At the corner of Second Street and Emerson Drive in Seymour, there once was a three-pump Standard Oil gasoline station and later a convenience store before an ice cream shop opened.
When Lena Faye and Bill Kovener returned to the city in 1949 after traveling around the country for his service with the Army Air Corps during World War II, they opened Kovener’s Korner.
Lena Faye came up with a chocolate malt recipe that made the shop a popular stop for that cool treat along with milkshakes, floats, sundaes and more.
That shop is still open today, and customers now have a second option to visit.
A former Cintas truck has found new life as a Kovener’s Korner ice cream truck.
"Our grandparents did all of the work of making it into a store here, but now, we’ve been able to kind of mimic what they did with our own kind of adventure," Meredith Kovener said, referring to the project co-led with her brother, Nick Kovener.
"Hopefully, it will be just as busy and popular as the store," Nick said.
Nick serves as chief executive officer of Kovener’s Korner, handling operations and finance, while Meredith is chief brand officer, handling marketing and communications. Just like Lena Faye’s chocolate malt recipe, the siblings have the perfect blend to make the business a success.
The idea of an ice cream truck started about a year ago.
"Over the last few years, we’ve had more and more requests for offsite catering or employee appreciation events," Nick said. "We had been doing a handful of those, but obviously, it’s more difficult when you don’t have a dedicated vehicle or a path to do that."
They were able to use a vehicle to haul the products to serve, but that wasn’t suitable.
"Last year, we were like, ‘What could we do more long term?’ because welcoming, doing stuff like that and exposing more and more people to Kovener’s is always a good thing for us to share the experience," Nick said.
That got the wheels turning, and at the beginning of the year, Nick began researching options for a food truck.
In February, they bought an old Cintas truck and began working to get it customized.
"We had it completely stripped out," Nick said. "We custom designed the layout to be as similar to the store as possible to not only provide as similar of an experience for the customer but also for an employee to be able to work in the truck with relative ease with the same equipment and everything."
They knew the business’ most popular product had to be the priority.
"We wanted to have a soft serve machine in there because of our chocolate malt and that being our staple product that we wanted to make sure that we could make that happen, so that was our first priority," Meredith said. "Then we built out around that."
Initially, the plan was for the truck to be done in six to eight weeks. Making sure soft serve could be available on the truck, however, resulted in the project taking longer to complete.
"Soft serve machines take an incredible amount of power, so you have to buy a very large generator," Nick said.
"With that, we had to find an appropriate generator and necessary power. But then also, that meant the storage rack for the generator had to be custom built, so that added time, as well," he said. "Once we got it, it wasn’t the most easily usable, so we had Matt Findley with FINCO in town do some additional work on it to make it safe and secure and easy to use."
There also were delays in obtaining equipment.
The siblings finally were able to pick up the truck in mid-May, but then the exterior had to be wrapped with graphics. Meredith did the design work.
"We wanted to keep it with a similar kind of historic feel," she said. "Obviously, we want it to feel like you’re at Kovener’s in a sense. Even if someone is coming up and they don’t know Kovener’s if we’re a town away or something, we want someone to come up and really feel like who we are as a store."
The truck is white with forest green lettering, and images of the business’ products are sprinkled along the bottom, giving it a fun feeling.
"Ice cream, at the end of the day, it’s a fun thing," Nick said. "We wanted a way for people that haven’t been to the ice cream store to look at the truck and understand what we provide and why people would know us to get their attention."
When they saw the completed truck, Nick and Meredith realized the fruits of their labor.
"A sigh of relief that we had made it to the finish line because it was a lot of work," Nick said. "Both of us have full-time jobs, so we’re doing this in the evenings or over a lunch break, so it was definitely, I think, a little bit of a sigh of relief to have gotten it, and to be able to physically touch it and see it in person was great."
There also was excitement to start a new adventure, Meredith said.
"With anything you start, there are setbacks and there are positives, and you just get the gamut of emotions during the whole thing," she said. "I always was like, ‘This is just an adventure we’re going on.’"
The equipment on the truck includes soft serve machines to carry chocolate, vanilla and twist, the latter being Kovener’s Korner’s top seller and the first being the second most popular.
They also wanted a dipping cabinet to hold seven hard serve flavors, including the most popular, Superman. The others are mint chocolate chip, cookies and cream, orange sherbet, orange pineapple, butter pecan and rainbow sherbet. At the store, they sell four other flavors.
Kovener’s Korner’s most popular toppings are available, too, along with milkshakes, sundaes, icebergers, dream shakes and hot fudge cones.
The siblings also wanted to offer something unique on the truck that’s not available at the store. They chose shaved ice and had to buy equipment to make it.
"It’s a dairy-free alternative," Nick said. "We do get requests for dairy-free, so this provides something refreshing that would be something we could offer to someone who can’t indulge in our ice cream."
The flavors are cherry, grape, banana, blue raspberry, lemon lime, strawberry, tiger’s blood (strawberry and watermelon), piña colada, cotton candy and bubble gum. The flavors can be mixed and matched, and you can add a sour spray that makes it taste like a Sweet Tart, Nick said.
On the outside of the truck, the phone number and social media accounts are listed in case people want to learn more about the business or reserve the truck.
The store is open from the first week of April to Labor Day, and the truck is going to operate until November. Next year, Nick said the truck most likely will operate from April to November.
The first event for the food truck was in June in Reddington. Since then, it has made appearances at a Seymour CityJam concert, a Brownstown Ewing Main Street concert and the Bartholomew County Fair.
Three or four people can work on the truck at once, which Meredith said is similar to the store.
Brett Kleber is manager of the truck, while Myka Wetzel and Kierstyn Ellis are managers for both the truck and the store.
"We really empower them to run the place, and we support them and are obviously available to help out," Nick said. "We try to just focus on keeping everything running and the planning, and they really are the boots on the ground making sure everyone has excellent customer service and the products are all delicious."
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For information about Kovener’s Korner or its new food truck, call 812-522-9259 or visit kovenerskorner.com, facebook.com/kovenerskorner or instagram.com/koveners_korner.
The ice cream shop is at 712 W. Second St., Seymour.
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