Sweet Republic

One thing you can say about the greater Phoenix metropolitan area: It’s always a good time of year for ice cream. Whether it’s a balmy 80 degrees in December or a scorching 110 in July, sweet frozen treats hit the spot.

Eighteen years ago, Jan Wichayanuparp and Helen Yung bet that Phoenix would embrace a store producing artisanal, all-natural ice cream handcrafted in small batches and highlighting local ingredients. Their selections ranged from the basics — chocolate, vanilla, strawberry — to more unusual, savory-sweet flavors, like honey blue cheese and “I Heart Bacon” (bacon brittle folded into maple ice cream), plus sophisticated non-dairy combinations like basil lime sorbet. The base of their ice cream: milk and cream from Arizona dairy farms. Cookies, toppings, sauces and cones — even marshmallows — were all made from scratch, to ensure quality. 

Within the first year of opening, Sweet Republic was named one of the Top 10 ice cream stores in the country by Bon Appétit. It was an auspicious beginning for Wichayanuparp and Yung, who had met at a training session in New York City in the summer of 2001, when they worked for the investment banking arm of Citigroup. They bonded over food — literally.

“Somehow we were in a group and both of us talked about what restaurants we wanted to go to,” Wichayanuparp recalls. “Our conversation was, ‘Here’s where I got reservations, where did you get reservations, you can totally come to mine.’ ”

As part of the training, Wichayanuparp and Yung were working in downtown Manhattan on 9/11. Wichayanuparp was in the lobby of Tower 7 picking up breakfast to take up to her desk when she saw the first plane hit, on television. Both women were evacuated.

“Something like that has to change you,” Yung says. “Seeing that, it does make you really think how short life can be, how you must capture every day and pursue what you’re really passionate about before it’s too late.”

By 2002, Yung had left Citigroup to attend Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Sydney, Australia. Wichayanuparp returned to her Citigroup job in Bangkok, where her parents lived, but her heart wasn’t in it, and soon the two had hatched a plan to launch their own business. “We wanted to do something with food for sure, because we both love food,” Yung says. Eventually they landed on ice cream, because, as Yung puts it: “It’s so hard not to like. It’s sweet, it’s cold, it’s creamy. You instantly feel better when you eat it.” 

Bon Appétit was just the start of the accolades. In 2011, Food Network star Alton Brown named Sweet Republic’s Toffee Banofi sundae his favorite ice cream concoction ever, and he said their vanilla ice cream was “maybe the best vanilla ice cream I’ve ever had.” And in 2012, the store was featured in Time as part of a story on unusual food flavors, including Sweet Republic’s Sichuan Chocolate.

“My parents were in Hong Kong,” Yung recalls, “and they were definitely worried about me going from investment banking to opening an ice cream shop — all this education for this?” The mention in Time allayed some of their fears. “Time is a globally known publication, so I could show my parents, and they could show their friends.”  

Today, Sweet Republic has four locations around the Valley. Everything is still made in-house, including gluten-free chocolate sandwich cookies for the cookies and cream. Yung says now that she has young children, she’s more attuned to allergies, and to what kids like — so most of the ice creams are egg-free, and the stores have little cones on hand.

The focus is still on being local, supporting local and creating unexpected flavors. “We do a lot of collabs with other small Arizona businesses,” says Wichayanuparp, like Pho-Real, a limited-edition ice cream based on the Vietnamese soup, for Phoenix restaurant Pho 43.

Once a week, Wichayanuparp and Yung hold a flavor meeting with their kitchen lead and ice cream lead. Wichayanuparp describes the meetings as “really fun and some would say passionate.” Every month, five of six flavors change out, making way for new experiments, and sometimes old favorites. Some one-offs are so popular that they end up in regular rotation, like crème brûlée and dairy-free mango sticky rice.

To celebrate Route 66 turning 100 in November, Sweet Republic will feature four flavors inspired by a Western road trip: Date Shake, Prickly Pear Sherbet, Mine Run (sweet cream with golden honeycomb candy nuggets and chocolate flakes) and Root Beer Float.

“We’re always trying to be creative,” Yung says. “If we’re going to run an ice cream shop and make it ourselves, we might as well make it interesting.”