Ask anyone who went to BYU where to take a visitor and you will get the Creamery inside three suggestions. Ask them what the Creamery is and the answer gets vaguer, because it is genuinely several things at once: a university dairy operation, a small grocery store, a grill, and an ice cream counter that has become a rite of passage in a town where the usual college social lubricants are not on offer.
It is also, as of very recently, not the building people remember. That is the part most guides have not caught up with, including one run by BYU itself.
The building on Ninth East changed at the end of 2025
This is the single most important practical fact on this page, and it is the one that will make a returning alum's directions fail.
The original Creamery on Ninth closed on Tuesday, 2 December 2025. The new Creamery on Ninth opened two days later, on Thursday, 4 December, on the west side of the same parking lot. The replacement carries over a 70% increase in retail space, and the plan announced by the university was for the old building to come down afterwards so the lot could take more parking.
So the address has not moved — it is still 1209 N 900 East — but the building has. If you are steering by a photograph, a memory, or a set of directions written before 2026, you will be looking at the wrong side of the parking lot, or at nothing at all.
⚠ BYU's own history page has not caught up. The university's Dining Services history of the Creameries still describes the Creamery on Ninth in the present tense as the renovated Kent's Market building, with no mention of the move — while BYU's own news service published the opening of the replacement. This is a pattern worth internalising when you research anything: the correct host is not the same as the correct page. A university, a national park or a city can be entirely authoritative and still be serving a page nobody has updated. Check the date on the specific page, not the domain.
The founding date is published four ways, and each one is true of something different
You will see the Creamery described as starting in 1946, 1949, 1954, and 2000, and you will see it credited with "over a century" of ice cream, which is the one version that is simply wrong.
Here is the actual sequence, from BYU's own account:
- 1946 — the Church purchases a dairy farm in Elberta, Utah, about 35 miles south of Provo. That farm still supplies the milk.
- 1949 — the BYU Dairy Products Laboratory opens, providing milk and dairy products for campus. It has a small sales room where you can buy milk, cheese and ice cream. This is the date BYU uses most often, and it is the honest birthday of the operation.
- 1954 — the Dairy Products Lab merges with BYU's Animal Science Department, and students in agricultural, food and animal science start working the dairy production themselves. Some news coverage dates the Creamery from here.
- 1957 — BYU buys roughly 600 acres of farmland in Spanish Fork to expand its farming operations.
- 2000 — the Creamery on Ninth opens, and this is when the Creamery becomes the thing most people mean by the word.
Which means the Creamery is a seventy-something-year-old institution whose most famous building was a quarter-century old when it was demolished. It is not a century old, and it was not producing ice cream in the early 1900s. That claim circulates widely and appears to come from conflating the university's age with the dairy programme's.
One small archival detail worth keeping: a 1975 record of BYU history notes that by 1959 the average BYU dairy cow was producing 6,276 quarts of milk and 470 pounds of butter a year, substantially above the average for the period. The dairy was not a novelty operation.
Kent's Market, and the widow who gave the building away
The Creamery on Ninth exists because of a grocery store that failed and a bequest.
Kent's Market — also known as Carson's Market — sat on Ninth East and served the neighbourhood for 59 years before closing in 1999. Heritage Halls residents complained loudly about losing their nearest grocery store. Then the owner's widow willed the building to the university, which left BYU with a decision: tear it down, pave it, or do something with it.
They renovated it. Work started 14 March 2000 and finished that August — a million-dollar remodel in roughly five months — and the Creamery on Ninth had its grand opening on 24 August 2000.
What it became is the detail that gets under-reported: it was the first full-service grocery store on any college campus in the United States. Not the first campus convenience store, not the first university-run food shop — the first actual grocery store, with produce and a meat department, on an American campus.
(A small sourcing note: BYU's own history and its student newspaper both give the grand opening as 24 August; one academic local-history project gives 23 August. It is a one-day discrepancy in a well-documented event and is not worth resolving here, but it is the kind of thing that makes two otherwise identical accounts disagree.)
By the time it closed, the original building had been visited by more than 1.3 million guests a year.
What to actually order
The ice cream is the reason to come, and the reason it tastes the way it does is not mysterious. Creamery ice cream carries roughly 2–4% more butterfat than most commercial ice cream. That is BYU's own figure and it is the whole explanation for the density — it is closer to what an ice cream maker would call a premium base than to what a supermarket half-gallon is.
Volume gives you a sense of the scale: BYU Dining Services has put annual service at more than 191,000 gallons, and Creamery Operations has been described as producing over 200,000 gallons a year. Either way, this is an industrial dairy wearing a soda-fountain hat.
Graham Canyon is the order. Creamery staff have described it as the number one flavour by an enormous margin, with Cookies and Cream and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough rounding out the top three. Those three are produced far more often than everything else — Graham Canyon three or four times a month, the other two two or three times, against a normal cycle of a batch every three to four weeks.
The counterintuitive part: Graham Canyon is not an old flavour. It launched around 2011 and, by staff accounts, was not even a top-ten seller at first. It climbed year on year until it took the top spot outright. The Creamery's most iconic order is younger than most of the students buying it.
A few others worth knowing:
- In-Shane-ly Chocolate — created for BYU president Shane Reese and debuted in September 2023. It was subsequently voted the Creamery's number one chocolate flavour, which is either a real referendum on the ice cream or a real referendum on the president, and probably both.
- Earnestly Chocolate — chocolate ice cream with caramel and marshmallow swirls and chocolate-covered caramel cups, created in 1999 for the rededication of the Ernest L. Wilkinson Center.
- LaVell's Vanilla — named for LaVell Edwards, and reported to lead half-gallon sales, which is a different contest from the scoop counter. The flavour that wins the freezer aisle is not the flavour that wins the cone.
- 150 Swirl — created in October 2025 for BYU's sesquicentennial (the university was founded 16 October 1875), in BYU blue, combining mint, cookie dough and brownie. It was introduced as a limited run, so treat it as a "check whether it still exists" item rather than a standing order.
- Blue Goggles — blue mint ice cream with chocolate-covered honeycomb and cookie dough, and one of at least four mint flavours on the roster. Mint does unusually well here.
And then there is the chocolate milk, which has a following entirely separate from the ice cream and is the thing alumni ask visitors to bring them. In 2018, marking twenty-one consecutive years of being named the country's most "Stone Cold Sober" school by the Princeton Review, the Creamery released a mint brownie chocolate milk — a joke about its own reputation, sold as a product.
The grill nobody writes about
Here is the omission that runs through almost every guide to the Creamery, including several written by people who went to BYU: the Creamery on Ninth has a grill, and the food is the point of the trip for a substantial number of regulars.
The counter is the Ninth Street Grill, and it is a hamburger operation with a soda-fountain frontage. The house recommendation, from BYU's own alumni magazine, is a double cheeseburger with bacon — deliberately modest in size so there is room left for a shake and a cone, which tells you everything about how the place expects you to order.
Order the flavoured fries. They are the sleeper item and the thing returning alumni actually ask about. A half-pound arrives in a paper cone in a metal stand, and you choose the seasoning — plain, garlic, cracked pepper, salt and vinegar, or a mild jalapeño — and then the dipping sauce, from fry sauce, ranch, pesto, ketchup or ranchero. Two sauces are free. Salt and vinegar with ranch, or cracked pepper with pesto, are the combinations people evangelise about.
Beyond that: chicken tenders, onion rings, a guacamole bacon burger, soups, salads and sandwiches for a lighter lunch, and a kids' meal widely described as one of the better-value plates near campus.
On the ice cream side, the number that matters is not how many flavours exist but how many are out. The Creamery's total catalogue runs to more than 150 flavours, with roughly thirty to forty available at any given time, hand-dipped, with thick shakes and the option to split a cone half-and-half if you cannot decide. Ask for samples — it is normal here and nobody minds.
Two Utah-specific oddities on the shelves: Cougar Tails (an enormous maple bar) and chocolate-covered cinnamon bears, which are close to a state food and which visitors from outside Utah invariably find alarming and then buy twice.
What the new building actually changed
The replacement is not a like-for-like rebuild, and knowing what changed is useful if you last went years ago.
The stated reason for building it at all was structural rather than cosmetic. BYU Dining Services said publicly that the old building's infrastructure could not support a modern shopping operation — no grocery delivery, no curbside pickup — and that it was severely overcrowded in summer, particularly during FSY, the church's summer youth programme that fills campus with teenagers.
What the new building has: roughly 70% more retail space, which staff describe as finally covering every category a real grocery store needs — a floral section, a meat department supplied from campus, a BYU store section, and a much wider fresh range. Outside, there is tiered outdoor seating with awnings and heaters, built to be usable in winter.
Two honest caveats from people who have been since it opened. Indoor seating is still tight at peak times — bigger, but not proportionally bigger in the sitting-down department. And the parking lot has been a work in progress, since the old building had to come down before the lot could be finished. Both of those are the sort of thing that resolves with time, and neither is a reason to skip it.
Which location to go to
BYU currently lists five Creamery locations, and they are not interchangeable. The distinction that matters is which ones actually scoop.
- Creamery on Ninth — 1209 N 900 East. The flagship: ice cream, grocery and grill. This is the one to go to if you are only going to one.
- Helaman Creamery — 1085 N 700 East. Ice cream and grocery, no grill. Built for the Helaman Halls residents next door.
- Wyview Creamery — 1990 N 40 West, on the western side of campus near Wyview Park. Ice cream and grocery.
- A grocery-only location on North Canyon Road, which is the one to avoid if ice cream is the entire point of the errand.
- A location in the Cannon Center area of campus carrying ice cream, grocery and grill.
Two practical warnings. First, not every flavour is available at every location — BYU says so directly. If you have driven for a specific flavour, the flagship is your best odds. Second, everything closes Sunday, along with the rest of campus.
If you are coming as a visitor rather than a student, our BYU campus visitor guide covers the wider logistics — where you can actually park, which museums are free, and the Sunday problem in more detail. This page is the Creamery itself; that page is the trip around it.
The shipping option nobody mentions
BYU now sells Creamery ice cream for delivery across the United States, in a set of eleven signature flavours, through its own marketplace. For anyone who left Utah and has spent years describing Graham Canyon to sceptical friends, this is the relevant development, and it does not appear in most write-ups of the Creamery because most write-ups predate it.
The caveat is the obvious one: the shipped set is the signature range, not the rotating seasonal menu. The flavour you are nostalgic for may or may not be in it.
What it costs, and why students treat it as a fixed point
The Creamery's pricing is the quiet reason it holds its place in campus life. A scoop costs meaningfully less than a commercial scoop shop charges for a smaller portion, and the grocery side is priced for people who do not have a car. Students can spend dining plan funds there, which effectively converts a meal plan into ice cream — a feature, not a loophole, and one the university has never seemed inclined to close.
That combination is why the Creamery run is a genuine social institution rather than a tourist stop. In a town where the standard evening does not involve a bar, an ice cream counter open late, cheap, and walkable from most of campus does a lot of structural work. Our guide to the best ice cream in Provo and Orem puts it alongside the artisan shops it does not really compete with — the Creamery is not trying to beat a small-batch producer on craft, and it does not need to.
For students working out where the money actually goes, our student budget eating guide treats the Creamery honestly: excellent for quick grabs, dairy and the chocolate milk, not the cheapest option for a full weekly grocery run.
The practical version
Go to the Creamery on Ninth, at 1209 N 900 East, and go on a Saturday if you are visiting, because Sunday is closed and weekday parking near campus is unpleasant. Order Graham Canyon the first time. Buy a chocolate milk whether or not you want one now. Expect a bigger, brighter building than the photographs show, because the one in the photographs is gone.
And if you are trying to sound like you know the place: the correct nostalgia is not for the ice cream, which is unchanged, but for a low-ceilinged grocery store that used to be a market called Kent's, which a widow gave to a university, which turned it into the first full campus grocery store in the country, and which lasted exactly twenty-five years and two days.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you have to be a BYU student to go to the Creamery?
Where is the BYU Creamery on Ninth East?
How many BYU Creamery locations are there?
What is the best flavor at the BYU Creamery?
Is the BYU Creamery open on Sunday?
Why is BYU Creamery ice cream so thick?
Can you get BYU Creamery ice cream shipped outside Utah?
When did the BYU Creamery actually start?