky Moo’s offers 16 flavors at a time; seven classics like strawberry, chocolate and mint chocolate chip are always available, and other selections rotate on and off the menu, often with the seasons. Lemon Strawberry Shortcake, a blend of lemon pound cake ice cream and strawberry ice cream debuted this summer. The Grinch, a green peppermint ice cream studded with crushed Oreos and little red heart sprinkles (representing the villain’s notoriously tiny heart), adds to the festive feel of downtown Enterprise’s transformation into Whoville during the holidays. It’s just one of Milky Moo’s “Enterprise-specific” offerings.
“We do several flavors tied to our community,” Shanks says. Inspired by the Boll Weevil Monument a few blocks away (which commemorates how the cotton-crop-decimating pest pushed area farmers to grow peanuts, thus saving the city’s economy), the Boll Weevil variety combines peanut butter ice cream, peanuts, marshmallows nodding to cotton and Oreos mimicking dirt. “It’s a massive seller,” Shanks says. “A military family that was stationed here for a bit, and then moved to Massachusetts, drove to us from where they were vacationing in Destin just to get it.”
While some of the recipes were inherited from the original owner, Shanks says coming up with new flavors is fun. “We kinda ‘mad scientist’ our way into new things,” she says. “It is usually us thinking, ‘Have you ever heard of X flavor ice cream? I wonder if we can do that ?’”
Shanks hopes this playful approach and the store’s whimsical atmosphere make every guest feel like a kid again. “The vibe is like Mary Poppins and Willy Wonka and Mr. Magorium (of Wonder Emporium fame) designed an ice cream shop together,” she says.
Lookout Mountain Creamery
612-D Gault Avenue North, Fort Payne
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While Brian Mince admits ice cream is no health food, he stresses that the homemade ice cream served at his shop is as good for you as the frosty dessert can be. “It’s all homemade with milk — not powdered milk — sugar and natural ingredients like real fruits,” he says. “We don’t use any artificial flavorings.”
Mince owns the creamery with his wife Tiffany, and the idea to open the shop grew from the couple’s passion for sweets. “For 10 years, we worked for the Discovery Channel show, ‘Street Outlaws,’ a drag-racing series, handling their merchandise, and that took us all over,” he says. “On our travels, we always sought out ice cream and dessert shops to try.” Once they began thinking about their own creamery, they got serious about sampling and sourcing ideas.
Then COVID hit. “The shop became our pandemic experiment,” Mince says. “We had the time, so we just did it.” The creamery opened on Jan. 1, 2021, and now churns up about 100-150 gallons a week of approximately 30 flavors during summer. The shop also makes its own brownies, cupcakes and rice crispy treats.
While standards like chocolate and vanilla sell well, more complex confections like its salted caramel and banana pudding ice creams earn five-star reviews too. Seasonal hits include pumpkin spice in fall and refreshing pina colada and watermelon in the summer. “If it is sweet and people like it, we’ve probably turned it into an ice cream,” Mince says. Or will in the future. Mince sometimes takes requests. “A customer asked if we could make a black walnut ice cream, so I’m figuring out how try that for them,”
he says.
Cammie’s Old Dutch
2511 Old Shell Road, Mobile & 9555 Co Rd 24, Fairhope
Necessity drove Cammie Wayne, owner of Cammie’s Old Dutch Ice Cream, to start making her own ice cream. While the business has been open since 1969, and she’s owned it since 1998, the closure of Dairy Fresh, the company that custom made the ice cream for the shop (based on the original owners’ recipes) closed in 2010. “So, I decided we’d make our ice cream ourselves,” she says. Customers who frequent Cammie’s are sure glad she did.
One little ice-cream-making machine kept Cammie’s supplied initially, but as word spread of Wayne’s peanut-butter-cup-studded Moose Tracks and praline-packed Creole pecan, demand increased. “Other ice cream shops started reaching out to me, so I started selling our ice cream to them wholesale,” she says. Then grocery stores came calling.
Today, Cammie’s fans find their ice cream fix at the small retail ice cream shop fronting its ice-cream factory, at the Fairhope shop that opened in 2023, in half gallons at south Alabama Piggly Wiggly and Greer’s locations, and at ice cream shops in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana. “There’s actually a waiting list for other spots to get our ice cream,” Wayne says. But the original shop, Mobile’s oldest ice cream parlor, remains busy, too.
Despite the growth, Wayne still makes her ice-cream in 10-gallon batches with the best ingredients she can find — which includes baking all the cakes, brownies and cookies that get blended into some of her flavors — and builds all her ice creams on a base containing 12percent butterfat. Wayne stirs all the flavorings in by hand and jokes she’s got the forearms to prove it. “That’s the key to our success,” she says. “Making it small batch like that, our product is super fresh, in our store and in others.”
While Wayne stays faithful to the original owners’ recipes, she enjoys coming up with new flavors too, like Moon Pie. For America’s 250th birthday, she’s whipped up a blackberry cobbler ice cream. “It reminds me of my mom,” she says. “We’d go blackberry picking, and then she’d make us a cobbler with what we got.”
More Frozen Fun
Blue Ribbon Dairy, Tallassee
5290 Chana Creek Road, Tallassee
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“Fresh” is no empty adjective attached to the ice cream made by Blue Ribbon Dairy in Tallassee. In 2019, owner Michaela Wilson started turning the milk squeezed from her cows into vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, blueberry cheesecake, banana pudding and Snicker’s ice creams. They’re available by the pint at the dairy’s farm store seven days a week from 7a.m. to 7p.m. Before hitting the road again, most folks who make this ice-cream field trip sit a spell to enjoy the farm’s relaxing scenery, which includes a playground, a picnic area and a petting zoo with goats and fuzzy sheep. Wilson’s coffee shop in Tallassee, the Coffee Cow, serves her ice cream, too.
Perfect Pit Stop — Peach Park
2300 7th Street South, Clanton, AL
Right off I-65, Peach Park draws drivers off the interstate in droves with its 14 flavors of homemade ice cream, including the beloved and best-selling peach ice cream crafted with Chilton County’s famed fruit. Each year, Peach Park turns more than 4,000 three-gallon buckets of peaches into cobblers, pies and cakes, but 70 percent of these peaches go into its ice cream.
For decades owner Mark Gray’s mom Frances made its cool treats using recipes she developed in 1987. Last summer, she turned over the churning duties to her granddaughter and a few other Park employees, but she remains involved. Robin Gray, speaking on behalf of the Peach Park family, shares the “secret” to Peach Park’s ice cream success. “Our recipes are from-scratch recipes with real sugar, real milk and fresh fruit with no added ingredients,” she says, “just like you would make at home.”
Spoonlight Ice Cream
Opelika
As she traveled and tasted ice creams everywhere she went, Dominique Treadwell, founder and “chief flavor maker” of Opelika’s Spoonlight Ice Cream, got a little bored. “I saw so much of the same stuff,” she says. In 2024, she started Spoonlight to add some energy to the ice-cream scene. There’s no shop to visit; if you want her hot honey cornbread (sweet cream ice cream swirled with habanero honey and crumbles of cornbread), lavender honeycomb (lavender-steeped ice cream with homemade honey-vanilla candy pieces mixed in) or other imaginative concoctions, you place an order through her website, and schedule a weekend pick-up of your pints. If you’re after vanilla or chocolate, keep looking. “I never make an ordinary ice cream,” Treadwell says. “If you’re going to waste calories, you need to go for something special.” And if ice cream doesn’t usually agree with your tummy, Spoonlight might be for you. Treadwell uses milk from cows that naturally produce only A2 protein, which is easier to digest for many. “My lactose-intolerant family can eat gallons of my ice cream with zero digestive issues,” she says.
Can’t-Miss Cones
Scoop Du Jour
512 A. Broad Street, Gadsden
Great ice cream tastes even better in a great cone, and the homemade waffle cones at Scoop Du Jour, which opened in fall 2020 in downtown Gadsden, make the perfect edible containers for the shop’s dreamy ice creams. “They’re very popular,” owner Kossi Amegble says. “If we ever run out, folks get mad.” While not every flavor at this shop is homemade, he crafts the bourbon butter pecan, brandy peach and grape varieties in-house and tastes every batch to ensure top-shelf quality.
Other Don’t-Skip Ice Cream Stops
Delighting taste buds since for more than a century, the orange-pineapple ice cream at Trowbridge’s Ice Cream & Sandwich Shop in Florence is an essential Alabama experience.
316 North Court Street, Florence
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Big Spoon Creamery, an artisan ice cream company based in Birmingham (with two Magic City locations and an additional location in Huntsville), whips up inventive flavors like tahini-chocolate crunch and passionfruit mascarpone.
4000 3rd Avenue South, #104, Birmingham
Tucked away on a rural road in Gallant, Greasy Spoon Kitchen’s homemade ice creams, like strawberry cheesecake and chocolate chip cookie dough, encourage diners to save room for dessert.
13956 Gallant Road, Gallant
Homemade soft serve in both chocolate and vanilla add to the abundant good-eats at Pike Road’s SweetCreek Farm Market, which also features produce right off area farms, barbecue, jellies, pickles and more, as well as other ice cream from Blue Bell.
85 Meriwether Road, Pike Road
facebook.com/sweetcreekfarmmarket
Freezy’s Creamery in Helena is only open on weekends but home-makes and serves flavors like fruit punch and caramel macchiato that are well worth the wait.
4025 Helena Road, Helena
