Riverhead’s Snowflake Ice Cream loses 700 gallons after heat wave, power outage

For many people, last week’s heat wave meant reaching for an extra scoop of ice cream. At Riverhead’s famed Snowflake Ice Cream Shoppe, it meant trying to save hundreds of gallons of ice cream before it melted away.

As the sweltering temperatures pushed the heat index into triple digits on July 3, the store lost its air conditioner and three freezers, Snowflake owner Stuart Feldschuh told the Riverhead News-Review on Thursday.

The outages melted about half of all the hard ice cream — an estimated 700 gallons, he said.

Mr. Feldschuh said that in 38 years, he had never seen his walk-in freezer fail.

“That’s always been my backup,” he lamented. “We had that heat wave a few days before the Fourth of July, and one of our two air-conditioning compressors failed. The other unit couldn’t keep up, and customers told me it was about 94 degrees inside the store. The heat put a tremendous strain on our equipment.”

Then came the storm.

After four days of extreme heat, Saturday night’s thunderstorms and winds gusting up to 84 mph knocked out power at the shop, forcing Mr. Feldschuh and his staff to start over just as they were trying to reopen.

“It was like a perfect storm, one thing after another,” Mr. Feldschuh said. “We had worked all night to get enough product made so we could reopen. At first, we were soft-serve only because almost all of our hard ice cream had melted. Then the storm rolled through, and we lost power for about eight hours. Normally, I could handle an outage like that, but that walk-in freezer had already failed. We lost much of the ice cream we’d just made all over again.”

Photos courtesy of Snowflake Ice Cream Shoppe

Riverhead officials are collecting damage reports from residents and businesses affected by the July 4 storm as part of a damage assessment with the Suffolk County Office of Emergency Management, police announced Thursday. The information could help support potential requests for federal assistance, though officials said completing the form does not guarantee the relief funding.

All of Snowflake’s ice cream is made in-house and needs to sit in a shock freezer for 24 hours before it is ready to be sold. Mr. Feldschuh said losing so much product twice made this unlike anything he had dealt with before.

Still, customers were grateful for a bit of sweet relief when they walked through the doors.

“A lot of our customers were dealing with storm damage at home themselves, so they understood what we were going through,” Mr. Feldschuh said. “I kept asking my staff how customers were treating them and they said people were incredibly supportive and just happy we were open.”

Mr. Feldschuh credited Richard Warno of Richard Warno Refrigeration with helping get the shop’s freezers running again, saying he worked for three days to make the repairs.

He also thanked his staff and customers for helping the shop get through the outage and equipment failures.

“I really appreciated everyone’s support,” Mr. Feldschuh said. “My staff worked incredibly hard to get us back up and running, and our customers were patient and understanding throughout the whole thing. That meant a lot.”