Johnstown’s Summer’s Best Ice Cream has plans for new, out-of-state location

“It’s always bittersweet when we’re getting ready to close,” she said as she walked away from one of the humming Electro Freeze machines and handed the cup to customer waiting at one of the service windows.

It was the middle of the afternoon on Oct. 13, the last Sunday of the 2024 season at Summer’s Best Ice Cream. A glowing LED sign near the sidewalk next to 24 Briggs St. let passersby know that only three days remained for people to get their last licks of the year. Hayes and her husband Mark own the business.

“This is very sad for me,” said Thomas Romeyn, sitting behind the wheel of his burgundy Ford pickup and speaking at the drive-thru window. “We pretty much come here every day when they’re open.”

Romeyn, from Johnstown, had purchased two ice cream sandwiches and would bring them home to share with his wife.

Unless the lot is buried under feet of snow, the owners of Summer’s Best Ice Cream plan to open again for a few days in February as a special treat around Valentine’s Day. The store will then close again before reopening for the season in the spring.

Mark Hayes said another regular had visited earlier on this damp Sunday to complete a purchase of 150 pre-ordered ice cream sandwiches.

“He’ll store them away and put into his freezer to help get through the winter,” Mark Hayes explained. He said this season had been a good one but not as spectacular as 2023, when hot stretches of weather pushed more people to come out for ice cream. Still, they used nearly a ton of sprinkles in 2024 — opening box after 10-lb. box of the ice cream toppers.

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Victor Orsell was next at the drive-thru window. He purchased two eggnog-flavored ice cream sandwiches.

“We’re going to miss it because we come here all the time,” said Orsell, from Johnstown, sitting in his Honda SUV. “Yes, I do like coming here.”

Mark and Diana Hayes opened Summer’s Best — which is named for their beagle, and her love of ice cream — six years ago. When he was a teenager, Mark Hayes, 53, had worked for his older brother Barney Hayes, when he and his wife Charlotte opened the Udderly Delicious ice cream stand on N. Comrie Avenue.

“I knew the ins and outs of everything,” Mark Hayes said. He has had many jobs during his career, including stints working on the family’s dairy farm, at a farm store, an anodizing plant, and managing the parts room for a material handling company. In 2016, he and Diana put a bid on a half-acre vacant lot owned by the city and then became the new owners of 24 Briggs St.

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Most of the building constructed for Summer’s Best Ice Cream was handled by family members and friends, Mark Hayes said, and was ready in time for them to open in June 2018. Business during that half-season of operation was good and was better the following year, when ice cream was sold from May to October.

By 2021, Mark Hayes had resigned from the parts room job and since then he and his wife have made a living solely from the sales at Summer’s Best Ice Cream.

Ice cream is ubiquitous in grocery and convenience stores, and seasonal roadside stands are commonplace in the area. Mark Hayes said his experience at Udderly Delicious, his past work on a dairy farm and being mechanically inclined have helped him to perfect a product that tastes better than the soft ice creams offered by the competition.

“I’ve changed these machines,” he said while standing in front of the store’s nine Electro Freeze ice cream units. “I had a few ideas about changing speeds and pressure settings and stuff.”

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Diana Hayes said Summer’s Best Ice Cream had many regular customers and some of them set aside large blocks of time to visit 24 Briggs St.

“We get a lot of people that make a trip,” she said. “People from Saratoga Springs and Glens Falls and Albany.”

Not including the proprietors, 20 employees were on the store’s books during the 2024 season, Mark Hayes said, and the payroll was over $140,000.

The owners believe their brand and their menu — along with the special settings on the Electro Freeze machines — will be successful in other places. They have considered opening a store in Saratoga County but expect their next location will be a food truck parked on some property they own in Johnson City, Tenn., an 11.5-hour drive from Johnstown. Both have family in Texas and said the location was selected because it’s nearly equidistant to Fulton County and to the Texas state line with Arkansas.

“We plan to run both of them,” Mark Hayes said. “The one down there and the one up here. It should be interesting.”