Blue Bell Was Once A Butter Company Under A Different Name — Here's How It All Changed

Today, the name Blue Bell is synonymous with ice cream, particularly for native Texans. But the company didn't start out making the frozen dessert that eventually turned it nationally famous. The beloved Texas ice cream brand actually began as a small butter producer called the Brenham Creamery Company, which was established in 1907 by local businessmen and dairy farmers in the small town of Brenham, Texas. Its original purpose was both practical and democratic: making use of the extra cream produced by surrounding dairy farmers and churning it into butter for local customers. 

The creamery was housed in an abandoned cotton gin and organized as a dairy farmers' cooperative. Since local farmers had more milk and cream than they could use, this new joint effort provided a way to turn that surplus into gold — but butter wasn't going to remain its only product for long. In 1911, just four years after the creamery opened, it began experimenting with ice cream. Considering that butter is the secret to rich, homemade ice cream, this was a wise choice. 

Production was adorably tiny at first; the company made about two gallons a day, hand-cranking the mixture in wooden containers packed with ice and salt and delivering the finished ice cream around Brenham in horse-drawn wagons. Butter, however, remained the company's, well, bread and butter. According to a former executive, the creamery sold millions of pounds of butter to the Army during WWII.

In 1930, the company finally made the decision to rebrand as Blue Bell Creameries, taking its name from the Texas bluebell wildflowers that grew around the town. The name change reflected the company's shift to ice cream production, but the transformation wasn't instantaneous. Blue Bell continued making both butter and ice cream for decades, but ice cream gradually became the focus, especially as improvements in refrigeration and transportation made it possible to sell frozen desserts beyond Brenham.

It wasn't until 1958 that Blue Bell discontinued butter production and devoted itself entirely to ice cream. Still, the company preferred to grow at a slow and steady rate, rather than rush to be a national ice cream brand. You couldn't even buy the ice cream outside of Texas until the late 1980s, and even now, Blue Bell is only available in 24 states. That's because the company deliberately prioritizes a tightly controlled distribution system, where only employees handle the product until reaching retailers.

Still, it hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows for the Texas-based company. In 2015, Blue Bell was at the center of the deadliest ice cream recall in history. But the brand not only survived the disaster, it thrived. Today, its homemade vanilla remains the most iconic ice cream flavor in the Lone Star State. While the Brenham Creamery Company's original mission was simply community-supported agriculture, the shift to ice cream giant over the years has been both a small-town triumph and a total transformation.