Building an Ice Cream Empire With a Beat-up Truck and a Few Good Friends

Michael Mendenhall: Welcome to PeopleForce Podcast by TriNet. I'm your host, Michael Mendenhall. TriNet is a full-service HR solutions company, empowering small to medium-size businesses by supporting their growth and enabling their people. We work with amazing small to medium-size businesses and I'm excited to bring their voices to life here. You can catch episodes of PeopleForce Podcast every month on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and Rise.TriNet.com.

Today we're delving into the fascinating story of Ben Van Leeuwen, the innovative mind behind the wildly successful Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. From its humble beginnings in a Brooklyn apartment to its now iconic status nationwide, Ben's company has redefined the frozen treat industry with a commitment to quality ingredients, sustainable practices and bold flavors. Van Lewen Ice Cream has captured the hearts and the taste buds of dessert lovers everywhere. Join us as we uncover the secrets behind Ben's entrepreneurial success and his deliciously inspiring story.

Ben, thank you for being here. So, Ben, welcome. Thank you. How exciting. Here in New York City.

Ben Van Leeuwen: I know. So beautiful day.

Michael: Yeah. So you didn't have any ice cream this morning, did you?

Ben: I did not have ice cream today.

Michael: Yeah. But you know what I, what I wanna do is, I wanna go back because your parents certainly must have had some influence because you growing up were like an entrepreneur all the way back in high school, and I want to talk about that. And it had to do with Oakley sunglasses and what you were doing to build an enterprise already in high school. So, so, so what influence did they have first your parents on you that got you into this idea of becoming a business person at a pretty young age?

Ben: I think my, my father is entrepreneurial serial entrepreneur, but he either influenced me subconsciously, or it wasn't influenced, I actually believe it's DNA. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's nature, not nurture there. I just had a desire to start businesses since I was very, very young.

Michael: To make money.

Ben: To make money, yeah. To make a living. And my first venture was selling fake Oakley sunglasses that I would buy in Chinatown. I got to Chinatown on the Metro North, north train from Greenwich, Connecticut. So I was 11 years old doing this, taking the subways, going to Chinatown. I didn't sell them as real Oakleys. I bought them for five bucks a pair and brought them to my middle school and sold them for $10. And my mother, who, you know, grew up and went to Catholic school and was very well-behaved, immediately called the principal and said, "Hey, is it okay that he's doing this?" And they said, "No, absolutely not." And she put an end to the business.

Michael: Oh. Now, you have siblings. Were they in on this too? Did they start to see the money and like…

Ben: They were not. So they're all older than me, five, seven and nine years older. So they were, you know, somewhere in college by time.

Michael: Ah. Oh, that's awesome.

Ben: I think I am the most, I mean, we're, we're all entrepreneurs, but I think I'm maybe the most entrepreneurial.

Michael: So, so from there, you're gonna go to college. So now what did you decide at that point? Like, I want to go in, I'm gonna go for a business degree, I want, I wanna learn more about this, or no, you had some other endeavor that you were pursuing.

Ben: I, my senior year of high school, I saw an advertisement in the local newspaper, and it said, "Drive an ice cream truck. Earn $500 a week." And I responded to that ad and ended up renting an ice cream truck for the entire summer buying ice cream. So that was sort of an entrepreneurial venture. I did that two summers. So after the first summer, I went to college for a year at University of San Francisco. Wasn't happy there, wasn't really happy being in school. And I said, I'm not going back to college. I'm gonna save up money and I'm gonna travel the world. So that next summer I saved almost $40,000. This was in 2000.

Michael: This is, this is the Good Humor.

Ben: This is the Good Humor truck.

Michael: And, and it had the bell.

Ben: It had the bell, it had the songs. And I would drive around, you know, Riverside, old Greenwich, Greenwich, Connecticut, you know, stopping in front of the family's homes who I knew had kids who wanted ice cream and just ring. I can't imagine how annoying that must have been for the parents.

Michael: And was it, it was the music that you were…

**Ben:**It was the music, yeah. It's no shame.

Michael: Is there a company that leases this to you? Or is it something you, they hire you to drive the truck?

Ben: They leased it to me and I bought the ice cream from them, marked it up and sold it.

Michael: Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. So now you have the 40 grand.

Ben: So this $40 grand. And I said, I'm not going back to college. I wanna travel. So I took that money and I went to Europe with no plan, traveled throughout Europe for a few months. I went to Southeast Asia, I went back to Europe.

Michael: And now where in Europe did you go?

Ben: A lot of countries. Italy, Spain, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czechia, England, Sweden and Germany, Austria, you know, everywhere.

Michael: Were you tasting ice cream at that point, or no?

Ben: No. I mean, I'm, I'm sure I had ice cream, but I ice cream was not on my mind. What was, what I was being affected by was, you know, being in a place, particularly like Southern Europe and Southeast Asia, where good food was such an integral part of the culture and not something reserved for cosmopolitan folks.

Michael: Is this, is this where you sort of got into the healthier part of food, like the more natural part of food is when you were traveling there? Or was that later?

Ben: I think it, I think it was a combination of that. And that was from my parents too. You know, both of my parents cooked a lot. They loved cooking. And there was, there were really no processed foods in the house. Not in sort of a health, you know, focused way, but more in a, we make everything from scratch because it's better. We're not getting fast food. There's no, you know, crappy sugar cereals. We were allowed to get one sugar cereal a year on our birthday. And I never liked it. You know, I didn't like soda. So I think because of them, yeah, because of how they cooked, which by the way would be, you know, nothing compared to the quote unquote foodies of today. But they just…

Michael: Now, our now ours, when I was growing up, it was, we couldn't, they couldn't afford that. So everything was homemade. Everything was from scratch.

Ben: Which is so much more luxurious.

Michael: Yeah. See now, yeah, we were, we were like, well, they have that peanut butter and fluff and we can't get that.

Ben: Thank goodness.

Michael: No, no. Yeah. So we, we didn't have soda. We didn't, and our birthday, we got to go to McDonald's. That was a big treat. But anyhow. So, so now you come back and you decide what you were 24, I think.

Ben: Come back, I go to college. I major in business.

Michael: Now what? What college are you in?

Ben: Skidmore College. Okay. Saratoga Springs, New York. I was… I was hell-bent, or I won't say hell-bent, 'cause if I was hell-bent, I probably would've succeeded. I was eager to get a high paying job in finance because I wanted to make a good living and survive. And my sister, Jenny Van Leeuwen Harrington, who's on CNBC every week now as a, you know, very successful investor, had worked in finance. And I really looked up to her and I thought, wow, I wanna do that. And I said, Jenny, can you please get me one of those jobs? And you know, in so many words, she said, you have a 2.9 GPA. You never did an internship. No, that's not how it works. I can't get you one of those jobs. And throughout that process of, you know, I think going into the city and having lunch with my sister, my senior year of college, I saw a Mr. Softy truck, and…

Michael: Now we're back to the trucks.

Ben: We're back to the trucks. And I thought, why don't I build an ice cream truck and make my own ice cream and sell it off of this truck? And that was a birth of the idea.

Michael: So, we'll get to, so this is… you’re 20 what? 24?

Ben: 22, 23. At this point, when the idea came, yeah.

Michael: So, so now you have to have funds ‘cause you actually went on eBay and bought a truck.

Ben: Yes. So, but before that it was writing a business plan. This was my senior year of college. I was graduating. I ended up working restaurants for about nine months as I wrote the business plan. And I wanted to raise a quarter of a million dollars, which I actually thought would be easy because of where I grew up. There are a lot of wealthy folks, and I thought, I can just talk to some of them, and that'll be easy. Not a single one of the wealthy folks that I knew invested. In the end, it was a college professor, Christian Bramer. It was a lot of my friends. My dad put a little bit in, but we only raised $60,000 to start a retail food business in New York City. That was vertically, you know, integrated manufacturing, you know, shipping the ice cream from upstate New York down New York. I can't believe we did it for that. I mean, I can barely like buy the equipment for one store with $60,000 today. So we started in a very scrappy way, and we took that $60,000 and ran off that for 10 years. So we didn't put more new capital into the business until 10 years in.

Michael: But, but… So you were generating a profit then at some point early on? That was early on.

Ben: Early on. Super profitable. You know, the business was myself, you know, my best friend and business partner, Laura O'Neill, and my brother, Peter. And that was it. The three of us were running the trucks. We had two part-time helpers on the trucks. We were doing the bookkeeping, you know, I mean…

Michael: Well, talk to me about buying the truck on eBay. You had your $60,000. You're buying a truck.

Ben: Yeah. So a new truck before you turned it into an ice cream truck would've been like $70,000. So that wasn't in the cards. So we went on eBay and somehow we determined that a, you know, that a Chevrolet P30 step van is what you used to make an ice cream truck. You know, I went on eBay and I must have put that model in, and some trucks popped up. And, you know, I bought one site unseen. I think it was in Pennsylvania or upstate New York. And I don't remember how somehow I got this truck shipped to Truck Yard in Queens, you know, for probably another 400 bucks in those days. Yeah, it was so, everything was so much less expensive. And then we retrofitted it into an ice cream truck, which was about $30,000. But we paid for this truck, $2,500 on eBay. So it was, it was beat up, it broke down a lot. I mean, almost constantly. And it was an incredible headache.

Michael: Do you still have it? You didn't keep it as a part of your archives?

Ben: Sadly. No. I, I think the reason we didn't keep it is because, you know, the places where we have trucks in New York and LA, it probably costs $1,500 a month to, you know, store a truck.

Michael: Oh, yeah.

Ben: Yeah. So we just had to sell everything.

Michael: So, so now you have to get into, what is it we're gonna make? We got the truck, now we gotta make the ice cream. You have a great story around that. And I want to know if it's still the same recipe, because it was a Michelin star chef. So talk about how you developed that early on.

Ben: I had never made ice cream when I had the idea to start an ice cream company. One of my favorite cookbooks was Thomas Keller's “Bouchon,” and mostly a savory cookbook, but there was a recipe for vanilla ice cream. I don't remember what drew me to that recipe. I somehow determined, though, before I'd even tried making ice cream, that good ice cream was going to be a custard. And a good custard was gonna have a lot of heavy cream and a lot of egg yolks. So I think I used the recipe in that book, which had a lot of heavy cream and egg yolks and whole vanilla beans as a guide. So we made that ice cream and right away we said, wow, this, honestly, we said, this is really easy. You know, making fine breads or beers or wines or cheeses is not easy. You know, you need…

Michael: Yeah.

Ben: It takes years of practice and expertise making ice cream. If the formula's right and you don't overcook it and you freeze it quickly, you're gonna have awesome ice cream. And the simplicity of the process really excited us because we said, wow, we can scale this. We can use these, you know, pistachios from Bronte, Sicily, and these whole vanilla beans and not put any stabilizers in it. And we can make, you know, a thousand servings a day. Or if we get really big, we can make a million servings a day and it will be this good. So if you, did I answer you? I forgot what the original question.

Michael: Yeah, no, we, we were talking about the vanilla.

Ben: The vanilla. So, so we made the vanilla and we said, wow, this is really good. And we, I think, or I should say I know, that if you're an ice cream shop that's worth anything, you're gonna have an amazing vanilla, right? Don't go onto the flavors with lots of chunks and flavors before you've mastered that. Right? You know, it would be like, if I started a new car company and the car looked really cool, but it had like a mediocre chassis and engine. You know, it's like, it's not actually special. Yeah. So the base needs to be really, really good. So we spent, you know, we made the recipe outta that cookbook and then we spent months and months sort of applying that recipe to other flavors. So pistachio, for example, is a flavor we love and we talk about a lot. And those pistachios come from Bronte, Sicily, but when you add pistachios to ice cream, you're adding paste. So it's like peanut butter, but made with pistachios. And there's a lot of fat in there. So you actually have to lower the cream. So you're changing the base formula a little bit.

Michael: Oh wow. So, so who, who does that? That's a lot of chemistry going on there.

Ben: Yeah, I, I did that. I think I'm, again, it seems, again, relative to other, you know, food products, it seems pretty simple to me. You're just balancing fat, sugar, solids, tasting of course. Seeing if it tastes as the sort of formulas and the attributes, which are fat, sugar, solids say it should. So there's a lot of, a lot of testing, a lot of tasting. But your question was, are, are the recipes the same today? They're actually better. You know, we've gotten much better at it. So we actually use…

Michael: You have this one that I, I saw on your website, the evil something or other, it's got green and something else in its name for monster or something.

Ben: That was the Lizard Lunch.

Michael: Lizard Lunch. Lizard Lunch. What is a lizard lunch?

Ben: So, Lizard Lunch was a matcha green tea ice cream swirled with a spirulina-colored ice cream. The spirulina-colored ice cream has cake frosting flavor in it, a natural flavor, and then chunks of our homemade Oreo cookies. So there are Oreo cookies, because there's no hydrogenated oils, there's no palm oil.

Michael: Oh, wow.

Ben: There's no artificial vanilla. There's Ecuadorian chocolate.

Michael: Chocolate. So you're baking stuff too?

Ben: We're contract manufacturing that. But every, we used to bake everything in house, but we, we couldn't scale that. But everything is made to our spec. So…

Michael: How did you get the name for that?

Ben: For…

Michael: That ice cream.

Ben: Lizard Lunch? That was a collaboration with an Adam Sandler movie on Netflix. The star of the movie as a lizard. It's a great label.

Michael: I guess kids would go for that. I want the lizard. Come on.

Ben: It was very popular.

Michael: So anyhow, so now I thought what was very interesting is if we go back to the first cart, the yellow cart in Soho, your first day, huge lines. And a Whole Foods guy comes up and he says to you, “Hey, are you selling this commercially?” And what did you say? And what did you do at that point? Because now you're talking scale, right?

Ben: Yes. We said, I mean, no, but we are very excited. We love to, you know. And year one, we were so excited and I almost wanna say not insecure, but you know, we, we weren't sure of ourselves. So we just said, we're gonna say “yes” to absolutely everything. Everything. And we're gonna bend over backwards to make sure we are able to execute on any opportunity that comes around.

Michael: So tell me how that then progressed from that guy saying, oh, oh, great. Okay.

Ben: So that was our, I mean, that was our first wholesale business. Right? Selling to Whole Foods in New York City.

Michael: Well, how, and I mean, you've got that scale. So now you're like, oh god, we gotta like…

Ben: The challenge was just, you know, we are putting the ice cream instead of into three-gallon tubs now into, you know, in those days, 16 ounce pots. Now we're at 14 ounces. But the bigger challenge was a challenge that we weren't aware of at the time. And to really win in the wholesale business, or CPG, as some people call it, or retail as others call it, you need to put a ton of marketing spend behind it. We believed, you know, this was 16 years ago, that if you made a really distinctly good product and simply put it on the shelves, the market would sort of do the rest and your product would blow up. And it always did fine. But until we started investing in wholesale, that business grew very, very slowly.

Michael: So if I'd said, what's your purpose then? 'Cause when you get into sort of the, you know, you know this more direct sale and you're using marketing advertising as you go to market, you know, you've gotta really have a sense of purpose around your brand. What would that be for Van Leeuwen?

Ben: So, I'll first tell you what our mission is—to make good ice cream that makes you feel good. But what that means in a, in a sort of longer way is we want to make distinctly good ice cream that's better than what is on the market. And we wanna be able to sort of define that beyond just the sort of marketing symbols we can slap on the front. You know, grass fed, fair trade. So we want it to truly be different. So to us, that means it's an 18%, 5% butter fat ice cream with 5% to 8% egg yolks and fantastic flavoring ingredients that we don't just say, “Hey, they're great.” We say, “This chocolate is from this region of Ecuador and that region of Ecuador grows great chocolate.”

Michael: So it's all about being good.

Ben: It's about being really good, but truly good. You know, good that if you strip away all the branding and marketing and you're just eating a scoop of Van Leeuwen next to two of our competitors, we, we hope and think you would say, “Wow, I don't know. I don't, I don't see anything, but this is better.”

Michael: What would the personality be of your brand? It has a personality.

Ben: It would be, I mean, it would be kind of an obnoxious foodie, you know, out of the show Portlandia, where you are asking about where the, you know, eggs are from and where the chocolate's from. And that's me. And that doesn't really work to broadly market to the market.

Michael: No, but, but the reason I say that is 'cause you've expanded into retail. I mean, you've got stores all over the place. Talk to us about where you started. What was the first store? Where was it, how you expanded, certainly in the New York metropolitan area, but now you're in multiple states. So talk about that piece. And then I wanted to come back to your mission and the idea of who you are because who you employ as the person behind that counter is your brand and how you maintain your sense of culture around your company with who you hire. So talk about first the first store, how you expanded 'cause you're certainly doing the commercial thing, and then your employee base.

Ben: So first store was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We had about 120 square feet. It was a teeny store, so very hard to operate in. But it was a relief going from trucks to stores because it was always in the right place. The water was always working. There was always power. So, and, and it did a lot more revenue because of, compared to a truck. We started expanding the stores immediately. And what we found, but sort of back to the brand personality and mission, as I was just talking about how our personality would be this sort of foodie ingredient obsessed personality that matters if it's going to create a really, really, really yummy product. So I think the new personality, or not the new personality, but the distillation of that is make incredibly yummy ice cream.

Now what works is that when you're obsessed with ingredients and try to make really good stuff, if you focus that in the right way, it will make yummier ice cream. Right? If you try to be interesting, not yummy, then it's probably not gonna work. Right? So we've practiced that for years and gotten better at figuring out that the wild Himalayan licorice ice cream, while it might be exciting to me, isn't gonna move, but if you make a really good cookies and cream, people will get that. Right? And if you introduce millions of Americans to Sicilian pistachios, that's sort of a cool example of this special flavor that people don't think about. That they say, “Wow, I didn't know how much I like pistachio ice cream.”

Michael: Okay, now we need a pint of that. Now.

Ben: Exactly. And, and then you were asking about the, the team in the stores. That is the most important part. You know, we look at retail as a triangle, you know, three aspects. You have environment, what does the store look like? Where is the store? You have product that's the ice cream. And then you have service, mediocre environment, mediocre product, incredible service is gonna probably make you walk out and have a good experience. Amazing product, amazing environment, mediocre service. You're probably gonna say, “I'm never wanna come back there.” So we though, I'm obsessed with making great ice cream, I believe service is the most important part. How do you do that? I mean, it's never ending, right? It's practice. It's trying to build a culture.

Michael: Yeah. What do you do? You do things like, I know initially when they did Starbucks and it was smaller, they bring all of them together. They'd rah-rah, you know, here's what we're doing, here's where we're going and they got to meet each other, et cetera. And it really became almost a family sort of culture around the baristas and stuff. Do you do things like that?

Ben: We bring the general managers and up together. I mean, at least on a monthly basis. Not, not physically together. But we do Zooms with every GM and the entire retail operations team. From HR to ops, to op services, to maybe supply chains.

Michael: Were you always remote? Fully remote?

Ben: No, we're, we're not fully remote. But, but the general managers in, you know, we have California, Colorado, Texas. I mean, we don't have the resources to fly everyone out once a month to be together. But how do we try to achieve basically an environment where people are nice and happy and providing great service? You know, my partners and I, you know, we don't have MBAs, so we we're not trained in how to build a culture. What we always tried to do is just to be nice and not be jerks, which didn't actually work that well. What we found is that combined with bringing in highly trained, experienced operators was a recipe for pretty good culture. You know, very, very low turnover. Happy people.

Michael: Yeah. I was gonna say, your attrition's lower and…

Ben: And it should be, we're selling ice cream. So what we say is, it's really easy to provide good service and make people happy. 'cause when someone walks into an ice cream store, their baseline's already pretty high. They're doing something that's fun, that's gonna make them feel even better, you know, with very little utility to the action. Other than, I wanna feel happy in this moment.

Michael: Well, so how many employees do you have?

Ben: It fluctuates a lot winter to summer. Now we're probably at like 1,100 by this July we should be at 2,000.

Michael: Oh, wow.

Ben: So it's a combination of how many states? Seasonality, how many states? We are in seven states today, opening three more this year. So this year we're opening Massachusetts, Florida and Las Vegas, Nevada.

Michael: Wow. Now, now are you gonna, are there any expansions in the product? Like you're selling ice cream, it's in pints and things. Are we gonna get like, you know, little Popsicle type?

Ben: We actually do sell novelties as well. So we have chocolate dipped bars, chocolate dipped vegan bars. We have cookie sandwiches prepackaged, but very limited distribution on all of that stuff. And we are soon launching a swirl bar, which is a non-dipped bar, which is two flavors swirled into one. So like a sweet cream swirled with a cold brew coffee.

Michael: Oh, that's awesome. There's this great place. And I took our executive team in our company. We had gone to dinner. I go, don't order dessert, because across the way is this dairy. And they've been doing this for, I forget how many, well over like 70 years, whatever. It's very well known. It's soft ice cream, but it's the most unbelievable. Like it's all natural.

Ben: It's soft serve. Oh yeah.

Michael: The line you could drive through. I've never seen it without massive lines. It was in the Food Network. They covered this.

Ben: Oh, cool. Where is it?

Michael: It's in Pleasanton, California.

Ben: California, okay. I haven't been there.

Michael: It's Meadowlark Dairy.

Ben: I'll look it up.

Michael: And it's a dairy and they sell milk there, but they have this soft ice cream, which is not typical with all the air and stuff. It is unbelievable.

Ben: Oh my gosh. I mean, I love soft serves. So I'm gonna try it.

Michael: No, you have to. Meadowlark. But anyhow, I think it's similar. It's very… really well done. It's not like preservatives and things like that. So, so with that, you've gone from 60,000 to well over a hundred million and you have a lot of sort of full-time and part-time. Talk to us about how important, when you build your culture, are the benefits that you provide to those employees so that they don't, that they stay with you. That you, you've built an environment with a benefit package that's important to them.

Ben: Yeah. I mean, benefits are extremely important. Then the internal communications to make sure everyone understands them, knows how to take advantage of them is really important too. So A, your package needs to be good, right? Needs to be competitive, ideally better than our competitors. B, you need to make sure everyone understands what it is and how they can use it. And then three, it's having a responsive HR department. Which is huge. So we respond, I mean, again, there's gonna be 2,000 employees this summer, but we reply to every single email, text, call that any employee has…

Michael: Do you, do you offer multiple choices in benefits? Like here's, you know, you could do this, this, or this?

Ben: For health insurance? We do offer multiple choices.

Michael: It was interesting 'cause we just partnered with Healthee, two E’s at the end, and it's an Israeli-based company and they're using AI and they plug in who you are. You know, do you have dependents, ages, you know, all of your basic statistics. And it actually uses AI to tell you what you need, what you should purchase in your healthcare. So that you're, you're buying the right plans. So if you have multiple plans, we use that you can get confused.

Ben: That’s awesome. I mean, it's honestly confusing to me when I choose. I'm like, no, am I wasting money?

Michael: Well, no. What the problem is, every time, you know, you, you go to the next, you're like, is it the same or no, things have changed. What's changed? Like, you're not sure. Well, this, this does this. And we actually, I should tell you, we offer it to our customers.

Ben: Oh, awesome. Offer that. We'll try it if, if we aren't already.

Michael: No. It's pretty amazing. So yeah. So they're using AI to do it because people get confused and most people over insure.

Ben: Most people over insure.

Michael: Yeah. You're, you're, you're, you're buying insurance that you probably don't need.

Ben: Right. I mean, I, I do think I pay more for my health insurance or the company pays more, far more than I spend every year. Yeah. So maybe I am over insured.

Michael: No, most of us I think do because you're, you're like, I just want where I can go wherever. And just get me that plan.

Ben: RRight. But it might be cheaper just to pay for wherever sometimes.

Michael: Correct.

Ben: And have the catastrophic plan.

Michael: Yeah. So, anyhow. Well that, that's awesome. So you, do you, as you expand, you'll probably expand beyond the 2,000. No? As you open up more of these retailers

Ben: Beyond the 2,000? Oh, beyond the 2,000 employees. Absolutely. I mean, we, this year we are, we started this year with 53 stores. We will end this year with over 80 stores. So we will have 80 stores by the end of 2024. We plan to open 40 stores in 2025. So we'll be at 120. And we hope to get to 500 stores in the U.S. by 2030 with additional franchising internationally that is happening.

Michael: Oh, wow.

Ben: Yeah. At the same time.

Michael: Wow. So, so the hundred million's going up per year.

Ben: Yeah. Absolutely.

Michael: Wow. That's, that's awesome. So, and with that, do you do any sort of national advertising? So like, out of home, like billboards or radio or what, what do you use as your tool to generate that interest when you go into a market?

Ben: Right now, to date, we have done very, very little marketing to support our national expansion in, in the CPG channel. When a new store opens, we do $1 ice cream scoops, we invite some influencers and that's pretty much it. And then we hope and anticipate that that store will generate interest and build unaided, what we call unaided brand awareness to help the wholesale channel.

Michael: That's, we, we look at; unaided and aided and top of mind. So, so the top of mind is we don't tell you anything, you just tell us. So you monitor all of that as well.

Ben: We're looking at that, what tells us how big the opportunities that are, our unaided brand awareness in the U.S. is extremely low. So the opportunity for velocities to go up in grocery stores, to for sales, to go up in new markets where we have scoop shops, we significant…

Michael: You could, you know… I interviewed Ryan Reynolds and he has a marketing branding company and he, that's what he used for Mint Mobile and all those fun commercials. Now he's doing it for some other things. And, and it's very clever and you're very engaged and some of it's a little irreverent. And I could see him, his company working on an idea for you that would be quite unique relative to your personality.

Ben: We're looking for marketing agencies. So because we spend, we…

Michael: You should check. It's small, but, but very clever. And with the personality you said that you're creating, I think they would have some great ideas for you. Just

Ben: So to give you the, the metric on it, we spend less than 1% of our revenue on marketing. So it's very, very low.

Michael: Well, well, you look at Mint Mobile, I mean, look at what he did. And that was all through his clever, you know, the, the clever ads that he was doing. And he sold it for what, a billion-three to T-Mobile.

Ben: Pretty quickly too.

Michael: Yeah. Well, he, and now he's working on, but he does it for, he had some of the Super Bowl commercials. I mean funny. Really clever. Very clever ideas. So he does big brand, small brands.

Ben: I'll look into that. Thank you.

Michael: But you could see where that, that could go with your, your ideas around who you are as a company. But it's, it's great to see, you know, it was what, two years ago we interviewed you at PeopleForce?

Ben: Was that two years ago? Oh wow.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. And, and the growth you've had has been remarkable. Really remarkable. And it has to feel very good. And it, it's exciting to see. That's why we wanted to have you back on, on the podcast because it's like, wow, here they are. And now you just looked at what your projections are for the next couple years. That's massive. And I hope you keep introducing cool new flavors.

Ben: We will. Yeah. We're also, we're opening a consumer-facing innovation laboratory in Brooklyn this fall, which I'm very excited about, which I'll spend a few days a week at. So we will be making dozens and dozens of special flavors every month and serving them out of that shop.

Michael: And then if it takes off, you'll expand it.

Ben: Yeah.

Michael: Oh, that's clever.

Ben: 'Cause what we've seen as we've gotten bigger, the pace of innovation slows. You make a flavor, you're nine months out on getting into the scoop shops. And we want to get back to that, you know, instant reactivity.

Michael: Oh, so the scale, the scale you sort of get comfortable. Like just keep producing that it's doing well.

Ben: Right. And here we can say, let's make a Tanzanian chocolate sorbet and let's see how it does. And we have the idea. And we make it the next day and it's selling that day.

Michael: Now do you, do you employ chefs or people that help you do that?

Ben: So we have a commercialization team, pastry chefs, and also folks who have expertise in commercializing, which means how do we take this flavor, take this chocolate-dipped bar and make it as a factory.

Michael: Those have to be fun meetings.

Ben: They're the most, my favorite meetings are real estate meetings, design meetings for the scoop shops and product ability.

Michael: No, certainly the real estate. But I was telling you about, hey, on West Broadway, I saw all these stores that were… He's already, you were already on with the real estate agent saying, “Hey.”

Ben: Yeah. Voice dictating to Emily.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Emily, there's stuff available down there. No, that's awesome. Well, that's, congratulations. Thanks. I mean, what, what a great success story, a great career, but also something that's fun and creative and innovative. And I think that's, that's what's so interesting is when you get in there and you start to play with things, you know, it's never old. It's always new. And that becomes exciting.

Ben: Yeah. And that's what keeps me going*—*thecreative aspects of it. If it was just the business operations, which I do find interesting, I couldn't do it. You know, I got into this because I love, I love cooking and I love hospitality.

Michael: So now what does your sister say? About, about the success of all of this. Like, I couldn't get that job in finance, but…

Ben: Right. Everyone in, you know, our family's proud of Van Leeuwen. It's a fun business to be associated with. It's ice cream, right? And it gets, it probably gets attention that outsizes its size, right? If you're in the ice cream business, people wanna talk about you, whether you have one shop or a thousand. So they, they love it and yeah.

Michael: Oh, that's awesome. Well, listen, thank you for joining us.

Ben: Thank you, Michael.

Michael: I mean, this was exciting. I know you're busy traveling as well, and it was great to have you in the studio and tell your story 'cause I think it's inspiring for people. You know, most of these businesses don't come without the hurdles, without the stress. I mean, you started trying to raise $250,000, you raised $60, and you're like, we're gonna make that work for 10 years. I mean, wow.

Ben: It was really hard. And, and I'll, I'll leave you at this too, because I imagine there are some aspiring entrepreneurs listening. What we do is not brilliant. We make ice cream, we use a lot of cream, a lot of eggs, and good ingredients. We haven't reinvented the wheel. So why has it worked? Why have we been able to go from a beat-up old ice cream truck to, you know, almost a hundred stores and 2,000 employees and selling in 15,000 grocery stores? And this might sound cliche, but it is the two things. It's perseverance, number one, and it's just trying to do a good job. But the perseverance is what makes it work in the long run. Because over the last 15 years, particularly that first 10 years, you know, when we were just going off the $60,000, there were dozens of moments where it would've been so easy and even reasonable to throw up your hands and say, this is just too much. You know, I mean, driving our, you know, beat up old Subaru from truck to truck, from store to store in the middle of winter, clearing out the cash registers of everything but $10 in change so we could make payroll. You know, and this happened multiple times, and the amount of stress that comes with that is massive. I couldn't do it again at this age, you know. I could do it when I was much younger.

Michael: Is that right?

Ben: Yeah. But, but, but that's, you know, one example.

Michael: But I, but I think it's, it's not only the perseverance though, it's about being innovative in the idea that this is all gonna be good. We want it good. Yes. We want it, it feels healthier, more interesting and more innovative.

Ben: The product's gotta be there. You've gotta have a good, you know, compelling product, but that won't work without the perseverance. I think if you start with, you know, $35 million, you probably don't need as much perseverance. But when you start the way, I think almost every entrepreneur in this country starch was, which is in a scrappy way…

Michael: You, you have, don't you?

Ben: We have a cookbook. Yeah. Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream.

Michael: Yes, you do. I remember this.

Ben: It’s a good book.

Michael: And, and so you can make your own.

Ben: Absolutely. Yeah. It's so, it's delicious.

Michael: That's awesome. Yeah. I remember you, you, you, yeah. You had them when we had you on the show. Yeah, well, so you all can go out, get the cookbook. What is it again?

Ben: It's called Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream.

Michael: Okay. So on Amazon.

Ben: On Amazon.

Michael: So they can all go out and try to make some of this.

Ben: Yes.

Michael: Yeah. Very exciting. All right. Well, Ben, thank you so much for being here.

Ben: Thank you, Michael. Yeah, this great. It's really terrific.

Michael: And we wish you well. And thank you, by the way, for being a TriNet customer.

Ben: Absolutely. Yeah.

Michael: I want to remind everybody that our PeopleForce Podcast by TriNet is committed to helping small and medium-size businesses and their leaders with timely and relevant business content. The PeopleForce Podcast drops new episodes every month and we hope you continue catching our new episodes on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and Rise.TriNet.com. To get relevant SMB news and info, make sure you subscribe to our podcast and to our newsletter at TriNet.com/insights.