San Francisco · ice cream
Smitten Ice Cream
The city's clearest specialist-equipment story: a from-scratch, patented machine built specifically to make each scoop to order rather than in advance, developed with an ex-NASA engineer, which is a different kind of innovation claim than the farm-provenance stories elsewhere on this list.
What we know
- Founder Robyn Sue Fisher began as a street-cart vendor in 2009, tweeting locations for pop-up 'wagoneering' rounds in the Mission and other SF neighbourhoods during the sale
- Built a proprietary machine, Brrr, with a team including mechanical, electrical and software engineers and a control-systems expert, to churn ice cream to order using liquid nitrogen in under 90 seconds
- Eight utility patents on the machine, per the company's own account, making it, in their words, the only sophisticated cryogenic ice cream machine of its kind
- First permanent shop opened in Hayes Valley in 2011, in a refurbished shipping container, before the current Valencia Street location
- Described on its own schema markup as small-batch ice cream made with seasonal ingredients
- Status
- open
- Address
- 904 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110
- Maker
- Robyn Sue Fisher, founder
- Opened
- 2011
- Website
- www.smittenicecream.com/
- Last checked
- 2026-08-21
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