Ben & Jerry’s has resurrected an ice cream from its “Flavor Graveyard,” raising the profile of an Oregon startup in the process.
Portland-based Wheyward Spirit is the boozy touch in Dublin Mudslide, replacing the mid-aughts original’s Irish cream liqueur and joining chocolate chip cookies and coffee fudge swirls in the ice cream.
The revival was released on St. Patrick’s Day.
“It’s very true to mudslide,” Emily Darchuk, Wheyward’s founder and CEO, said, “and there’s definitely that Wheyward element noticeable, with the slight vanilla, oaky, creamy notes.”
Those subtleties come naturally to Wheyward Spirit, which uses whey, a liquid byproduct of cheesemaking, as its base. Whey disposal is a challenge for the industry and putting more of it to use — upcycling it — to reduce food-system waste is a founding rationale for Wheyward Spirit.
That, on top of its flavor profile, made the clear, 80-proof Wheyward Spirit a fit for Ben & Jerry’s, a B Corp subsidiary of Unilever.
“We really have a lot of values alignment,” Darchuk said of the connection, first made about 18 months ago. “It’s been exciting to help catalyze them bringing back Dublin Mudslide.”
Darchuk already had a master’s degree in food science and technology when she came up with the whey spirit idea in 2017 while an MBA student at the University of Oregon. In 2018, her budding company was in the Cascadia Cleantech Accelerator, where it won a standout company award and prototyping grants. It also won a Small Business Innovation Research program grant, with assistance from Portland-based VertueLab, along the way.
The spirit officially launched in September 2020, not the best time to be knocking on distributor, bar and retailer doors. But it’s available through the Wheyward website and many Oregon retailers, and has gained placements in Northern California, Darchuk said. That’s where the spirit is made, in Sonoma County, what Darchuk called “the crossroads of dairy and alcohol.”
The spirit has received some prominent recommendations, including in the New York Times, and the marketing reach of Ben & Jerry’s is no doubt significant. Darchuk is hopeful that Wheyward Spirit is making strides in a long journey.
“We’re first movers,” she said. “We’re disruptive in the dairy industry and disruptive in the alcohol industry, and even (in) being a female founder in alcohol. So we’re leaning into being wayward, that mentality of doing things differently for the right reasons.”
