The Turkey Hill Experience

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Turkey Hill Dairy.  All opinions are honestly my own!

Those of you who know me well know that there are two things I can’t resist.  Coffee and ice cream.  If you’re a fellow ice cream aficionado, you’re going to love today’s post.  One of my favorite kinds of ice cream to eat is Turkey Hill {I eat their Light Skinny Minty on a very regular basis}!  Not only do they make awesome ice cream…and yummy teas and lemonades too…they also have a really cool place you can visit called the Turkey Hill Experience where you can learn all about how they make their products in a fun, hands-on way!

Recently, Little Crafter, my mom, and I visited the exhibit to see what it was all about!  Each of us received this ticket, which had a unique CYO {short for “Create Your Own”} code on it.  You see, it’s not like some other factory experiences where you just walk around and learn about the process, you actually get to participate in it!  At different places throughout the experience, you use touch screen prompts to create your very own flavor of ice cream, and entering the CYO code pulls up all the previous things you’ve done.

After smelling some of the different flavor options, you are given all kinds of choices in designing your own ice cream…you choose a vanilla or chocolate base, a flavoring, a sauce like fudge or peanut butter, and add-ins like fruit, nuts, and candy.  Then, you get to name it.

When you’re done, you get something that looks like this.  This one is Little Crafter’s custom creation.

After traveling through more of the exhibit and learning about the process from mixing to packaging, you get to design your own carton for the custom flavor you created earlier.  Entering your code onto the screen pulls up your flavor creation and you have different options for the font, the background, and the images you’d like to use.  Here’s how mine turned out!

Another fun stop along the way allows you to create your very own commercial about your custom ice cream flavor.  There’s a prompt you can read from, or you can just wing it and say whatever you like.  The final part of the “CYO” process is the Taste Lab!  This was by far everyone’s favorite part of the tour!

After washing your hands, you get to sit at a table with a huge variety of flavors and sauce add-ins.

Each person receives a cup with a spatula for mixing, a wooden spoon for tasting, and a pint of vanilla base ice cream.  The first step is to choose and add a flavor.  They suggested 4-6 drops of everything except for cotton candy and chocolate.  My mom and I chose mint, while Little Crafter picked strawberry.

Once our flavor was stirred in, we got to add up to three inclusions {candy and nuts} from the side wall.  LC went with lots and lots of rainbow sprinkles.  I added mini chocolate chips and some chopped up chocolate mint candies.  Then, we folded in a sauce {mine was fudge} and put our creations into the hardener.  While the ice cream hardened, our guide Kyle told us all about the manufacturing process and showed us pictures from the actual factory.  Finally, our creations were ready to be eaten!  Honestly?  I ate the whole thing.  It was my lunch.

Besides the “Create Your Own” aspect, there were tons of other fun things to do and see throughout the experience…including a slide, a milk truck, games and interactive exhibits.

In the tea room, you could sample the flavors of tea and lemonade…or in my case, “Ooh-la-Latte”, Vanilla flavor, and yes, there was a place to sample ice cream flavors too.  Here’s LC with a totally different cup of ice cream, which he also ate.  Can you tell he thought it was the best day ever?

Before we left, LC insisted on doing a few of the parts of the experience one more time, including the movie which we watched three times.  And, of course, we browsed the gift shop.  Mooooooooo….

All of us had an awesome time, and we also loved spending the day with my blogger buddies Courtney and Tanner from A Little Craft in Your Day!  Little Crafter especially loves them because they gave him the little stuffed cow that came in their gift bag…now we have two stuffed cows, Mr. and Miss Moo.

I know many of you aren’t local to the MD/DC/PA area, but if you are, the Turkey Hill Experience is definitely worth a visit!  In fact, so much so that I’m giving away four tickets to a lucky reader {including the Taste Lab part of the experience}!  If you’re within traveling distance of Lancaster/Columbia, Pennsylvania, you’re definitely going to want to enter this one!!  Rafflecopter will walk you through the entry process; good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

PS: You can follow along with Turkey Hill on Facebook and Twitter!