Everyone has a story. Jared Plummer’s story starts with ice cream.
As a young boy in Stokesdale, North Carolina, family gatherings in the summer always held one thing: hand-cranked ice cream. Plummer spent many days on his granny’s front porch churning out the frozen treat.
“Nothing beats peach ice cream in the summer,” Plummer smiles as he thinks back to the early days laboring over a classic rock salt ice cream machine under the watch of the two black rooster cut outs that framed his grandma’s front door. These roosters eventually became the face of his Raleigh-based ice cream brand, Two Roosters.
Despite attending NC State University for engineering and then switching his major to accounting, ice cream stayed with Plummer, and his mind never stopped dreaming up new flavors and playful concoctions.
“I had no culinary background beyond helping my grandma in the kitchen,” he says. Plummer also had no entrepreneurs in his large family. But he always dreamed he’d start an ice cream business, as farfetched as it seemed.
The dream became real in 2011 with the help of his wife Kelsey, a financial planner, along with their deep faith and the Triangle community, a story they shared at the July edition of Creative Mornings in downtown Raleigh.
The couple recalled the fateful night a year into their marriage when they were eating at Poppyseed Market in Raleigh and Kelsey pushed her husband to put his career as a CPA on hold and chase his dreams.
“It was a little more than I bargained for,” laughs Kelsey. “But when you love someone, you are willing to do the most dangerous thing in life, which is take a risk.”
Local businesses have reached out to Plummer, offering to carry his ice cream if he ever developed a packaged product. As for expanded retail opportunities, he doesn’t know if Two Roosters will ever become a recognized brand in the freezer aisle.
The key for Plummer now is to create a hospitable environment for his customers, where they can experience the Two Roosters journey.
The ice cream he creates is a gift he wants to give to the Triangle. He wants his creations to add unique flavor to the local culinary scene that natives and visitors can come and enjoy.
Plummer’s excitement for the future appears to be shared by the Two Roosters growing fan base, but he does not neglect to give credit where he feels it is due. To the crowd at Creative Mornings, he shared that he’s has been humbled by the grace of God and driving him is a belief that it is important to serve others in order to get where you want in life.
