It doesn't look like much from the outside, that industrial building that takes up all of that odd-shaped block just north of where 23rd Avenue angles into Rainier. Except for the faded sign on the Rainier Avenue side, there's not much to indicate just what goes on there.
What goes on there, and has gone on there pretty much nonstop since the late 1940s, is the manufacture of ice cream and other frozen treats. Through ownership changes and changes in the food business, Arctic Ice Cream Novelties has managed to make a go of it in a space that is now fairly bursting at the seams.
"This is an old house," said Paddy Narayan from his office. Narayan, the general manager, and the other office personnel work out of a structure that melds into the rest of the facility in such a way that a person might have to be told where one building stops and the other one begins.
"If you look at it from the outside, you could never tell what we do in here," Narayan said as he led a tour of the plant. "We are well represented here in the soft-serve business," he added, explaining that much of the plant's output goes to chain fast-food restaurants-Dairy Queen, Burger King and Burgermaster.
"The state of California is our largest customer base," he said. "Half gallons, three gallons, five-quart pails, most of it goes out of state."
But Arctic also produces a dozen ice cream and frozen novelties marketed under its own label, the one with the mommy and daddy and baby polar bears and the valentines. There's your fudge bars and your orange cream bars and your old reliable chocolate-covered ice cream bars and ice cream sandwiches. The Dixie Doodle carries the Arctic label, as does the Kernel Crunch. But Arctic's products may well be better known in other countries than they are in the company's hometown.
Much of the Arctic brand product goes to places as far away as Japan, Narayan said. The treats are sold in Guam and Taiwan and lots and lots of it finds its way to Mexico. On this day, a run of ice cream bars was getting wrapped in Spanish-language packaging.
Gerald Marsland, the chief engineer, works in a space full of stainless steel, from which he fabricates new and replacement parts.
"Some of our ice cream freezers date back to 1965," Marsland said. "We rebuilt those in-house. Our newest ones just went in, in 2004."
Bill Stanford, the plant manager, has been with the company since 1979, when his uncle owned the place. He has stayed with Arctic through three ownership changes, and while he acknowledges that from the outside the place doesn't appear to have changed much, that's not the case inside. Production processes have become increasingly automated. "You have to do that to survive," he said.
Stanford started out as summer help, all those years ago. Now he's in charge of production and is looking forward to retirement. ("Five years and three months," he said, "but who's counting?")
Those machines, as up-to-date as they may be, still aren't perfect. In the space of maybe 20 running feet, vanilla-flavored ice cream is injected into molds, has wooden sticks inserted, gets dipped in chocolate, wrapped in paper and boxed. But some of it finds its way to the floor, and from there to the garbage can.
"If we have a bad day, then you see the losses," Zarayan said.
Ice cream is a seasonal business, Narayan said. In the winter, about 20 people work there. That number bumps up to 50 or more in the summer months.
Narayan, a Fijian immigrant of East Indian descent, started out as a part-time janitor. "They gave me a bucket and a mop," he said. "I worked my way up through the ranks. There's not a place here I don't know. I know every rack."
The relatively small crew requires the workers to be generalists, he said.
"We are not martini and golf kind of guys," he said. "We all work here. If you can't pick up garbage, then you don't work here."
Narayan figures at least 13 different ethnicities are represented in Arctic's workforce. And it's a good union job. (The workers are represented by Teamsters Local 66, the union local currently embroiled in a dispute with Darigold.)
"I know each and every one by name," he said. "Some of them, I know their history."
It is a matter of some pride to Narayan that in his years at Arctic, the company has never had a product recall, and, to his knowledge, there has never been one. There's a lab on premises, run by Kelly Hill.
"We test for microbial analysis, component analysis, so that it's consistent for our customers," Hill said. "We test incoming raw products. If you put out a consistent product, you have customers coming back."
Hill also tests to be certain that contents of some Arctic products, contents some people have allergies to (peanuts, for instance) don't find their way into other products.
Cleanliness counts for a lot.
"Everything gets cleaned every day," Narayan said. "The sanitation is done every night. This is not something to play around with. I want my son to know he can eat Arctic ice cream and be safe ... Everything we do is pasteurized. Even the water [used in frozen non-dairy products] is pasteurized."
Part of Hill's job requires no laboratory equipment at all. She takes a taste every now and then, just to make sure the component proportions are in order.
But wouldn't a person get awfully tired of ice cream?
"You'll notice that I take very small bites," she said.
"The operators randomly test the product," Narayan said, "just to make sure everything is OK."
What you won't find at Arctic Ice Cream Novelties is a lot of unused space. A new cream silo went in outside not long ago, another silo is going in soon, and inside people and machinery work in tight quarters.
"You see how compact everything is," Narayan said. "We have outgrown our space. We're opening a vendor location a couple of blocks from here, and we rent storage space. There's continuous improvement. We're operating right in the heart of the city, and we like to be good neighbors.
"We love being in Rainier Valley."
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