WednesdayFood
THE BOSTON GLOBE WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2019 | BOSTONGLOBE.COM/FOODG
Workers
produce ice
cream
sandwiches
and other
treats at
HP Hood.‘In my mind, all these things are here today,
gone tomorrow. One thing that’s always going
to be here is ice cream.’
PETER FABBRIPlant manager at HP Hood in Suffield, Conn.Birth of
the cool
A farm fresh idea
App gets veggies, eggs, meats to your door
By Alison Arnett
GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
If you’re like many consumers to-
day, shopping for clothes, electronics,
and toiletries is done with a click of
the mouse. You might even shop for
groceries that way. And everything ar-
rives at your door.
But what if you’re a fan of farm-to-
table vegetables, of choosing carefully
curated meats, specially sourced spic-
es, or eggs hours from the henhouse?
That takes more planning, and possi-
bly several trips to farm stands, farm-
ers’ markets, or specialty shops. In abusy world with lots of traffic, shop-
ping locally can be daunting and
time-consuming. Matthew Tortora,
with his WhatsGood app, has a solu-
tion for that. “We aim to flip the mod-
el in how food is distributed,” says
Tortora.
Using the WhatsGood mobile app,
I recently scrolled through the pro-
duce offerings of farms such as Ward’s
Berry Farm in Sharon, beef and pork
from Cascade Brook Farm in North
Sutton, N.H., fish from Tony’s Seafood
in Rhode Island, and oysters from Is-
WHATSGOOD,PageG5PHOTOS BY PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFFFrom left: The WhatsGood app; a container of nasturtium; WhatsGood operations specialist Kirby
Engelman (left) accepts a delivery from Ward’s Berry Farm field worker Devon Parsons.
S
UFFIELD, Conn. — I am standing in the middle of a room that looks
like a cross between a Rube Goldberg machine and Willy Wonka’s
chocolate factory. There are networks of silver pipes overhead, shiny
vats of citric acid and huge sacks of sweet whey, dials and switches
and hoppers where hot-pink peppermint candy is crushed into bits.
Conveyor belts ferry tubs and boxes and the containers called
scrounds. Or is it squrounds? There is some debate over the spell-
ing, but it’s pronounced the same either way. It describes the round-cornered square
cartons that are particular to the ice cream trade.
This is the whirring, clicking, clanking, buzzing heart of the HP Hood Ice Cream
Plant, a long, squat brick building with a flagpole out front and the words “Ice Cream
Division” spelled in white curlicue letters along one side. It’s one of the original Hood
plants, here since the early ’60s. “There aren’t too many of those left,” says plant
manager Peter Fabbri. “It’s one of the few.”
In this 10,000-square-foot space, about 85 employees produce all kinds of good-
ness: the 60 or so Hood ice cream and sherbet flavors, the premium brand Brigham’s,
Lactaid ice cream (Hood has an exclusive licensing arrangement), oat milk, and
ICECREAM,PageG6Story of the ice cream sandwich, an icon at 120
BY DEVRA FIRST | GLOBE STAFF
PHOTOS BY LANE TURNER/GLOBE STAFF