Each week, Jim Richardson and his apprentice, Megan Coll, head into a large room behind the sales counter at Richardson’s Farm, and then, they start to play.

They begin mixing the decades-old base recipe for their ice cream and start adding inventive natural flavors. They created their most popular flavor, Catherine’s Passion, by adding cayenne pepper to chocolate ice cream. They parted from tradition when they began making their blackberry flavoring not from the surprising industry standard — raspberries — but from real blackberries.

Richardson’s family ice cream business in Boscawen, born in 1956, has become “a million dollar test kitchen,” he joked. “We’re basically food scientists.”

Behind Richardson’s creative flavors, including cranberry walnut, key lime pie, and blueberry rhubarb, draw crowds of ice cream lovers from near and far.

Richardson proudly traces the roots of his ice cream shop back to 1907, when new pasteurization requirements began putting little dairy farms across New England out of business. That’s when his family’s business in Pelham and in Dracut, Massachusetts, started focusing on bottling local milk and delivering it door to door.

By the 1950s, big supermarkets changed the industry again, siphoning profits from milk delivery by keeping their own milk prices low. In 1956, the Richardson’s family ice cream stand was born.

Growing up in Pelham, he worked in kitchens and ice cream shops from a young age. As a young adult, Richardson studied biochemical engineering at Boston University, but he returned to farm life after graduation, growing apples, flowers and vegetables while continuing to help at the ice cream stand. He and his wife, Susan, started making pies, which they still sell.

Once the couple took over the Richardson’s business, they began noticing areas in Boscawen resembled the farmland where Richardson grew up. With little advance planning, the Richardsons moved into town.

“It’s what I’ve done since I was a little kid,” he said. “We wound up here because we came up here and we were like ‘Hey, this is like home.’”

Since then, they’ve developed 35 ice cream flavors and 15 different kinds of pie. With more creations on the way, Richardson and Coll fit the mold of great inventors.

“The word you’re looking for is stubborn,” Coll said. Richardson laughed: “I was thinking more like stupid.”

Regardless, both take pride in the Richardson’s way.

“Nobody else does what we do,” Richardson said. “What we do is unique for the area, and it’s disappeared, and we’re the last ones to do it on this scale, this way.”

Richardson’s will continue to delight the masses with its tubs of ready-to-serve ice cream this summer, opening from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week through the end of August.

Kiera McLaughlin can be reached at kmclaughlin@cmonitor.com