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The Story Behind Custard MKE

How solving a quintessential Milwaukee "first-world problem"—checking a dozen different websites, Facebook pages, and PDF flyers just to see what flavors are churning today—grew into Wisconsin's daily Flavor of the Day tracker.

56
Greater Milwaukee Stands
179
Total Wisconsin Locations
7-Day
Upcoming Flavor Forecasts
100%
Free & Community Driven
Our Origin Story

"Part IT Professional, Part Dairy Detective"

Living near Waukesha—within 10 minutes of at least three different frozen custard stands—local IT professional Noah Huotari kept running into the same ritual every evening: opening five or six browser tabs to check what Kopp's, Oscar's, Gilles, Bubba's, and the local Culver's were serving for their Flavor of the Day.

"It kind of started as solving a—what I'm gonna call it—a first-world problem of having to check more than one custard website to see what the local flavor of the day is... I didn't realize quite how serious Milwaukee took their custard." — Noah Huotari, interview with Urban Milwaukee (July 2024)

After spending evenings coding after work, Noah launched the original version of Custard MKE in July 2024 and shared it with the r/milwaukee Reddit community. Overnight, the post racked up hundreds of upvotes and dozens of comments from fellow custard fanatics suggesting their favorite neighborhood drive-ins across Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington, and Racine counties.

Within days, local news outlets picked up the story—with TMJ4 News dubbing Noah "The Frozen Custard Crusader" and features running in Urban Milwaukee and WUWM 89.7 FM (Milwaukee's NPR).

The Pause & The Rebuild

Rebuilt From the Ground Up for Automation

Not long after the original site went viral, life took center stage: Noah's daughter was born and spent her first month in the NICU. Because the original WordPress version of Custard MKE relied on time-consuming manual weekly schedule entry, updating the site naturally had to take a backseat to family.

Once things settled down, Noah set out to rebuild Custard MKE from scratch so it would never go stale again. The new platform is powered by automated daily scrapers and schedule parsers that wake up every morning, gather the latest daily flavors and 7-day forecasts across 179 Wisconsin custard locations, sort stands by live GPS distance from wherever you are standing, and dispatch morning email alerts whenever your favorite flavors are on the calendar.

  • July 2024
    Custard MKE Launches: Shared on r/milwaukee tracking 18 local stands; featured on TMJ4 News & Urban Milwaukee.
  • Dec 2024
    WUWM 89.7 NPR Feature: Cited in Bubbler Talk's deep dive into Milwaukee's 50+ custard stands.
  • Today
    Fully Automated & Statewide: Rebuilt with automated daily flavor scraping, 179 Wisconsin stands, dedicated stand pages, and free email flavor alerts.
Milwaukee Heritage

Why Milwaukee Is the Custard Capital of the World

Although frozen custard originated on the Coney Island boardwalk in 1919, it found its true home in Milwaukee during the 1930s and 1940s. Today, Greater Milwaukee boasts the highest concentration of frozen custard stands anywhere on Earth: