About

Our Ice Cream

Parfait's organic ice cream is skillfully handcrafted in small batches. We proudly make all of our products, including our beautiful hand-rolled cones, completely from scratch. Our delicious ice cream is a true labor of love, prepared with painstaking care and artisan methods. Our flavors come from real foods, usually have fewer than five ingredients, and contain absolutely no corn syrup, no added stabilizers, and no preservatives. Parfait supports local farms and sources all of our ingredients from certified organic growers and producers who share in our commitment to agricultural and environmental sustainability.

In French, the word parfait means perfect.

Our Venue

Parfait uses a beautifully styled custom ice cream truck as an upscale mobile parlor for selling our tasty ice cream confections. Our design was created by the very talented team at Graphiti Associates.

Our Sources

We purchase our milk and cream directly from the Fresh Breeze Organic Dairy farm. The Langley's are a fifth-generation Lynden dairy family. Their cows graze on fresh grass, their products are batch pasteurized, and their outstanding local milk and cream is the best we've tasted. We get our eggs from a special flock of organically raised hens at the family-run Stiebrs Farms in Yelm. The Stiebrs mill their own organic feed, and allow their chickens to enjoy a cage-free lifestyle with access to the outdoors. Our produce is sourced directly from a variety of local organic farms. Our cane sugar is both fair trade and organic. We use locally roasted organic coffee beans from Seattle's beloved coffee house, Caffè Fiorè. For other items that don't grow at the 47th latitude, we purchase only organic ingredients from sources that use socially and environmentally responsible practices. All of our disposable packaging is made from biodegradable and compostable materials.

Our Chef

Like a good odyssey, Adria Shimada's culinary journey is a winding adventure that began in Ithaca. She started off studying literature at Cornell University, which led to a year in France immersed at the University of Paris. During that formative time, she was inspired by the high cultural value placed on fresh food, the prevalence of artisan producers, and the overall French aesthetic with its acute attention to beauty and detail. (She also contends that she single-handedly helped keep the Berthillon creamery in business through her personal consumption of ice cream!) That summer she had the opportunity to assist in the kitchen of an authentic farmstead inn near Toulouse, and the culinary bug took hold.

With European sensibilities and farm-to-table ethics, Adria returned to the States committed to building a career around quality living and eating. Her passion led to an internship at Amy's bread in New York, a stint at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, work at the nationally renowned Greens restaurant, and a job as a pastry chef in the Bay Area's celebrated La Farine bakery. For years, Adria dreamed of opening her own business. Ice cream being the best food in the world (tied only perhaps with french fries, chocolate, or a really good Salade Niçoise), she wanted to create a parlor that embraced the same made-from-scratch integrity as that of a fine French bakery. This is no easy task in the US, where ice cream is predominantly an industrialized food, and most shops, even some that claim to be homemade, use commercially processed mixes, which are basically pre-made bags of dairy goop with added corn syrup and stabilizers. Unfortunately, because it's cheaper and easier to use a mix, the frozen dessert industry supports this kind of production and perpetuates a tolerance for junk-food ice cream.

In 2006, Adria moved to Seattle, committed to bringing true artisan ice cream to the Northwest, where an appreciation for real, organic, farm-fresh food, and a dedication to protecting the environment, prevails. By choosing a mobile parlor as her venue, Adria was able to keep her overhead costs low, the quality of her ingredients high, and her carbon footprint small. Parfait is the result of nearly three years of planning and hard work, a steadfast investment in the organic and local food movements, and a lot of creativity and love. Adria invites you to visit her mobile parlor at one or all of its locations. She's confident it will be the best ice cream you've ever bought from a truck...if not anywhere!