Scoop shop owners across the country are using regional and international ingredients to tell stories of place and identity.

On Yala Greek Ice Cream’s muggy opening day in late July 2025, throngs of customers stood outside the Washington, DC scoop shop, eager to get a taste of flavors that had already made local headlines. Over the course of the day, more than 1,000 guests—some Greek but many not—filed up the steps of the parlor’s steep Georgetown stoop, wove past walls adorned with painted ceramic plates and mati pendants, and reached the much-anticipated glass case lined with frozen treats.

Yala specializes in Greek-style ice cream, made with A2 milk and formulated to be lighter and less sweet than its American and European counterparts. For example, “Yiayia’s Karamela,” a malty, burnt-caramel-flavored scoop finished with Cypriot sea salt, is a tribute to owner Chrys Kefalas’s grandmother, while “Pistachio Odyssey” is borderline savory, blended with imported pistachios into the consistency of a thick, frozen nut butter. The shop also fuses tangy Greek yogurt with its ice cream base for a smaller roster of flavors, including the perfumy “Mornings with Thea,” accented with traditional orange preserves.

“I’m incredibly proud of my Greek heritage. Part of this is establishing and defining a style of ice cream that can be right up there with the great ice cream and gelato traditions of the world,” Kefalas says. “I think Greek ice cream deserves its place.”

Kefalas is one of a growing number of entrepreneurs who have turned ice cream into a canvas for cultural storytelling. From West African puff-puff sundaes to ice cream flecked with New Mexican blue-corn biscochito cookies, scoop shop owners across the country are using international and regional ingredients to evoke nostalgia, chronicle diaspora, and forge connections with customers who may share their stories—and with those who may not.

“The scoop shop enabled us to open the doors, not just to our ice cream, but to the heart behind it,” Kefalas said. “Folks love all types of frozen desserts. Giving them an opportunity to try ours and think about how it compares to the other big flavor profiles out there … I think we’ve embraced that.”

The inclusion of international and regional flavors into US-made ice cream is nothing new. In the 1960s, San Francisco’s Mitchell’s Ice Cream drew around-the-block lines when it began serving ice cream flavored with imported Filipino mango and ube, according to manager Marlon Payumo. The founding family of Mitchell’s is not Filipino; however, Payumo says they created the flavors after noticing an influx of Filipino immigrants to the Bay Area who were “longing for home.”

“It was a comfort for them, knowing that mango from the Philippines [was] being introduced here in the US,” says Payumo, who began working at Mitchell’s in 1987 after emigrating from the Philippines at age 20. Today mango is still the 70-year-old parlor’s best-selling flavor, with ube trailing not too far behind. Other highlights from its extensive menu have included horchata, based in rice-milk-flavored ice cream; halo-halo, with mixed-in mung beans; and a sunshine-yellow durian flavor.

Decades later, in 2015, Pooja Bavishi founded scoop shop Malai with the goal of infusing canonical South Asian flavors into ice cream. The concept is an homage to her own first-generation Indian American heritage, she says, but it’s also a means of combating the “othering” of Indian sweets and cuisine that she experienced while growing up in suburban North Carolina.

“Everyone knows ice cream. They have an access point,” Bavishi says. Malai scoop shops in New York, Philadelphia, and DC offer fragrant rose ice cream with cinnamon roasted almonds, saffron-pistachio ice cream sweetened with thick bands of white chocolate, and a chutney-esque cilantro-mint sorbet loaded with peppery herbs and a kick of serrano chili. “Ice cream is a really fun and approachable vehicle to be able to introduce these flavors,” she says.

Others have used ice cream to celebrate regional ingredients and cuisine. Kyle Wai Lin and his wife, Josephine, have spent the last two years creating ice cream that evokes their home of Kailua, Hawaii, at their shop Please Come Again. They have swirled chamoy into ice cream made with locally sourced lilikoi (passion fruit), combined poha berry and basil to make a cooling and not-too-sweet sorbet, and, for what Wai Lin refers to as his “darling flavor,” speckled shiso ice cream with Mānoa chocolate—their take on a nostalgic pint of mint chip.

“Locals love that as well, because a lot of them grew up with shiso,” he says. “As a person of mixed Asian descent, to me, it’s just normal to see this kind of mixing of cultures and invention of new things.”

In Silver Spring, Maryland, Ndidiamaka Agu founded pop-up ice cream business Shuga x Ice in 2021, inspired by Africa’s sweet and savory culinary staples. Her top seller is Tea + Bread, which features a tea-infused ice cream base studded with buttered pieces of sweet Nigerian agege bread—a nod to what Agu says is a quintessential West African experience of dipping hunks of fresh bread into tea with evaporated milk and extra sugar. It is the medium of ice cream, Agu says, that allows her to share stories of her own childhood with customers who might have grown up differently.

What is it about ice cream that facilitates this kind of storytelling? According to owners, much of the answer is scientific. “Fat carries flavor so beautifully, and ice cream is full of fat. When you flavor it and infuse it with these really beautiful ingredients, it’s going to take on that flavor immediately,” Malai’s Bavishi says. “The mere fact of knowing that the flavors you want to highlight are going to shine through is a really exciting and, dare I say, easier way to showcase them.”

The scoop shop format also allows for one critical experience that retail doesn’t: sampling. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, ice cream parlor La Lecheria serves flavors that are quintessential to the state, with mix-ins such as red chile honey and blue corn biscochito cookies. Allowing guests to sample these options, says founder Joel Coleman, has often made the sale.

“They’d be skeptical. Then they’d try it and be like, ‘Wow. You can taste the green chile, and it’s not just spicy,’” he says. “I always love seeing how pleasantly surprised people are.”

And then there’s the nostalgia factor of ice cream itself—a mainstay of the US dessert canon, often evocative of childhood memories and hot summer days. Ice cream “can be both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time,” says Nick Ladin-Sienne, owner and operator of the Somerville, Massachusetts, ice cream shop and café Third Time Together. Over the past two years, his house-made scoops have included cantaloupe-pandan with chunks of local melon, sour green plum with chewy apricot pâte de fruits, and jasmine-tea-perfumed rice with ginger-pineapple tepache. “You’re enjoying it because it’s ice cream, but you’re also enjoying it because it’s something entirely new.”