New Flapdoodles ice cream flavor gives back to the community

Mar. 7—ROCHESTER — Flapdoodles Ice Cream and The Landing MN have partnered up to sell a new ice cream flavor and donate some of the proceeds to the nonprofit organization.

The newest Flapdoodles Ice Cream flavor, Oscar's Snack-a-Palooza, has been in the works for some time now. It's a simple vanilla ice cream with oreo, chocolate chips and Heath bar pieces mixed into it, but the story behind it is so much more than simple.

"Our very, very first donor when we started the landing five and a half years ago came up with the idea," said Dan Fifield, co-founder of The Landing MN. "He talked with the owners of Flapdoodles about coming up with an ice cream flavor and donating part of the proceeds to The Landing to help us continue doing what we're doing."

The Landing MN was founded in 2017

to help the community by providing hope and support steps toward stability for those experiencing homelessness.

"We're a grassroots homegrown Rochester born nonprofit," said Fifield. "I was an ER nurse and I started this after taking care of a family of five that were living in their car. My wife, Holly, and I founded it. I left my position at the hospital after being suspended for trying to find shelter for this family for making a couple of phone calls and started it. It's a blessing to us to be able to do this and serve this community and I hope it blesses the community that we're serving as well."

That first donor was Oscar Delgado. Fifield had just met him at a FedEx Office when he was ordering business cards. Fifield told Delgado about how they first got started and he paid for a large portion of their first printing orders.

Since then, Delgado has made an effort to follow The Landing MN's progress and has been impressed by their efforts in the community.

Delgado is a huge foodie and loves Flapdoodles. He had thought about using his creativity to craft a flavor, but he wanted there to be a purpose behind it. After thinking about it for a while, Delgado came up with an idea.

"I'm not going to create a flavor just for me," said Delgado. "That's just not the way I'm built. If I'm going to use my creativity, I'm going to use it for something good, so I started emailing Matt, the owner, and was like,'I got this flavor. I think it'd be phenomenal. But can we put portions of proceeds back to the Landing?'"

That was how it all began. Delgado worked directly with Matt Tierney, owner of Flapdoodles Ice Cream, to solidify a plan and create the flavor. Tierney reached out to The Landing MN and everything fell into place.

"Out of the blue I got an email and had never thought about doing anything like this before but thought about it and it sounds like a solid, good idea," said Tierney. "So, we've kind of tweaked the name a little bit. Oscars is still on and the name is Oscar's Snack-a-Palooza and a portion of what we sell goes right back to The Landing."

The ice cream flavor was at both store locations for the first weekend after its debut, but now has become an indefinite flavor at the south store location, 1710 S. Broadway Ave.

"We're honored that Oscar would do that and that Flapdoodles would do it as well," said Fifield. "It speaks to the quality of our community and their willingness to partner and help us help support us."

It's unclear how long the flavor will be available at Flapdoodles, but it will stay through the rest of March. It will be available at the south store location at all times but might periodically find its way into the north store as well. After March, Tierney will reassess as he views this partnership as potentially a longterm collaboration with the possibilities of working with other organizations as well.

"This could be something we could do with other organizations too," said Tierney. "It could be something that we rotate on a monthly, month by month basis. So it could be kind of the beginning of a fun and rewarding project."