A Purbeck company has just received six prestigious Taste of the West awards for its products, four of them gold, which will soon be served from one of Britain’s latest hybrid electric ice cream vans.
And to add to Purbeck Ice Cream’s range, an exciting new product is about to be launched which will get a lot of tails wagging along the South Coast – strawberry flavoured Pawbeck ice cream for dogs!

The dream team from Purbeck Ice Cream, getting ready for a new season
Wishing for sunshine
Together with growing acclaim for its range of Purbeck chocolate, the only thing that the team based at Kingston, near Corfe Castle, could really wish for is a healthy supply of sunshine for the year.
Taste of the West awards, announced on Thursday 9th January 2025, included gold awards for Purbeck Ice Cream’s banoffee ripple and lemon sorbet flavours, as well as its single origin Ecuadorian milk chocolate with honeycomb and its single origin Ecuadorian milk chocolate with salted caramel.
A silver award was given to the company’s lemon ripple ice cream, while its blackcurrant sorbet was highly commended. Elsewhere in the awards list the company’s head of pasteurising, Rose Butterfield, took two gold awards for her Dorset Rose strawberry and gooseberry and elderflower ice lollies.

Purbeck Ice Cream business director Ben Hartle at the company’s Kingston headquarters
“Making produce the best it can be”
Purbeck Ice Cream business director Ben Hartle said:
“We normally put new products in every year for the Taste of the West awards and it is always nice to have a great result come back like this – no matter how many times you get them, it is always pleasing to know that we are doing the right things in the right way.
“We have always stuck to our philosophy of making our produce the best it can always be and to send products out to an awards committee to blind taste for them to come back with awards means that we are doing something right.
“My mum and dad didn’t really drink or smoke, they did ice cream crawls around the South Coast instead, that was their thing, so when they diversified into making ice cream 37 years ago, it was always about making ice cream better than all the ones they had tried.
“That meant sourcing everything as locally as possible with all local ingredients, gluten free, nut free and egg free, which often restricts the things we can make. We have never thrown in artificial ingredients to boost the flavour, and never will – we have stood firm to that promise since the very beginning.”

Four more Taste of the West gold awards have been added to the company’s collection
“It’s not all about chocolate and vanilla”
Ben added:
“All of our milk comes from the Isle of Purbeck – most of it from Knaveswell Farm – our cream comes from within Dorset and everything else we try to source as locally as we can.
“We are always playing around with new recipes, all through the year, last year we trialled 12 flavours, of which we felt two of them would be good enough to launch – we are very, very picky about what we release for sale.
“It’s not all about chocolate and vanilla, we did ice creams in 2024 for the Dorset cheese and chilli festival which were insanely spicy, a cheese ice cream, a garlic and cayenne pepper variety – we try all sorts of different things to see how they will work and how well they are received.
“I’m not sure the savoury ice cream market will ever be huge, but we work with Michelin starred chefs and high end restaurants who want something exciting to put on the menu – like a scoop of blue cheese ice cream on cheese boards, or chilli ice cream with prawns or in tomato soup.”

Humphrey has given top barks to the company’s new ice cream offering
New product given top barks
Another new product for 2025 will be Pawbeck Ice Cream for dogs, which the company has attached its normal high standards to, using pea protein instead of milk to make sure that it is as healthy as possible for precious pets.
The team has avoided banana as a flavour since it was found to make a number of dogs ill, preferring to use strawberry instead, and has come up with a wider, shallower pot which is easier for dogs to eat the ice cream from.
Office dogs Humphrey and Poppy have been taking part in taste trials and have given it top barks, while the tubs themselves – fully recyclable like all the company’s packaging – have been branded with a paw print so that humans know it’s not for them.
The product will be launched in February 2025 in time for the industry trade fairs and it is hoped that the canine treat will get a great reception – Humphrey certainly thinks that it should!
It will certainly join the range of products available from Purbeck Ice Cream vans out and about at around 150 events through 2025 from Swanage to the Chelsea Flower Show – which this year will include a new addition to the fleet.

Out and about in Swanage in 2024 – and soon the vans will be powered by renewable energy
Electric ice cream van will open doors
The Purbeck company has become one of a handful in Britain to use an electric hybrid ice cream van which, while it uses a diesel motor to drive, powers the ice cream dispensers and freezers from an electric battery powered by renewable energy.
Ben Hartle said:
“It means you can take the van inside buildings and switch off the engine as there are no problems with emissions. It’s a huge step forward and I imagine over time that our whole fleet will change over to electric vehicles.
“It will open a lot of doors for us, lots of venues like conference centres that wouldn’t have entertained old style ice cream vans are now getting in touch with us – it is a very exciting development and massively better for the environment.
“We have done product trials on site this week, and will be attending its first events in February or March. Undoubtedly it will be going to the RHS show at Chelsea, possibly Hampton Court, all the county shows and you may well see it in Swanage too.
“It’s yet to be named and branded, we have asked the public to come up with some ideas through our social media platforms – the last one we put to a public vote became Coney, although someone did suggest it should be Creamy McCreamface!”

Purbeck Ice Cream’s moo statue says everything you need to know about the product
“Team is like an extended family”
Ben added:
“We are hoping for a more stable year in 2025, as I’m sure most people are, and we are all doing our sun dance, hoping it will be a nice dry and sunny year, as much is still dependent on the weather.
“We are all happier when the sun is shining, and it is good for business too. The last real heatwave I can remember was in 2020 during Covid, when we had probably the hottest March we have ever had and people were stuck at home.
“Sales went down to around 20 percent during that time, as most food service outlets like pubs, hotels, restaurants, and cruise ships were all closed.
“I was in the sales division at the time and sales stopped overnight, but we had an entire team which we didn’t want to lay off.
“Our team is like an extended family, so we tried to come up with any solutions to create work to keep them here and decided to make chocolate using the same ethics we apply to our ice cream. Now when ice cream production slows down we can make chocolate instead.
“We are very artisanal, everything is hand made in tiny batches – it is quite a lengthy exercise, but at the same time it is what kept us all employed over Covid rather than us losing our jobs, so it achieved what we wanted and we are getting awards for it!”

Everyone’s hoping for more than just a taste of summer this year
Further information
- Keep up to date with Purbeck Ice Cream on its website