San Francisco · ice cream
Garden Creamery
The clearest working answer this city has to its own editorial question: a shop whose owners name the specific farm, the specific week, and the measured sugar content of the fruit that becomes that week's flavor, and who pasteurize their own base by hand instead of buying one in, because it is the only way to make that adjustment possible.
What to order
The cantaloupe, when in season (late July), made from hand-picked Del Bosque Farms melons
What we know
- Owners drive to a single named farm, Del Bosque Farms in Firebaugh, every July to hand-pick the melons for their cantaloupe flavor, and adjust sugar to that batch's measured brix
- Pasteurize their own ice cream base by hand in a closet-sized room inside their 1,200-square-foot shop, rather than buying a pre-made, pre-pasteurized base as most shops, including Bi-Rite, do; the process is quarterly-monitored by the California Department of Food and Agriculture per the same reporting
- Names specific source farms on other flavors: Kashiwase Farms for Flavor Supreme pluots, Masumoto Family Farms for Sun Crest peaches
- 100% grass-fed, organic dairy from local Petaluma family farms, per the business's own site, alongside a coconut-based vegan sorbet line sweetened with agave
- Distinctive Asian and Hawaiian-inflected flavor identity: haupia, salty kaya, butter mochi, ube, pandan, Japanese milk coffee, Thai tea
- Founded in 2012 from a vegan ice cream cart selling out of a commissary kitchen at a Marin homeless shelter, per the owners' own account to a named reporter
- Status
- open
- Address
- 3566 20th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
- Maker
- Erin Lang and Donny Capozzi, owners
- Opened
- 2012
- Website
- gardencreamery.com/
- Last checked
- 2026-08-21
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