How a summer job grew into an ice cream empire, with CEO Ben Van Leeuwen

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1:22I didn't really think it through. because I didn't have great grades. I'd done no internships. I really looked up to my sister. After college, she worked at Goldman Sachs. So I said, Jenny, can you help me get a job like one of the ones you had? And she's like, no. I can try, but it doesn't work that way. Ben Van Leeuwen left that meeting with his sister feeling discouraged. He'd graduated college, but he had no idea what to do with his life. Until. After meeting her one day in the city, I saw Mr. Softee truck. Mr. Softee, that classic New York City ice cream truck. I didn't have an idea in that moment.

2:04I made a decision in that moment. The decision? Build an ice cream business. Ben's favorite summer job as a teenager had been driving an ice cream truck. What if that was his calling all along? He scraped together just enough money to get started. We bought two used post office trucks on eBay. We found someone to retrofit them into ice cream trucks. You know, all the credit cards were maxed out. On day one, we probably had, you know,$500 in our bank accounts collectively. More than a decade later, Van Leeuwen is one of the fastest growing dessert brands in America. In 2025, we started with 70 corporate-owned scoop shops.

2:47We'll actually grow 50 % on our scoop shop footprint this year. Wholesale is in 15 ,000 doors. By July, we'll hit about 2 ,000 total team members. So growing rapidly.

3:10You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working at a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it.

3:41This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, a conversation with the CEO and co-founder of Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, Ben Van Leeuwen. He's the mad scientist behind the company's wildest flavors. You may have seen their viral Kraft Mac and Cheese or Hidden Valley Ranch ice creams online. And also its incredibly delicious approach to classics. The New York Times Wirecutter called its vanilla the very best on the market. fair warning, this episode might make you drool. Ben, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you. I love your product. It is so much fun for me when I get to have a conversation with a founder who has started a company I just love.

4:26So starting an ice cream company is not the obvious path for every entrepreneur. Take me back. Where did this come from? Where did the entrepreneurial drive come from? Entrepreneurial drive, I think it's in my blood. My dad has been a serial entrepreneur. S-E-R-I-A-L, not C-E-R-E-A-L. Yes, yes. Since he was in high school. So yeah, I think it's part of my DNA. But Van Loon Ice Cream actually came from my first summer job before college. That was the impetus. I drove a Good Humor Ice Cream truck where I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and I loved it. I loved the hospitality aspect, interacting with people.

5:06the product itself was pre-packaged strawberry shortcake bars which actually van lewin makes a van lewin version of that now which is really good i was always partial to the good humor chocolate eclair bars those were those were my favorites yeah really good i did that for two summers after the second summer of doing that i decided i didn't want to go back to college i had saved up enough money from driving that truck to go backpacking throughout europe and Southeast Asia. But that was a very formative experience. And the decision to do that kind of changed the course of my entire life because it wasn't a rational decision, like especially having grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut.

5:48But that path there, at least the way I saw it was you go to the best college you can, you get the best grades you can, and you hopefully get a job in finance, right? I never had great grades, maybe 2.8, 2.9 GPA. So when I decided to go travel, you know, it was sort of the opposite of that path. And I wanted friends to come along with me. I didn't want to go alone. Like I'm a really social person. I don't do well on my own, but all of my friends were like, no, no, Ben, we can't do that. You know, this is, it's going to look so bad on our resumes to take a year off college. And I was like, but I want to do it.

6:23So I think the lesson there was like, go with what attracts you. I guarantee you if I didn't go on that trip, I wouldn't have started an ice cream company. Why not? A, it was formative in like learning about food and learning about really good ingredients. But more than that, why is Van Leeuwen going to open its hundredth store this year? Not because we're brilliant, not because we came up with an incredibly novel product. It's really good ice cream. It's the way any good, well-trained pastry chef would make ice but van lewen's going to open their hundred store this year and we're going to be the almost biggest artisanal ice cream company in the u.s the biggest consumer market on earth simply because we decided to do it yeah i mean i think there's a lot to be said for it's not just making a decision it's making a decision that flies in the face of everything you've been raised to do you've seen around you the definition of success around you it sounds like you really just listened to what was inside of you totally so on that trip through europe through southeast Asia.

7:20What did you learn about food and ingredients? And then what'd you learn about yourself? I remember going to the first grocery store I'd ever been to in Italy, and it wasn't a fancy grocery store. They don't really have fancy grocery stores there. Yet every grocery store is almost as fancy as the fanciest store in America. Because I always say there's no foodies in Italy, it's just Italian. Yes, you care about your olive oil and your cheese and the quality of your pasta. And that, without even realizing it, then I was like, it was so exciting to me that food, this thing you do three times a day, which is something I was excited about, is normal to be excited about in other places and to care about and to put a lot of time into, into, you know, value, you know, in a really high way, right?

8:11Because I value it a lot. I mean, my food experience is every day. It's like, you know, some of the most important parts of my day is eating and what am I going to eat? So I learned a lot about that there. So you came back to the States from your travels. At what point did you say, we're really going to do this? I'm going to launch an ice cream truck. I came back to the States. I went to college. I finished college. I really looked up to my sister. After college, she worked at Goldman Sachs, then she worked at Neuberger Berman, then she started her own private wealth management firm. And I looked up to Jenny because she was really responsible and she made a good living.

8:48And I said, I want to do that. And I didn't really think it through because I didn't have great grades. I'd done no internships. So I said, Jenny, can you help me get a job like one of the ones you had? And she's like, no, I can try, but it doesn't work that way. and after meeting her one day in the city, I saw Mr. Softee truck. I didn't have an idea in that moment. I made a decision in that moment. So that's where the decision piece comes in. I didn't say, oh, I have an idea to start an ice cream company. I said, oh, that's what I'm going to do. It was so clear and I was so excited. I saw this Mr.

9:20Softee truck and by the way, I don't think this was a great idea, but I said, I'm going to get an ice cream truck and I'm going to learn how to make ice cream and I'm going to find the best ingredients I can. Had you made ice cream before? Never. No, no history. No. So where do you even start then? Long before I had made ice cream, I started writing the business plan. His brother Pete and his then romantic partner, Laura O 'Neill loved the idea too. They became Ben's co-founders. And then once we had more confidence that we could do it, I said, okay, we better figure out how to make the ice cream.

9:58And I had Thomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook. There was a recipe for creme anglaise, which you can turn into vanilla ice cream in there. Right. And I made that and had a lot of cream and a lot of eggs. And what was really exciting about making that and tasting, we said, whoa, this is the best vanilla ice cream I've ever had. And it was really easy to make. And all it has is cream, eggs, sugar, milk, a little bit of sea salt and whole vanilla beans. Okay. And you put it in the freezer and it stays good for months or years. So we're like, whoa, you can make the best ice cream ever. And it's completely preservable.

10:34You don't need to add any weird stuff. Okay, so you've got a business plan. You've got a recipe for one ice cream. What's the leap to actually starting a company? Raising money, figuring out your supply chain, all of that. How'd you get from A to B there? For some reason, we came up with a quarter million is the number. Okay. be enough to buy a brand new Chevrolet truck, pay a lot to turn it into an ice cream truck, probably have a hundred thousand bucks on the balance sheet to get us through the first year or two if we weren't making money. And we set out to try to raise money and everybody said no.

11:12What were they telling you when they were saying no? What were you hearing? It's funny. It's such a way of not remembering anything that I don't love. I mean, I was annoyed by it and disappointed, but I wasn't discouraged. I was like, I'm hardworking. I have a good palate. I know I'm going to be able to sell ice cream off a truck and make money. You know, I know I'll be able to pay everyone back. So I just kept going, kept going. And I had this really beautiful business plan. It was 60 pages. And at this time I lived in Greenpoint with Laura O 'Neill, who at that time we were in a relationship.

11:43Now we're just co-founders and best friends on earth. I want to come back to that in a minute. So it was her and I, my brother, Peter, and our friend, one of my best friends, Ben Colombo, all living in this apartment on Driggs Avenue and McGinnis in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. So I got$2 ,500 here,$5 ,000 here,$15 ,000 from a college professor,$15 ,000 from one of Laura's best friends from Australia. My dad put in$25 ,000. So we cobbled together only$60 ,000. So we tried to raise$250 ,000. We only raised$60 ,000. And that was enough not to buy a new truck because just the new truck before you turned it into an ice cream truck would have been$70 ,000.

12:22We bought two used post office trucks on eBay. One was$5 ,000 on eBay. You bought them on eBay? We bought them on eBay. It was click, click, deliver it here. They were on a truck. And one was$2 ,500. One was$5 ,000. We found someone in Astoria, Queens to retrofit them into ice cream trucks. All the credit cards were maxed out, everything. Day one, we probably had$500 in our bank accounts collectively. What I find really striking about what we were able to do with$60 ,000 18 years ago is I have so much more experience now. I know so much more about business. I am 50 times more sophisticated in every business department.

13:07Yet I don't think I could do half of what I did then with$60 ,000 with even half a million dollars today. Why is that? It's a weird phenomenon. Yeah. I think part of it is age when you're that young, you know, there's a different kind of energy. Part of it is an age, but it's just the hunger and the pressure to have to do it. But I mean, what we accomplished with that, like the website we built, the graphic design we did. The marketing, the product development, I'm struck by how much we could do with so little. But I think this phenomenon, you know, you see it in business. This is why the Unilevers, the Nestles cannot do what we did, you know, cannot start it, even with all of the resources in the world.

13:50Like when you get big, your brain changes. You become good at running big organizations, but harder at starting something in a scrappy way. So you've got 60 grand, two trucks. You got 500 bucks left. How do you get to market? Getting to day one was hard. You needed a special permit to vend in New York City. Of course. A mobile vending permit. And are you manufacturing in a home kitchen at this point? We're manufacturing in a Copac or in upstate New York. Okay. Because we didn't have any money to buy these hundreds of thousands of dollars. And had you done recipe testing? Had you, like, where were you in your product development?

14:25incredibly extensive and exhaustive recipe testing. So we tested, for example, over 50 different chocolate recipes with 15 different kinds of chocolate, different levels of everyone. We narrowed it down to 10. So I think we had 10 chocolates that we loved. We had 10 vanillas, we had five mint chips, we had seven gingers, probably a hundred flavors. And we invited 50 people over to our apartment. This is the greatest party ever. Oh, it was awesome. And we had everybody fill out surveys. What do you like? What do you like? What do you like? So we did really, really rigorous, you know, market testing for no money.

15:04If Van Leeuwen were to attempt to do that now in a regular way, that, you know, that study would cost 30,$40 ,000. All right. So you're waiting on the permit. We're waiting on the permit. You've got a co-packing location upstate. Every week we're going to try to get the permit, but then the person doesn't show up. So it's really discouraging. And then finally, after six weeks of doing this, it's late June, it's almost July. So we missed those great spring months. You have four months of really, really good sales. And then finally, I think it was June 21st, we get our permit. And we are so excited.

15:39So we get the permit on this first truck and we parked on the corner of Green and Prince and Soho. And by the time we opened the window, there was like a line of 15 people. The truck looked really nice. It had this beautiful, solid butcher block counter. So it had a homier feel than most food trucks. And we were serving 10 flavors of ice cream. So Hudson Valley red currant, Sicilian pistachio, a really good Michel Cazel chocolate. And that was day one, but it worked, I think, because of the distinctness of the truck. And then people were happy to have a product, I think, that was so clean label, not because of the label red clean, but because I really still believe like the best ice cream is made with just milk cream, sugar, eggs, and, you know, a little bit of salt, but nothing else.

16:32Did you come back to that location the very next day? Did that become the truck location? That became the location for, I think, our first three or four years. It was green and prints every day from 10 a.m. till 5 p.m., 6 p.m., and then Soho would kind of die because it was mostly retail driven. Then we would drive up to University and 12th Street, University and 12th or 11th in Greenwich Village and stay there till midnight. Still ahead, how Ben Van Luen earned billions of media impressions with some seriously unexpected ice cream flavors.

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18:05And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the US can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization or PEO that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

18:49So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel.

19:10Van Luen started as a family business. Ben's co-founders were his brother, Pete, and his then-girlfriend, Laura O 'Neill. Ben and Laura got married the same week they started the company in 2008. They divorced a few years later, but they remain co-founders. She now describes him as a best friend and business soulmate. Let's talk about Laura for a second. You went on to marry Laura. Yes. We had Esther Perel on the show recently, and she talks about how 65 % of startups that fail, fail because of co-founder relationships falling apart. You and Laura ended up getting divorced, but you talk about her as your best friend.

19:50You've remained business partners. For a lot of people who are divorced, this is hard to imagine. How have you managed to make this work? I mean, it wasn't hard at all. It was effortless. I mean, we were very young when we got married. Laura's from Australia. But we wanted to continue running the business together. We were really excited about it. And we just continued being great friends and doing things together. Laura and her partner, Greg, were like my family. I have a four-year-old. I'm super close with her. I mean, we're best friends, but also like family. Was there a concern when you guys were separating on the personal side that would affect the business side?

20:31Zero concern. Wow. I do hear about the stories of founder Strife. Working with my brother, it's not always easy. With all that said, the three of us are so aligned in our work ethic and knowing that we're never going anywhere. Not because it's easy, right? You know, there's days where I'm like, is this worth it? Like, is it worth it trying to build, you know, 200 ice cream stores in the next two and a half years? But with that said, we're completely similar in our alignment on wanting to grow in our work ethic. I imagine that's what would make it hard. You know, if one founder said, you know, I'm going to take six months off and travel the world, which is awesome.

21:14Nothing wrong with that. But I think we're fortunate that there we're completely aligned. So there's never been a question of, is this person working hard? does this person want to grow it in this way? I mean, the problems I have with, you know, co-founders being my brother and Laura are that because we're so close, there's no filter, right? Generally the fights, particularly with Peter and I are over, I don't like the tone that you took in that email. And it's like, you know, we're really not fighting over the big stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Was it clear early on who would do what in this three-way partnership?

21:48No, no, no, no. So how did you sort that out? um how did we sort that out again i don't remember the hard stuff we kind of all did everything early on i always felt kind of silly saying ceo when we were like a little business with a few trucks i started calling myself the ceo and i don't know when we hit like a few hundred employees before that there were no titles just we're running the business we're the founders as we've grown, the responsibilities are delineated. With that said, it's pretty fluid. I mean, we're growing at 30 to 40 % a year. So nothing stays the same. The challenges change every year.

22:29Yeah. I mean, 30 to 40 % a year off of a pretty good size base now. How big is the business today? So in 2025, we started with 70 corporate owned scoop shops. We'll open 35 this year. So we'll actually grow 50 % on our scoop shop footprint this year. Wholesale is in 15 ,000 doors with over 50 SKUs. By July, we'll hit about 2 ,000 total team members. Most of those teams are in the retail stores. So growing rapidly. Yeah. How did you guys grow off of those two trucks? By the second summer, we had six trucks. And then in the third year, an opportunity to open a brick and mortar rose, which was not part of our plan.

23:15Why not? We loved the truck model. You could get a truck going for$60 ,000. There was no rent. You could put it wherever you want. As I'm saying this, why would you ever do brick and mortar? A truck sounds so much better. You do brick and mortar because they do a lot more revenue and they're a lot easier to operate. and somehow we got this store open, which was one block from where we lived. That's amazing. For like$22 ,000. It was 96 square feet. It was a very small store. But you didn't need much more than that because people can line up outside. Exactly. To us, wow, this is much bigger than a truck, bigger than the 30 square feet.

23:52Within three hours, we said we're never building another truck. Really? Yeah. Because? This was Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 14, 15 years ago. Okay. So not nearly as affluent or even residentially dense as it is now. And that store in three hours had already done the revenue that our best truck location would do an entire day. Why? What was different about it? Just something different about brick and mortar. Like, I think it looms in the consciousness of the consumer in a bigger way. And so was that the moment where you said we're going to plow into brick and mortar? We wanted to plow as much as we could with no outside capital.

24:31Okay, because you wanted to stay in control of the business? We wanted to stay in control. We didn't want to sell equity. I think the other part is we knew we weren't good enough yet to really scale. We were pretty good, right? But had we scaled then, had in year three someone said, here's$5 million, which would have been enough to open 10, 15 stores, those stores would not be the way we want them to be now. Right. You wanted to learn more and get better. I love this because so much of what we talk about with entrepreneurs is you jump off a cliff and you build the plane on the way down, right?

25:10And getting started, it kind of sounds like that's a little bit of what you were doing. Like, we're just going to figure it out. But then you took a more measured approach to scale. It was okay. We've got this going. We've got some traction. We clearly have some product market fit, but we want to hone this and get much better at this before we try to jump on a rocket ship or build a rocket ship. It feels like there are a couple of possible inflection points here, right? One is going brick and mortar. The other is going into wholesale. And for anyone who's ever looked at the frozen foods market, it's tough, right?

25:40I mean, especially ice cream, it's like, it's heavy to ship. You got to keep it frozen. You can't not do that. Talk us through how you all evolved, where you were starting to see that this could be a much bigger business. it never feels like we took a leap actually i mean it feels like we're taking a leap this year going from 70 to 105 stores in you know a single year until this year it was kind of slow and steady wholesale we did not plan on going into but our first day in business in new york city somebody from whole foods approached the truck and asked us if we did wholesale and what we did early on and we still do it to this extent is you know we say yes to everything you know now it's we say yes to every meeting that might sound interesting you never know what's going to come of it so we said yes wholesale but yeah to what you just pointed out wholesale is a much harder business if we didn't have the brick and mortar I don't know where we'd be because that has subsidized the wholesale business many many years just looking at my wholesale p &l today which will be not surprising to anyone with any literacy around selling frozen CPG products.