Community Spotlight: D'Served

Welcome to the Community Spotlight blog series! We have customers in over 400 communities, for which we are incredibly grateful, so we know how special your neighborhoods are. We thought it might be a good idea to introduce you to the place we call home; the historic community of Inglewood in Calgary, Alberta. With the recent hardships small businesses have had to face, our goal is to highlight some other local businesses in Inglewood with whom we are proud to share the community.

As summer winds down, the temperatures continue to stay high. It's been a scorcher this year, and one of the best ways to cool down on a hot day is to enjoy a delicious ice cream treat!

D'Served is an extremely popular food cart that can be found dishing up ice cream sandwiches in the Delta Garden by the Peace Bridge, but their home base operates out of Ninth & Brick here in Inglewood.

We chatted with Bronwyn Chhay, the founder/owner/operator of D'Served to get the scoop on the coolest new ice cream vendor in the city.

Spot Power: In your own words, tell us a little bit about D'Served, what do you do?

Bronwyn Chhay: D'Served is our way of bringing some local love to the community. The company focuses on community building and offering people local and more diverse options, creative business options and uses ice cream as a vehicle. We are both an ice cream sandwich manufacturer and a pop-up bicycle/solar-powered street food vendor on the Bow River pathway.

SP: How did D’served get its start?

BC: The Bow River pathway was a part of the company’s day-to-day before the business started so the company was created with the intention of becoming a part of the parks/pathway community. Being an ice cream lover already, it was easy to notice there were no local or diverse treat options for park and pathway go-ers. D'Served set out to bring those options to people spending time at the park and pathway. Upon searching for a good ice cream sandwich to stock, there were no options we wanted to support. So, being a food and ice cream lover, our craft-made ice cream sandwiches became a product and contributed to the goal of providing a local option and diverse treats there.

D'Served retained a permanent pop-up spot in the Delta Garden on the pathway near the Peace Bridge this year for our second summer, juxtaposing the roaming push-cart licensing we had during the summer of 2021. This gave us a chance to be a “permanent” part of the community as we come out every evening and on weekends. As much as we provide a local option for treats at the park, we now think of the business as a permanent part of the community and park vitality.

SP: What do you love about being located in Inglewood?

BC: Although we are street food vendors at the Bow River pathway in the Delta Garden, we wholesale and distribute our ice cream sandwiches within Calgary and through British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba too.

Inglewood has historically been a vital part of the movement of local makers, artisans and small businesses in the Calgary economy so we always wanted to be a part of that community. We sought out a local collective, Ninth & Brick and started to sell our ice cream sandwiches there so we could become a part of that strong movement. Partnering with Ninth & Brick gave us the ability to have more reach with our movement.

We love being in Inglewood because we can contribute to initiatives we are working on at the Bow River pathway, there as well – diverse community building, loving local businesses and supporting overall health through walkable and pedestrian-friendly areas.

SP: What impact did the pandemic have on your operations? How were you able to persevere?

BC: D'Served was actually started in the latter half of the pandemic, because of the impact of the pandemic! Being a part of the park community already, seeing the increase of people at the park and on the pathway during pandemic times encouraged the business to get out there as soon as possible. So, in short, choosing to start the business in the midst of a pandemic was really fundamental to the business model.

With the support of park regulars, tourists and other city folks who now make time to get out to the park, we were able to grow our community and persevere so we could make adjustments and work with the City to get out there in a permanent pop-up spot in 2022.

SP: You have solar panels on your truck, tell us what led you to opt for solar? What are your sustainability goals?

BC: Yes, we use solar panels to power our food cart as well as an electric bicycle to run our business!

Coming from a sustainability background, D'Served was designed to touch on a lot of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set out by the United Nations. SDG’s (sustainable development goals) we wanted to support with our business include: good health and well-being, affordable and clean energy, decent work and economic growth, industry innovation, sustainable cities and communities, and responsible consumption and production, and unbeknown to us until we started - reducing inequality.

Being located at a central park/ pathway, using what resources we had (the sun and our own kinetic energy), providing a creative business model for the business and compatible with our lifestyle (there are not a lot of food carts or street vendors in Calgary) allowed us to provide some innovation and run a sustainable business model both on the food cart and in our commercial kitchen production. Starting a business gives you more control of what SDG’s you can contribute to, so the intention was to hit a lot of them. As it grew, we realized that we were reducing the inequality between traditional brick-and-mortar storefronts and street vendors in Calgary, as our city really does not promote or have a ton of street vendors in the small business community.

SP: What are you looking forward to in 2022? Anything new and exciting you want your customers to know about?

BC: In 2022, we really wanted to be a more established part of the community and spread the complexity of our message to more people. Simply being on the pathway in a permanent spot was a goal we achieved as we got out in May. For the rest of the year and into 2023, we hope to build on the messages and SDG’s we support by showing others there are so many other options to run small businesses.

Unfortunately, the permitting we work under with the City and Parks is a pilot program, so we hope to prove to the city and bodies that be that our model and intention is really sustainable and supports community vitality. We really want to see more street vendors in the community and within the city, so we have been trying to promote our business model and inspire and educate others while we do what we love most – getting outside, connecting with people through food, and running a self-sustaining business that has the lowest possible impact on the environment and community around it.

We hope the City and Parks programs will welcome us back to the park in 2023.

To get your hands on some tasty D'Served treats, visit their cart in the Delta Garden by the Peace Bridge. Also, check out their retail partners who are proudly carrying D'Served products. Their website can be accessed here, and they can be found on Twitter and Instagram.

If you’re like D'Served and have taken the plunge into the world of solar, make sure you check out our Solar Club! The Solar Club is a special loyalty program designed specifically for microgenerators. You can earn a premium on your solar electricity and help green Alberta’s grid. In 2021, our members earned a total of $2.4 million in value! Sign up today!