Sibby's Homestead Ice Cream

SIbby's Home

A Scoopful of Goodness

This ice-cream maker found a recipe for success by doing things the old-fashioned way.
By Marija Potkonjak, Associate Editor

Sue “Sibby” Sebion loves rooting for the underdog. Maybe that’s because she’s a bit of an underdog herself.
Sue is an ice-cream maker. Her creation, Sibby’s Homestead Organic Ice Cream, competes with mega brands for the hearts and taste buds of ice-cream lovers all over the world. She’s slowly gaining on them one wholesome scoop at a time.
She makes her ice cream in a red barn on her family’s 150-year-old homestead near Westby, Wisconsin. It’s the kind of rich, creamy stuff that takes you back to a simpler time when using the best ingredients from farmers nearby was just the way things were done.
“Everything we do is local and organic,” notes Sue. “Except for the vanilla. I have to go halfway around the world for it. I’d get it locally if I could.”
Localism is at the heart of her business plan and it’s the philosophy she lives by. “The entrepreneur farmer is the most powerful person on Earth,” says Sue. “Nobody has empowered the farmer.”
Land of Milk and Honey
Vernon County is blessed with rich, fertile soil, deep river valleys and an established organic movement. The headquarters for Organic Valley, a national organic cooperative, is just 15 miles away in LaFarge.
“When the early Native American settlers came, they must have thought they’d found the land of milk and honey,” says Sue, whose own ancestors came from Norway over a century ago hoping to find the same thing.
Sue grew up on a farm near Chaseburg, Wisconsin in the 1960s. Her parents owned a dairy farm. In fact, just about everyone in her family farmed or raised dairy cows. Her connection to the land practically wrote the story of her life.
“Growing up on a farm had everything to do with it,” says Sue. “I went to a one-room schoolhouse that my dad and his siblings went to. I thought everyone was having the same childhood as me.”
When she was 17, Sue left home to try her luck in La Crosse, where she worked for UPS. La Crosse was about as big-city as Sue ever got. For almost 20 years, she drove the back roads of southwest Wisconsin, delivering packages and watching the region’s organic movement come to life.

The Root of Grassroots
Sue didn’t plan on becoming an ice-cream maker. Her life’s dream was born out of necessity and a mother’s love for her sons.
“I didn’t find ice cream,” Sue says with a smile. “ice cream found me.”
Sue’s boys, Ross and Joe, were 5 and 3 at the time. She was still driving for UPS while her husband worked for FedEx.
“We were working all the time,” says Sue. “Growing up on the farm with Mom and Dad working at home was all I knew. I wanted to give my boys the childhood that I had.”
So, Sue searched for something she could do at home. At one point, she considered mint and hemp farming.
Then one day Sue and a girlfriend stopped at the local pizzeria after work. They ran into a guy who worked at the Viroqua Dairy and started talking about the old days of ice-cream making.
“I told him they should start making organic ice cream,” recalls Sue.
And that’s how she found her calling. Making ice cream was that elusive something she could do at home. Sue began her business at what she likes to call “the root of grassroots.”
She worked with Dr. Bob Bradley at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create her ice-cream recipe, which is a simple one—cream, non-fat dried milk, naturally milled sugar, egg yolks and pure vanilla extract. The ice cream is available in two flavors—vanilla and chocolate.
Sue made batches at home and sold the ice cream at public markets. She made deliveries in her own truck.
In the beginning, Sue used cream from the Viroqua Dairy. When the dairy closed and the bank turned it into a parking lot, Sue had no other choice but to take out a loan and turn her barn into an ice-cream factory.
“I wasn’t planning on building a factory on the farm,” says Sue, who makes 4,000 pints a month. “I just didn’t see any other option. Now everything is totally under my control.”
Her entire business model is about buying the best ingredients from local producers. Sue believes that localism will one day be the saving grace of America’s family farms, small businesses and tradition of competition.
“The American dream is to be an entrepreneur,” says Sue. “When there are only a few banks and a few companies making cars, for example, then we’re in trouble.”
To make her case, she points out that last summer when the average price of a gallon of gas topped $4, people in Viroqua weren’t willing to dig into their wallets to go shopping in La Crosse.
“It just makes sense,” says Sue. “People have tough choices to make. Why not support your local farmer, save money and have better food—all at the same time?”
Peace Food
Eight years after making her first batch, you’ll find Sue’s ice cream in the freezer aisle at Whole Foods and co-op grocery stores around the country. There on the package is a photo of Sue with a Holstein cow and a label branding the ice cream as “the official planet peace food.”
“Eat in peace,” says Sue. “I mean it with all my heart.”
In 2007, Sue and her business partner, Tony Macasaet, opened an ice-cream parlor in Viroqua’s Public Market. Sibby’s Organic Zone is one of a few organic ice-cream parlors in the country. ForbesTraveler.com recently named her ice cream as one of the top 10 in the United States.
The parlor is a place to relax and dig into ice cream sundaes topped with chocolate, caramel, butterscotch, seasonal fruit, chocolate chips or espresso. Each scoop is served in a handmade waffle cone or in a compostable cup made from corn.
The lunch menu promises “locally raised pizzas,” and you can bet the strawberries on your sundae came from a farmer you might have passed on the road into town.
“It’s just so good,” says a DHL deliveryman who stopped in for a bite between deliveries. “It reminds me of the stuff I ate when I was a kid.”
To learn more about Sue Sebion, log on to www.farmandranchliving.com and click on “Links.”
Photos by: Marija Potkonjak

For Immediate Release:

Imagine Festivals, Inc. is proud to announce the winners of The flavor contest for the 1st Annual Chicago Luxury Ice Cream Festival, which took place Friday-night September 4th at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park.

1st Place Trader’s Point Creamery Sweet Cream

2nd Place Sibby’s Organic Organic Chocolate

3rd Place Chef Efrain Cuevas of Clandestino Supper Clubs Chocolate Chili Cream

For purity, nobody does it better than organic ice cream entrepreneur Sue Sebion, who runs Sibby’s Organic Zone Ice Cream Parlor in Viroqua, Wis। Made on her family’s homestead farm with organic milk from local sources, it’s not hard to see why Sibby’s has become synonymous with good, old-fashioned wholesomeness। This is ice cream at its best: pure, simple and made with love.