Scoops of Lansing owner: five seasons of ice cream

After a hotly contested baseball or soccer game at Lansing High School, the crowd can be seen piling into a parking lot 2 miles up the road on Route 34B at Scoops of Lansing to cool off with some ice cream.

When the school year ends in June, the parking lot is still full at the ice cream stand. Patrons often come after a walk on the Lansing Center Trail, which has a trailhead located next to the light blue building with Perry’s Ice Cream mini-flags adorned on the wooden fence outside.

While volunteering for the trail and working with Lansing Loves to Read, which placed a storybook walk along the trail, Laura Morse was intrigued by the ice cream stand.

She is a professor in Ithaca College’s occupational therapy program and has a chiropractic office in downtown Ithaca with her husband. Five years ago, while working on the Lansing Center Trail, Morse found out that the business was for sale.

A lover of ice cream, Morse saw an opportunity.

“We wanted the little kids to come get ice cream and walk on the trail,” she said. “I found out [the previous owner] was looking to sell the ice cream shop, and I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds like a cool business to own.’ I love ice cream, and it worked out.”

Now, it’s become a place where Lansing residents can gather, reconnect and enjoy a favorite summer treat.

“It’s a hub for the community. After sports, it’s really busy at night, especially with soccer and baseball; I would say that’s when the biggest crowd is,” Morse said. “Everybody is happy coming here. You can come here every day because we have so many different flavors. It’s multigenerational too. Little kids like it, and all the way up.”

Scoops is open from May through Labor Day, offering soft serve, hard ice cream, sundaes and dairy-free ice cream every day from 2 through 9 p.m.

Before Morse bought the business, it was already 10 years old. Times and demands of customers have changed, even in the five years since she bought the stand.

She said she’s seen people who are lactose intolerant pop a Lactaid pill into their mouths when they’re in line many times, but there is still a demand for dairy-free ice cream. Although dairy-free ice cream can be difficult to maintain, Morse said as long as there is a demand, she will supply it.

“It’s hard to get the dairy-free ones; there aren’t a lot of options,” she said. “It’s hard to get a good recipe for that because you want it to be held at the same temperature as regular ice cream. It’s a texture thing with the temperature, and it’s more expensive to make.”

Next to the building is a large pavilion with a small koi pond next to it, which is owned by the Lansing Garden Center.

Morse said the business was ready to go when she bought it, but she has had to put some of her own resources into making sure the ice cream stand makes money.

“Each year, something goes wrong with a freezer or something like that,” she said, laughing. “It’s continual maintenance and upkeep but nothing major at this point.”

Scoops is one of the sponsors of the Lansing Lighthouse 5K and donates 50 cents of every sundae sold to the Lansing Center Trail.

The stand has nine part-time employees, mostly students at Lansing High School. Morse said while schedules with sports and school can be tricky to manage, she has been happy to get behind the window and serve ice cream herself if needed.

For her, the stand has served as a gateway into understanding what is going on in the Lansing community and seeing groups of people reconnect with others they might not have seen in a long time.

“It’s harder to know when I’m working in the shop what’s going on,” she said. “But when I come after a trail clean-up night, there’s a lot of people who didn’t plan on getting together and people who are chatting that might not have seen each other in a while or the different groups of kids who haven’t seen each other since it’s summer vacation.”

At the core of her love of the ice cream stand is Morse’s involvement with the Lansing Center Trail. The trail is a 2-mile hike in a loop that gains only 95 feet of elevation.

She started becoming attached to the trail while helping with story walks as a part of Lansing Loves to Read. Now, the Family Reading Partnership has taken over the story walks, but Morse said having the trail and the story walks so close to her ice cream stand has benefited the community.

“I like that it brings people here and they get exposed to hiking on the trail. I think that’s really cool because I think a lot of people didn’t know about the town trails here,” she said. “It was a nice partnership, but I like to hike, I like to be outdoors and I was looking for something else to do in the community.”

Learn more about Scoops and other county ice cream shops at tinyurl.com/2mdax7dd.

Lansing at Large appears every Wednesday in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@VizellaMedia.com.

In brief:

Lansing Town Council sets agenda for Wednesday meeting

The Lansing Town Council will review outside water use requests and will potentially update its sexual harassment policy at its meeting tonight at Lansing Town Hall at 6:30 p.m.

The agenda features two requests for outside user water, department reports and 11 motions and resolutions on the consent agenda. Those include a motion to update the Town Board’s sexual harassment policy and a resolution to relevy yearly water and sewer charges on the 2023 town and county tax bills.

Lansing Town Hall is located at 29 Auburn Rd. The meeting can also be viewed online at lansingtown.com.