Page 37 - 01-Jan-Feb-2024

Trailblazer
connIe
sTAcey
They initially had to close the shop for three days a week, just to make enough ice cream to keep up with the demand of the other four. It took almost two months to follow the original business plan of being open seven days a week.
That was all in 2019. By spring 2021 they opened another adorable shop in yet another bustling area, Highlands, followed by another in the community formerly known as Oliver in April of 2023.
Clearly, Edmontonians wanted an old-fashioned ice cream shoppe (or three), and these women knew it. But they wanted to share more than their sweet treats. “We really wanted to create a community hub, and ice cream is the medium,” Bhar says, which is why they eschewed pop-up farmers’ markets
for brick-and-mortar stores in dense, walkable neighbourhoods full of families, and why they’re explicit in their inclusive philosophy.
“As a queer couple, we had the dis-
cussion of how vocal do we want to be
about it?” Bhar says. “And we decided n pretty early on that, yeah, we’re going to
make it known that we’re a queer-owned
ice cream shop.”
ecessity is the mother of invention — a proverb that dates back
to Plato. For Connie Stacey, that necessity came in the form of keeping two fussy babies sound asleep one night in Grande Prairie
There’s been pushback to their outspokenness. Some customers won’t say the name of their favourite flavour — the Froot Loops-infused Gay Okay — but will still order it by pointing and saying, “that one.” And an Instragram user posted that Kind “lost a customer” because of it. But they’ve mostly been just annoying, like an ice cream head- ache, and “all our other followers rallied behind us, writing, ‘Kind is very gay — how have you not noticed yet?’”
Overwhelmingly, the trio have noticed how much of a hub their old-school ice cream shops have become, like a real-life Archie Comics. “We had a customer here a couple of weeks ago saying that one of her favourite places to hang out is in a Kind lineup, because her neighbours are there, just chatting,” Morris says. “Any- time I hear anything like that, I’m just like, yeah, that’s why we do this.”
— CORY SCHACHTEL
back in 2013.
“When [my children] were about three months old, I was taking them
for a walk in the stroller to put them to sleep and I passed by a house. They were running a generator and I thought, ‘If you wake these babies, I swear I’m going postal,’” Stacey says through a laugh.
It was an “a-ha” moment for Stacey.
“It just got me thinking, ‘Why do we use diesel generators?’” Stacey says. “They’re expensive, loud and everyone hates them.”
Three years later, in the spring of 2016, Stacey and her company — then called Growing Greener Innovations and now called Grengine — released their first product. The result was a small, solar generator.
Today, Grengine has grown to 20 people and a 27,000-square-foot battery manufacturing facility in Edmonton that produces lithium-ion battery packs that Stacey says are completely scalable, meaning they can serve the needs of a diesel generator and much, much more.
“The whole system is modular. You can literally power one person camping or an entire city. It’s the same system, you can just stack more batteries and connect as many solar panels as you like.”
While there aren’t any cities running entirely on Grengine power, there are already sizeable applications in the works.
“We’re in final contracting with a client for installation at a uranium mine,” Stacey says. “They lose a lot of money from power outages. Putting in our system will save them money. It’s a $10 million system and it will pay for itself in 90 days.” — JESSE COLE
Shannon accent chair in white bouclé made by Universal Furniture
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