Governor Kelly Ayotte launched the 2026 New Hampshire Ice Cream Trail on Wednesday at Richardson Farm in Boscawen, marking the official start of a statewide tourism promotion that sends visitors to 69 ice cream shops, dairy farms, and creameries spread across the Granite State, from the seacoast to the Canadian border. The trail runs through October 18, 2026, and is designed to do something that broad tourism campaigns often struggle with: get visitors into the corners of the state that rarely see the traffic Hampton Beach or the White Mountains attract.

Richardson Farm, a working farm in Boscawen where owner Jim Richardson and his staff craft handmade ice cream from locally sourced dairy, was chosen as the launch site for reasons that go beyond symbolism. It is the kind of operation the trail was built to support: small, rooted in the land, producing something genuinely made in New Hampshire rather than marketed under that banner. Ayotte sampled ice cream and apple crisp at the farm before making the formal announcement, which was also attended by officials from the state’s Department of Business and Economic Affairs.

What the Trail Is and How It Works

The 2026 Ice Cream Trail is run through the state’s official tourism office, Visit NH, and uses a passport model that has proven effective for similar trail programs in other states. Visitors pick up a physical passport and collect stamps at each stop. Fill 58 or more stops and submit the completed passport by October 18, and you become eligible for prizes including complimentary T-shirts and “Made in New Hampshire” gift bags.

The 69 participating stops are spread across all of the state’s major tourism regions. The Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee area, the Great North Woods, the White Mountains, the Monadnock region, the Lakes Region, and the Seacoast all have participating locations. The northernmost stop is Moose Alley Cones in Pittsburg, a remote corner of the state near the Canadian border where the concept of a dedicated tourism trail is genuinely novel. Getting a visitor to drive to Pittsburg for ice cream is, by any honest accounting, a success.

The passport format encourages something that trail programs across the country have consistently produced: the multi-stop trip. A visitor who might have driven to North Conway for the weekend and come home will, with a passport in hand, be more likely to extend the route, stop somewhere unfamiliar, and spend money in a community that would not otherwise be on the itinerary. That ripple effect is the core of what makes trail programs valuable as economic development tools.

Why This Works as Tourism Strategy

New Hampshire’s tourism economy is heavily concentrated. Hampton Beach, the White Mountains, and the Lakes Region collectively capture the vast majority of summer visitor dollars, with the rest of the state seeing comparatively modest traffic. A lot of New Hampshire is genuinely beautiful, historically interesting, and worth visiting but remains effectively invisible to the traveler who arrives with a conventional itinerary.

Trail programs address that imbalance by giving visitors a reason to move through the state differently. The Ice Cream Trail is particularly well suited to this function because ice cream shops, by their nature, are distributed differently than ski resorts or outlet malls. They exist in small towns, on back roads, at farm stands off Route 9. The trail is, in effect, a map of places the state would like visitors to discover.

The timing of the launch, coordinated with Memorial Day weekend as the unofficial start of summer, is deliberate. State tourism officials project 4.8 million visitors this summer, expecting roughly $2.6 billion in spending statewide, as detailed in the summer tourism season overview. The Department of Business and Economic Affairs has been clear that the goal is not just volume but distribution: ensuring that visitor dollars reach businesses across all regions, not just the most-trafficked destinations. That goal has added urgency given recent data showing New Hampshire workers are losing ground economically even as broad economic indicators look positive.

Richardson Farm as a Model

The choice of Richardson Farm as the launch site reflects a broader philosophy about what the trail is supposed to celebrate. Jim Richardson’s operation is not a franchise or a chain. It is a multi-generation farming family that made ice cream a central product because it connects the farm’s dairy output directly to the consumer in a form that people enjoy and remember.

This is the kind of business that tourism marketing at its best can genuinely support, because it has something to offer that no chain replication can provide: specificity. Richardson’s ice cream tastes like Richardson Farm because it is made there, from the dairy raised there, by the people who work there. The same is true of the other 68 stops on the trail. The variation across 69 locations is not a weakness; it is the point.

Governor Ayotte has made the Ice Cream Trail a visible part of her summer tourism outreach, fitting into a broader framing of the Granite State as a place defined by local authenticity rather than branded experiences. That framing is not new to New Hampshire tourism: the state has always leaned on its rural character and local independence as selling points, but the Ice Cream Trail gives it a concrete, participatory form that visitors can engage with directly.

Cross-State Tourism and Small Business Impact

For the 69 participating businesses, the trail represents a guaranteed mention in state marketing materials, a spot on the official Visit NH map, and inclusion in the passport that travelers will carry with them across the state. For a small creamery in a town that does not otherwise appear in tourism brochures, that visibility has real value.

The trail also creates connections between businesses that might not otherwise have a relationship with each other. A visitor who completes the passport is, in a sense, a customer that all 69 stops share. The competitive logic that usually separates small businesses gives way, on the trail, to a collective interest in keeping visitors moving from stop to stop.

The economic multiplier effect of that movement is not trivial. A traveler who stops at Moose Alley Cones in Pittsburg does not drive there and back in a single trip. They stay somewhere overnight, eat at local restaurants, buy gas, shop. The ice cream is the anchor for an economic event that extends well beyond the $5 or $6 cone.

New Hampshire tourism officials are counting on that dynamic to play out across all 69 stops between now and October 18. Whether it does depends in part on how effectively the trail is marketed, how smoothly the passport process works, and whether the weather cooperates for the shoulder-season stops in September and October. But the infrastructure is in place. The launch at Richardson Farm was the starting pistol. The race, for small businesses across the state, runs for the next five months.

How many stops are on the 2026 New Hampshire Ice Cream Trail?

The 2026 New Hampshire Ice Cream Trail has 69 stops, spread across all of the state's major tourism regions from the seacoast to Pittsburg in the far north.

How do you complete the New Hampshire Ice Cream Trail?

Visitors collect passport stamps at participating stops. Completing 58 or more stops and submitting the passport by October 18, 2026 makes you eligible for prizes including T-shirts and "Made in New Hampshire" gift bags. More information is available at visitnh.gov.

Where was the 2026 Ice Cream Trail launched?

Governor Kelly Ayotte launched the trail at Richardson Farm in Boscawen on May 21, 2026, the day before Memorial Day weekend.

When does the New Hampshire Ice Cream Trail end?

The 2026 trail runs through October 18, 2026, which is also the deadline to submit completed passports for prize eligibility.

Where can I find the full list of Ice Cream Trail stops?

The complete list of participating shops and an entry form to redeem prizes is available at visitnh.gov/things-to-do/food-drink/ice-cream-trail.

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