Getting stamps on your passport can be an expensive endeavor. This summer, all it takes is the cost of a creemee.
The new VT Creemee Passport encourages Vermonters to head out and grab a cone or cup — both are allowed within the official terms of use — at 163 documented creemee stands around the state. Its rules are strict: at least one creemee per outing. Toppings are encouraged but not required. Passport may become sticky. But its goal is a sprinkle of summer fun while highlighting small businesses and raising money for good causes.
Adam Rice, the project’s founder and head of the not-a-real-government-agency VT Dept. of Creemee, has received orders for more than 1,500 creemee-adorned green passports since its mid-April launch. Each $10 passport has pages for 20 stamps, with room for tasting notes and a rating scale on each.
They can be customized with the holder’s name and photo, or you can order a blank one if you don’t want to wait two to three weeks for a personalized version to ship. Currently, 50 businesses are official locations with custom stamps.
Rice, 38, got the idea after making a custom passport featuring local creemee spots for his father-in-law’s birthday at the end of March. The present was a hit, and his mother-in-law’s joke about making it a business stuck with him.
Building the web platform behind the Dept. of Creemee — and designing the passport and stamps — was an appealing creative challenge for Rice, a Middlebury College alum who returned to Vermont in 2021. He’s worked in tech, mostly on the sales side, for 15 years and is currently consulting while he’s in the market for a new full-time job.
It’s also a way for him stay up-to-date with the tools quickly taking over the tech industry. Rice started playing with Replit, an AI software for building apps and websites, and had a prototype in just three days. The site was live by mid-April, and within 48 hours people started buying passports.
Creemee stands started reaching out, too, including Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks in East Montpelier, Silver Lake Syrups in Barnard and the Creemee Window in Richmond.
Using AI tools to manage the “minutiae on the back end,” including organizing orders and sending pdfs to 802 Print in Vergennes, where all the paper passports are printed, lets Rice “do what I wanted to do,” he said. “I’m shaking people’s hands, picking up the phone, pressing the flesh and getting out there.”
It’s part of our public obligation to eat as many creemees as possible.
Adam Rice
He and his wife, Darcy Cummings, 44, have eaten a lot of creemees in the past month and a half. Traveling from their New Haven home to ShireTown Marketplace in Middlebury, lu•lu in Vergennes and farther afield is “part of our public obligation to eat as many creemees as possible,” Rice said.
(Their dog, “official pup-cup inspector” Bernadette, is usually in tow and has a passport of her own. Others have ordered them for their pets and stuffed animals, too, Rice said.)
The passport has gotten early support from powerful fans of the cone, including creemee influencer Asa Waterworth (@creemeechronicles) and Vermont Secretary of Agriculture, Food and Markets Anson Tebbetts.
The passport celebrates “two iconic things we have in Vermont,” Tebbetts told Seven Days. “One is dairy, and one is maple. You combine those two with a maple creemee, that’s fabulous.”
The summer staple provides an important outlet for those agricultural industries. Maple producers have seen increased demand for late-season, very dark syrup as creemee stands look to amp up the maple flavor in their usually secret recipes, Tebbetts said. And creemees are “a sweet reminder” of the impact of Vermont’s $5.4 billion-a-year dairy biz.
The other thing Tebbetts loves about the passport, he said, is how “it’s encouraging people to visit another part of Vermont that they may not have visited in a long time, or never visited.” Besides the creemee, they might discover a new downtown, farmstand or shop, he added. There are stands in all 14 counties, and official locations span the state, from April’s Maple in Canaan to the Sugar Shack in Arlington.
The state tracks creemee stands based on their frozen dessert licenses, which are required for businesses that make or sell ice cream and other frosty treats. The government has used that information to create maps of the state’s creemee stands in the past, “but this is going to the next level,” Tebbetts said — one that’s more easily handled by a private enterprise.
Businesses pay VT Creemee Passport $75 to become an official stop, for which they get a custom stamp with their logo and premium promo on the website and social media. From all of his outreach, Rice said, he’s gotten just “one informed ‘no,’” from a newer spot that’s not looking for more traffic at the moment.
With each order, the passport website also offers a donation option. Rice will give all proceeds from the initial $10 beyond printing and shipping costs to HOPE (Helping Overcome Poverty’s Effects), Vermont Community Foundation and Voices for Vermont’s Children at the end of the year. But he’s seen an additional 20 to 30 percent donation rate so far, raising more than $2,000 on top of that for the Open Door Access Program at Burlington’s ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, which will make its programming — and creemees at Champ’s Legendary Creemees outside, of course — available to local kids.
There’s no prize for completing the passport’s 20 pages beyond bragging rights. But unofficial competitions are popping up. Tebbetts has encouraged his colleagues in Gov. Phil Scott’s cabinet to order passports of their own. Post-foliage, he’ll cook a pancake breakfast for the cabinet member who gets the most stamps.
“Our summers are very short in Vermont, so it’s a race to see how many creemee stands we can hit until the leaves come off,” said Tebbetts, who’s partial to a maple-black raspberry twist. Since cabinet members often find themselves traveling around the state, Tebbetts said, “why not sneak in and get a creemee along the way, get a stamp and support a local business?” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Stamp of Approval | VT Creemee Passport promotes travel by cone”
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