How Mercurio's got started

A few turns of events changed the lives of Rick and Linda Mercurio and their family forever.

A trip to Italy...a visit to a popular custard stand...a riverfront park built in their hometown...all of these combined events brought about the conception of their gelateria, Mulberry Street Creamery in Kittanning, Pennsylvania.

A physician by trade, Rick needed a creative outlet as a release from the pressure of his medical practice.  While visiting a popular custard stand, he heard about owners who worked three months a year and vacationed in Florida the remaining nine.  That sounded great to him!  Linda dreamed of owning a tearoom, opened only during the hours their seven children were at school.  She remembered the screams of "FRAGOLA!" (Strawberry) every time her daughter passed a gelateria while visiting Italy.  They decided, "Forget the tearoom, let's make ice cream."

There was only one problem.  They didn't know anything about making custard and gelato.  After a lot of research, they realized that making custard was the easy part; buy a good custard mix from a dairy, flavor it with good ingredients, put it through the best custard machine they could find and voila, terrific custard.  Making gelato proved to be much more challenging.  You can't buy gelato mix from any dairy, and using a dairy mix and adding imported ingredients didn't produce authentic gelato.  So, they studied with the best at the University of Guelph, Penn State University and Malcolm Stogo's Ice Cream University and learned what it would take to produce a quality gelato product.

The commonwealth of Pennsylvania requires pasteurization of milk products when sugar is added to them, so a pasteurizer was purchased.  Rick, better known these days as "Dr. Gelato," measured grams, configured calculations and cooked his concoction.  In the meantime, Linda searched the globe for the best tasting ingredients and inclusions she could find.  After a year of hard work and a lot of trial and error, they felt that their gelato was a good as what they had tasted in Italy.  Little did they know that it would turn out to be award winning!  At the NICYRA convention in Las Vegas in October 2001, Mulberry Street Creamery was honored with 5 awards for their gelato and custard, including a blue ribbon for Root Beer Float, red ribbons for Key Lime Pie, Chocolate Gelato and Chocolate Custard and a white ribbon for Vanilla Gelato.  Rick and Linda thought their products were good, but were very honored to know that others thought so too.

Winning the NICYRA awards led to publicity from one of Pittsburgh's leading newspapers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a TV spot on a popular news segment and KDKA radio's "small business report" featuring Mulberry Street Creamery.  This publicity expanded the customer base to beyond a 60-mile radius of the store bringing in customers new to gelato and those that ate and loved it in Italy.


 

~ photo by doratagold via flickr under creative commons attribution share-alike.