From Kitchen Project to $300,000 Opening Year: How Clementine’s Scooped Up Growth

Clementine’s Ice Cream parlayed a one-woman side project into an expanding food company — posting roughly $300,000 in revenue in its first eight months, growing to 11 parlors and a 25,000-square-foot production plant, and closing a $6 million investor round this year.

Founder Tamara Keefe walked away from a demanding corporate marketing career in 2014 and turned a home experiment into a business almost immediately. She began selling to wholesale customers before opening the first scoop shop in 2015, which helped produce steady income from day one. Keefe says those early sales, from May through December of that initial year, added up to about $300,000 and gave the venture momentum to expand into retail, e-commerce and national shipping.

Running an ice cream brand, she adds, is tougher than it looks. The work is physically demanding — staff routinely handle 50-pound buckets — and the product requires precise recipes and constant menu refreshes to keep customers interested year-round. Keefe also learned the hard way that leadership needs come sooner than founders expect; she wishes she’d brought experienced managers on board earlier and invested in leadership training instead of trying to manage every detail herself. Bringing in a director of retail helped stabilize store culture and customer service, she says.

A supply-chain crisis reinforced another lesson. Two days before a peak-season delivery, a co-op warned that the cargo ship carrying coconut and non-dairy cream had been seized in the South China Sea, and there was no backup supplier. Keefe reached into industry networks and sourced alternative coconut products from Indonesia and Mexico within days. Rather than forcing a substitute into existing recipes, her team developed new flavors around the ingredients — and since then the company avoids single-source suppliers for any key item.

Clementine’s growth has followed a deliberate path. The company opened a 25,000-square-foot production facility in North City, St. Louis, in 2022 to increase capacity while keeping quality control. Today the business operates parlors in Missouri, Kansas, Illinois and northern Arkansas, employs about 260 people and is branching into grocery, co-packing and franchising. Keefe, who had funded the company herself until now, recently closed a $6 million fundraising round; women founders receive fewer than three out of every 100 venture dollars, she notes, and this raise is a milestone for the brand.

Keefe’s practical advice to other small-business owners is straightforward: keep business and personal finances separate so you can gauge performance, attract capital and make sound decisions. Beyond that, she emphasizes the rewards of the work — seeing employees and customers connect over a product that builds memories — and the importance of planning for seasonality and operations early. A small-business adviser says her story underscores two common themes: diversify suppliers to reduce risk, and hire experienced operators before growth outpaces management capacity.