INSIDE SCOOP
BOOMBALATTI'S RAMPS UP ICE CREAM OFFERINGS by ELIZABETH WHITE photo by MEGAN DEITZ
10
WILMA
OCTOBER 2021
I
t was a good thing that two nine-to-fivers decided to trade in their laptops and conference calls and move to Wilmington. Why? The answer is simple – Boombalatti's. The local ice cream shop has become synonymous with the words Wilmington and dessert. KRISTEN and WES BECHTEL readily admit they had “absolutely no idea what the heck we were doing,” when they decided to open “Boom” as they now affectionately call their shop. The Pennsylvania natives decided to trade one climate for another. “We picked Wilmington off a map, moved here on a whim with little money and no jobs and have never
looked back,” Kristen Bechtel says. Wes Bechtel, who was a recent MBA graduate (and frequent consumer of ice cream since childhood) was looking to start his own business. In between conference calls and emails, he discovered one day that an ice cream shop was currently listed for sale online. And Boom! Boombalatti’s was born. The Bechtels’ world quickly went from being predictable to not. Kristen Bechtel easily remembers that first summer of business. “There were a lot of moments when employees came to us and said, ‘What do we do when …?’ You could easily insert everything that goes wrong owning your own business at the end of that question,” she recalls. But the couple persisted. Not only was starting a business for the first time daunting, but Kristen and Wes had to adjust their homemade ice cream-making skills for a much larger audience. “We had made ice cream at home, but in very small batches,” Kristen Bechtel says. “Figuring out how to scale those recipes and what worked and what didn’t work when it came to new flavors was a learning curve.” Speaking of flavors, Kristen Bechtel mentions their chocolate fudge brownie is probably their year-round bestseller, and peppermint stick is popular around the holidays. Personal favorites? For Kristen, it’s cannoli, and for Wes, it’s chocolate peanut butter fudge with a peanut butter shell. And, yes, they have had some not-so-favorites. “We did make a siracha peanut butter flavor once and thought it might sell. We didn’t sell a single scoop,” Kristen Bechtel says. With all their trials and errors now behind them, it is clear they are on the other side of things now. They have three locations, with about thirty-five employees for all three shops. Their Forum shop off Military Cutoff Road is the busiest of them all, so most employees work there. That 1,500-square-foot spot is expanding into neighboring space where Tama Tea used to be located, which will help Boombalatti’s
