Howdy Homemade Ice Cream in El Paso has cool jobs for disabled adults

From the looks of it, Howdy Homemade Ice Cream in Downtown El Paso is a fun place to get ice cream with interesting flavors, like dark chocolate chipotle, Dr Pepper and Cookie Monster.

Behind the counter, however, is the real scoop: an inspirational story about a franchise that provides meaningful employment to teens and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The franchise was started by Dallas entrepreneur Tom Landis in 2015 and has been growing in other cities since.

In El Paso, the Howdy at the base of the Roderick Artspace Lofts, 601 N. Oregon St., Suite 1, is going on six months with a steady customer base from Downtown businesses. It was franchised in El Paso through a partnership with the El Paso Community Foundation and some other donors. They are planning to open a food truck in a couple of weeks and have plans to open a second location in about a year in El Paso and another one in Las Cruces.

Three times a week, employee Joe Salazar is part of a crew called heroes that makes the ice cream from scratch in a small factory a few doors from the ice cream shop. The business has 20 employees and four shift managers.

Salazar, who has worked at Howdy since it opened, said he enjoys the job because he gets to make ice cream all day.

"I'm making sure everything is running smoothly," he said as he poured some ingredients into the ice cream-making machine for some cucumber lime flavor. The machine takes about 10 minutes to mix the ice cream into a soft-serve consistency before it's poured into buckets and put it in a hardening freezer for 12 hours.

Store shift manager Alexander Rangel said Salazar is great at coming up with flavors.

"He's been my biggest collaborator. He has a lot of amazing ideas and we've made a lot of ice cream together," Rangel said. "It's amazing to see the progress. In the last few months that we've been in here, Joe has gained years of experience in the kitchen. And that's a goal to show our heroes: how a professional kitchen works and take that experience elsewhere."

Aside from selling the ice cream to customers in the shop, the ice cream factory makes special sponsored flavors every month. A business or organization can create a flavor, which the ice cream shop makes and then delivers and promotes.

For May, the Emergence Health Network is sponsoring the Cool Cucumber Lime ice cream as part of Mental Health Awareness Month. It pays for a certain amount of 4-ounce ice cream cups and distributes it to clients or staff.

The crew works three days in the factory making nine flavors, and they can carry up to 16 different flavors in the ice cream shop.

"The goal is to employ people with disabilities and to do it in a way that's fun," Rangel said. "At the end of the day, we are serving amazing ice cream by amazing people. And of course, the goal is not only to have our business represented by people with disabilities but every other business in the community, so that we can show them by example how to employ 90 to 95% people with disabilities," he said.

More:Panera Bread coming to West Towne Marketplace in El Paso

María Cortés González, who loves chocolatey ice cream, may be reached at 915-546-6150, [email protected] and @EPTMaria on Twitter.

What: Howdy Homemade Ice Cream

Where: Roderick Artspace Lofts, 601 N. Oregon St., Suite 1

Hours: Noon to 8 p.m. Monday-Thursday, noon to 9 p.m. Friday-Saturday, and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday

Information: Instagram.com/howdyhomemadeelp/