David Chapman, left, and his wife Penny decided to rebuild the Chapman’s Ice Cream factory, which was destroyed in a 2009 fire, after their son Ashley said he’d help.Tannis Toohey
When a fire destroyed the Chapman’s Ice Cream factory in 2009, the family-run business faced an existential decision: rebuild or walk away.
Thirty-six years earlier, Penny and David Chapman had moved and left their jobs at a Toronto ice-cream maker to found their own company 150 kilometres northwest in Markdale, Ont. Now the town was running out of water to fight the blaze and their factory was in ruins.
Their son Ashley, who’d just joined the family enterprise in 2008 as vice-president, recalls the pivotal conversation with his parents the day of the fire: “Mom and Dad said, ‘We’re getting a little old and we’re not sure if we should rebuild this unless you’re into this,’ and I said, ‘I’m in.’”
Guiding the company through the rebuild was Ashley’s moment to usher Chapman’s into its second generation. He’d worked summers for the business as a teenager but left to study English literature at Trent University and then attended Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in France. He’d operated his own restaurant 250 kilometres east in Peterborough before his mother asked him to return to Markdale to join the family business.
The rebuild was a new challenge. “While I knew it was going to be a struggle, my parents were an incredible source of knowledge on how it should be done,” says Ashley, now 46 and Chapman’s chief operating officer.
Within hours, David was talking with equipment suppliers to restart production. The company paid its 235 employees during the shutdown, asking only that they be ready to return when operations resumed, which happened within weeks at a temporary facility. A permanent new Phoenix plant – roughly twice the size of the original and named for the mythological bird that was said to rise from the ashes of its fiery death – was up and running 17 months later.
For Ashley, it was a crash course in running the company. “Those 17 months were more valuable than 10 years of training in the old factory,” he says.
Today, Chapman’s is one of Canada’s largest independent ice-cream brands, with about 1,000 employees. Its ice creams, frozen yogurt, ice-cream sandwiches and popsicles are sold in every major grocery chain across Canada, with a small fraction of product sold in the United States. Chapman’s pumps out roughly 100 million litres of ice-cream mix annually, enough to make about 200 million litres of ice cream.
Penny says the company’s recipe – and its approach – has changed very little over the decades. Even after the repeal of Ontario’s Edible Oils Products Act in 2005 allowed manufacturers to replace dairy fat with cheaper alternatives, Chapman’s continued to produce dairy-based ice cream despite the margin pressure.
Chapman’s higher ingredient expenses aren’t inhibiting its growth: the company is investing $200-million to add six new production lines and more than 200 jobs. The expansion, slated for completion in June, will boost production capacity to meet increasing demand in Canada while allowing Chapman’s to broaden its peanut-free and nut-free offerings.
Bob Brema, president and CEO of food broker William M. Dunne and Associates based in Woodbridge, Ont., says the company’s success stems from the discipline and focus of listening carefully to customers rather than trend-chasing. “They dabble in [what people say they want] and, if it goes well, they prosper.”
When something doesn’t work, Chapman’s responds quickly, he adds. The company was ahead of its time when it introduced organic ice cream in the early 2000s, for example. “It failed miserably,” so they moved on, says Mr. Brema, who has worked with Chapman’s since 1994.
That restraint matters for a business built entirely around a discretionary category that is increasingly expensive to produce. The Canadian ice cream market, valued at roughly $5-billion in 2025 by market research firm StrategyHelix Group, remains dominated by global portfolios such as Nestlé, with its diversified product lines, and The Magnum Ice Cream Company that was spun out of Unilever late last year.
Cocoa prices reached a 60-year high in 2025 amid supply disruptions and climate pressures, while dairy costs continue to rise. Chapman’s has adjusted its supply chain in response to potential U.S. tariffs, seeking alternatives to American suppliers for ingredients to limit price increases. It also invested in automation and more efficient equipment to compete, rather than push aggressively into unrelated categories.
At the same time, the “buy Canadian” sentiment sparked by the U.S. trade war seems to work to Chapman’s advantage: it topped the Ted Rogers School of Management’s Great Canadian Brand Index last year and has reported stronger-than-usual demand outside the peak summer season in part due to consumers favouring domestic brands.
Daniel Clark, an associate professor of entrepreneurship at Western University’s Ivey Business School, says Chapman’s has benefited from its family-owned, Canadian-made identity. He recalls that the company’s public status updates after the 2009 blaze weren’t from a communications firm, they were from the family reaching out to customers, creating an affinity for the product.
“You don’t feel bad putting it in your cart,” Mr. Clark says. “In fact, quite the opposite – you feel comfortable, you feel safe, you feel like you are doing a good thing even though it’s junk food.”
But that closeness between brand and family also carries risk, Mr. Clark adds, particularly as leadership shifts between generations. Second-generation leaders often feel pressure to put their own stamp on a business, sometimes by taking on new risks. “The [full] transition hasn’t really happened yet,” Mr. Clark says. “That’s going to be an inflection point.”
Over the past year, Penny and David, now 74 and 82 respectively, have begun working half days, scaling back their traditional domains of production for him and people and culture for her. Ashley continues to increase his responsibilities, as he has since he first joined the company.
Chapman’s does not have a board of directors or formal governance structure, relying instead on collective decision-making among the leadership team. “I don’t think my parents and I have ever disagreed on a major decision,” Ashley says. That includes turning away multiple acquisition offers over the years.
“I would like this family, Canadian business to continue,” Penny says. “There are so few of them … we should be trying to preserve what we can.”
Have a suggestion of a Canadian multigenerational family business for this regular series? E-mail smallbiz@globeandmail.com.