Nightingale Ice Cream Sandwiches is introducing a S’mores flavor in collaboration with the National Park Service. (Photo courtesy Nightingale Ice Cream Sandwiches)
On the wall of Hannah Pollack’s office at Nightingale Ice Cream Sandwiches is a tile map of pictures from the national parks she’s visited over the years. She’s at 11 and counting. She says her favorite trip was to Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, where she saw grizzly bears. Last year, she visited the glowing red rocks of Arches and Canyonlands parks in Utah and skydived into the depths of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. This year, she is plotting an adventure to the alpine lakes and dramatic peaks of Glacier National Park in Montana.
“It’s on my bucket list to visit every national park,” the Marine Corps veteran says. “I just love being outside and hiking, kayaking, anything, skydiving, anything outdoors. To go experience that and see different landscapes, it’s so beautiful, and connecting with nature is important and healing. It brings such a different aspect to your life when you go outside and experience being in nature.”
Nightingale Ice Cream Sandwiches CEO and co-founder Hannah Pollack at Utah’s Arches National Park (Photo courtesy Hannah Pollack)
When Pollack and Belgian-born husband Xavier Meers devised their upcoming S’mores flavor for Nightingale, they knew exactly who to call: the National Park Service. The collaboration was designed to highlight the gooey-sweet treat synonymous with camping and being outside.
“We approached them and were just super super excited when they said they wanted to work together,” Pollack says. “It kind of fits Nightingale, it’s just family oriented.”
On Sept. 7, the Richmond-grown ice cream business will debut its collaborative S’mores Nightingale Ice Cream Sandwich, with a portion of proceeds benefiting the National Park Foundation, the charitable partner of the NPS. The sandwich will be sold exclusively at Target and available in the store’s freezer sections through the end of the year.
The foundation of Nightingale’s S’mores sandwich is a honey graham cookie, a chewy, rich new addition to the company’s portfolio. Between the cookies is chocolate toasted marshmallow ice cream with fluff swirled throughout.
“We wanted the ice cream to have marshmallow and not just the little hits in the fluff because the marshmallow is just such a big part of s’mores, and so that’s why it’s not just like ribbons of marshmallow; it’s in the ice cream, too,” Pollack says.
Asked about the last time she had a s’more, Pollack says it was a no-fuss situation, relying on the classic combination of Honey Maid graham crackers, Hershey’s chocolate bars and fire-bruleed mallows that she and Meers concocted during an RV trip together last year.
“It’s not just the s’mores, it’s the experience of it,” she says. “It’s kind of messy, and your fingers are sticky, and it’s such a fun experience. So we wanted to have that same feeling — just like all Nightingale flavors, we want you to have that nostalgic moment.
“People sometimes forget just how delicious s’mores are over the campfire,” Pollack continues. “That charred marshmallow, it was just delicious, I remember it vividly.”
Image courtesy Nightingale Ice Cream Sandwiches
Nick Offerman, the actor who plays the deadpan, flannel-wearing, woodworking, thick-mustached parks department director Ron Swanson on the 2009-15 hit series “Parks and Recreation,” recently gave the sandwich a nod of approval on Instagram.
Pollack and Meers are big fans of the show, and along with their CFO, Cameron Chaplin — whom they describe as Ron Swanson reincarnated — saw Offerman during a stand-up comedy event in Washington, D.C. They brought him sandwiches and got a shout-out during the show. Afterward, they even crafted a special one-off maple-pecan-bourbon flavor and sent it to him.
The National Park Foundation collaboration is also a throwback to Nightingale’s early days of small-scale production, when they often did one-off flavors. In the past five years, the brand has catapulted into the freezer sections of stores across the country, launched Chomp 4-packs and become a regular offering at Costco.
“We always love doing collaborations,” Pollack says, “and it was just such a dream with the national parks; it just seemed like a natural fit.”
With these public places facing tremendous pressure under the Trump administration, the partnership takes on another meaning.
“That’s the thing that is exciting, drawing attention to these parks because of the majesty of them and what you see and experience there, and hopefully get more people out there,” she says. “I think it’s important to make sure they’re here, for us and for the next generation.”
