For the Snow family of Pumpkin Hollow, a village in Conway, making ice cream at home created a byproduct for excess milk from their Jersey herd. Founder Frank Snow later moved the business into this building on School Street, sharing it with Greenfield Dairy. The dairy eventually closed, but Snow’s continued production. Snow sold the business in the 1930s.
Current owners Barbara Fingold and her husband, Gary Schaefer, say there were about half a dozen Snow’s Sweet Shoppes in its heyday. Ralph Gordon, a former Greenfield reporter for the Springfield Union-News, remembers the dairy bar in the factory building from his high school years. “We used to drop down after dancing school,’’ he says.
The rise of Friendly’s restaurants, cheaper ingredients, and consolidation in the industry all conspired against Snow’s. The Friendly’s on King Street in Northampton was once a Snow’s shop.
But the company missed an opportunity to turn its product into something more homemade. After a postwar emphasis on mass production of cheap foods, says Fingold, there was “this whole resurgence of quality’’ in the 1970s. Boutique food businesses sprang up in Greenfield. Fingold remembers a tofu maker who she says was ahead of his time. There was Lightlife, producer of vegetarian fare (now owned by ConAgra and based in Turners Falls). New England Natural Bakers began making granola and other products and still does.
At the time, Snow’s was being made with artificial stabilizers and emulsifiers. When Fingold and Schaefer bought the brand and the factory in 1983, Snow’s was in trouble. “They were just barely surviving,’’ says Schaefer. Many loyal grocers who once stocked Snow’s had gone out of business. Supermarkets purchased ice cream from big distributors. Schaefer and Fingold closed the Greenfield Sweet Shoppe, the last one, a few years later.
