Ben Van Leeuwen: I didn’t really think it through, because I didn’t have great grades. I had 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 was like, “No. I can try, but it doesn’t work that way.”

Jeff Berman: Ben Van Leeuwen left that meeting with his sister feeling discouraged. He had graduated college, but he had no idea what to do with his life. Until…

VAN LEEUWEN: After meeting her one day in the city, I saw a Mr. Softy truck.

BERMAN: Mr. Softy, that classic New York City ice cream truck.

VAN LEEUWEN: I didn’t have an idea in that moment. I made a decision in that moment.

BERMAN: 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.

VAN LEEUWEN: We bought two used post office trucks on eBay. We found someone to retrofit them into ice cream trucks. All the credit cards were maxed out. On day one we probably had $500 in our bank accounts collectively.

BERMAN: More than a decade later, Van Leeuwen is one of the fastest growing dessert brands in America.

VAN LEEUWEN: In 2025, we started with 70 corporate-owned scoop shops. We’ll actually grow 50% on our scoop shop footprint this year. Wholesale is in 15,000 doors. By July, we’ll hit about 2000 total team members. So, growing rapidly.

[THEME MUSIC]

BERMAN: This 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 & 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.

VAN LEEUWEN: Thank you.

BERMAN: 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. So 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?

VAN LEEUWEN: Entrepreneurial drive? I think it’s in my blood. My dad has been a serial entrepreneur.

BERMAN: S-E-R-I-A-L, not C-E-R-E-A-L.

VAN LEEUWEN: Yes, yes, since he was in high school. So yeah, I think it’s part of my DNA. But Van Leeuwen 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. The product itself was pre-packaged strawberry shortcake bars, which actually Van Leeuwen makes a Van Leeuwen version of that now, which is really good.

BERMAN: I was always partial to the Good Humor chocolate eclair bars. Those were my favorites.

The spontaneous decision that led to an ice cream business

VAN LEEUWEN: 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 in the decision to do that. Changed the course of my entire life, because it wasn’t a rational decision, especially having grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut. But 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. I never had great grades, maybe 2.8, 2.9 GPA. So when I decided to go travel, it was the opposite of that path.

And I wanted friends to come along with me. I didn’t want to go alone. 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. 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.” So I think the lesson there was, 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.

BERMAN: Why not?

VAN LEEUWEN: A, it was formative in 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 cream. But Van Leeuwen is going to open their hundredth store this year, and we’re going to be the almost biggest artisanal ice cream company in the US, the biggest consumer market on earth, simply because we decided to do it.

BERMAN: 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.

VAN LEEUWEN: Totally.

BERMAN: So on that trip through Europe, through Southeast Asia, what did you learn about food and ingredients, and then what did you learn about yourself?

VAN LEEUWEN: 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 Italians.

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, and to value in a really high way, because I value it a lot. I mean, my food experience is, every day some of the most important parts of my day are eating and what am I going to eat? So I learned a lot about that there.

BERMAN: 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”?

VAN LEEUWEN: Well, 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. And I said, “I want to do that.” And I didn’t really think it through, because I didn’t have great grades. I had done no internships. So I said, “Jenny, can you help me get a job like one of the ones you had?” And she was like, “No. I can try, but it doesn’t work that way.”

And after meeting her one day in the city, I saw a Mr. Softy 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. Softy 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.”

Building a business plan and convincing cofounders

BERMAN: Had you made ice cream before?

VAN LEEUWEN: Never. Never.

BERMAN: No history?

VAN LEEUWEN: No.

BERMAN: So where do you even start, then?

VAN LEEUWEN: Long before I had made ice cream, I started writing the business plan.

BERMAN: His brother, Pete, and his then romantic partner, Laura O’Neill, loved the idea too. They became Ben’s cofounders.

VAN LEEUWEN: 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.” I had Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Cookbook. There was a recipe for creme anglaise, which you can turn into vanilla ice cream, in there. And I made that, and I 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, little bit of sea salt, and whole vanilla beans. 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. You don’t need to add any weird stuff.”

BERMAN: 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?

VAN LEEUWEN: For some reason, we came up with a quarter million as the number, to 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. Everybody.

BERMAN: What were they telling you when they were saying no? What were you hearing?

VAN LEEUWEN: It’s funny. I have such a way of not remembering anything that I don’t love, so I don’t remember.

BERMAN: It’s good to have a short memory for “No”.

Starting up with limited resources and early lessons in scrappiness

VAN LEEUWEN: I was annoyed by it and disappointed, but I wasn’t discouraged. I was like, “I’m hardworking. I have a good palette. I know I’m going to be able to sell ice cream off a truck and make money. 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. Now we’re just co-founders and best friends on Earth.

BERMAN: I want to come back to that in a minute.

VAN LEEUWEN: Yeah. 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 McGuinness in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. So I got $2,500 here, $5,000 here, 15 from a college professor, $15,000 from one of Laura’s best friends from Australia. My dad put in 25. So we cobbled together only $60,000. So we tried to raise 250. We only raised 60. 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’ve been 70,000. We bought two used post office trucks on eBay. One was 5,000 –

BERMAN: On eBay?

VAN LEEUWEN: On eBay.

BERMAN: You bought them on eBay.

VAN LEEUWEN: We bought them on eBay. It was click, click, deliver it here. They arrive 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 are 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. Yet I don’t think I could do half of what I did then with 60,000 with even half a million dollars today.

BERMAN: Why is that?

VAN LEEUWEN: It’s a weird phenomenon. I think part of it is age. When you’re that young, there’s a different kind of energy. Part of it isn’t age, but it’s just the hunger and the pressure to have to do it. But I mean, what we accomplished with that, 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 see it in business. This is why the Unilevers, the Nestles cannot do what we did, cannot start it even with all of the resources in the world. When you get big, your brain changes. You become good at running big organizations, but harder at starting something in a scrappy way.

BERMAN: So you’ve got 60 grand, two trucks. You got 500 bucks left. How do you get to market?

Launching the first ice cream truck and connecting with customers

VAN LEEUWEN: Getting to day one was hard. You needed a special permit to vend in New York City, a mobile vending permit.

BERMAN: And were you manufacturing in a home kitchen at this point?

VAN LEEUWEN: We were manufacturing in a co-packer in Upstate New York, because we didn’t have any money to buy these hundreds of thousands of dollars of ice cream making equipment.

BERMAN: And had you done recipe testing? Where were you in your product development?

VAN LEEUWEN: We had done incredibly extensive and exhaustive recipe testing. So we tested, for example, over 50 different chocolate recipes, with 15 different kinds of chocolate, different levels of every one. 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, and we had –

BERMAN: This is the greatest party ever.

VAN LEEUWEN: 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 market testing for no money. If Van Leeuwen were to attempt to do that now in a regular way, that study would cost 30- to 40-thousand dollars

BERMAN: All right, so you’re waiting on the permit.

VAN LEEUWEN: We’re waiting on the permit.

BERMAN: You’ve got a co-packing location upstate.

VAN LEEUWEN: 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.

We get the permit on this first truck, and we parked on the corner of Green and Prince in SoHo. And by the time we opened the window, there was 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 Michelle Cluizel chocolate. And that was day one. 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 the label read clean, but because I really still believe the best ice cream is made with just milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and a little bit of salt, but nothing else.

BERMAN: Did you come back to that location the very next day? Did that become the truck location?

VAN LEEUWEN: That became the location for, I think, our first three or four years. It was Green and Prince every day from 10:00 AM till 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM. And then SoHo would 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.

BERMAN: Still ahead, how Ben Van Leeuwen earned billions of media impressions with some seriously unexpected ice cream flavors.

[AD BREAK]

Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel.

Navigating cofounder dynamics and building a resilient partnership

Van Leeuwen started as a family business. Ben’s cofounders 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.

VAN LEEUWEN: Yes.

BERMAN: 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. You’ve remained business partners. For a lot of people who divorce, this is hard to imagine. How have you managed to make this work?

VAN LEEUWEN: It wasn’t hard at all. It was effortless. 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, who are like my family, have a four-year-old. I’m super close with her. We’re best friends, but also family.

BERMAN: Was there a concern when you guys were separating on the personal side that it would affect the business side?

VAN LEEUWEN: Zero concern.

BERMAN: Wow.

VAN LEEUWEN: I do hear about the stories of founder strife. Working with my brother is 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. There’s days where I’m like, “Is this worth it? Is it worth it trying to build 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 and our work ethic. I imagine that’s what would make it hard, if one founder said, “I’m going to take six months off and travel the world,” which is awesome. Nothing 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?

The problems I have with co-founders being my brother and Laura are that because we’re so close, there’s no filter. 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 we’re really not fighting over the big stuff.

BERMAN: Yeah, yeah. Was it clear early on who would do what in this three-way partnership?

VAN LEEUWEN: No. No, no, no.

BERMAN: So how did you sort that out?

VAN LEEUWEN: How did we sort that out? Again, I don’t remember the hard stuff. We all did everything early on. I always felt silly saying CEO when we were a little business with a few trucks. I started calling myself the CEO, I don’t know, when we hit 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. We’re growing at 30 to 40% a year, so nothing stays the same. The challenges change every year.

BERMAN: Yeah, 30 to 40% a year off of a pretty good-sized base now. How big is the business today?

VAN LEEUWEN: 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 2000 total team members.

BERMAN: At the retail locations.

VAN LEEUWEN: In the retail stores. So growing rapidly.

Scaling thoughtfully and the transition from trucks to brick and mortar

BERMAN: Yeah. How did you guys grow off of those two trucks?

VAN LEEUWEN: By the second summer, we had six trucks. And then in the third year, an opportunity to open a brick-and-mortar arose, which was not part of our plan.

BERMAN: Why not?

VAN LEEUWEN: 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? Trucks sound 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 –

BERMAN: That’s amazing.

VAN LEEUWEN: – For like $22,000. It was 96 square feet. It was a very small store.

BERMAN: But you didn’t need much more than that, because people can line up outside and –

VAN LEEUWEN: Exactly. To us, wow, this is much bigger than a truck, bigger than the 30 square feet. Within three hours, we said, “We’re never building another truck.”

BERMAN: Really?

VAN LEEUWEN: Yeah.

BERMAN: Because?

VAN LEEUWEN: This was Greenpoint, Brooklyn 14-15 years ago, 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 in an entire day.

BERMAN: Why? What was different about it?

VAN LEEUWEN: There’s something different about brick-and-mortar. I think it looms in the consciousness of the consumer in a bigger way.

BERMAN: And so was that the moment where you said, “We’re going to plow into brick and mortar”?

VAN LEEUWEN: We wanted to plow as much as we could with no outside capital.

BERMAN: Because you wanted to stay in control of the business?

VAN LEEUWEN:  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, but had we scaled then, had in year three someone said, “Here’s 5 million bucks,” which would’ve been enough to open 10-15 stores, those stores would not be the way we want them to be now.

BERMAN: Right, you wanted to learn more and get better.

VAN LEEUWEN: We wanted to learn more.

BERMAN: 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. And getting started, it sounds like that’s a little bit of what you were doing. “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. One is growing brick-and-mortar. The other is going into wholesale. And for anyone who’s ever looked at the frozen foods market, it’s tough, especially ice cream. 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.

VAN LEEUWEN: It never feels like we took a leap, actually. It feels like we’re taking a leap this year, going from 70 to 105 stores in a single year. Until this year, it was 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 we say yes to everything. Now, we say yes to every meeting that might sound interesting. You never know what’s going to come of it. So we said yes to 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. The margins are absolutely razor-thin.

BERMAN: Why are they so thin? For folks who haven’t been in this category.

VAN LEEUWEN: Fulfillment costs. Fulfillment means just moving the product around. Trade spend, which is not unique to ice cream, but ice cream’s really competitive. Who has all of the market share? The Ben and Jerry’s, the Haagen-Dazs, Talenti. And they are, of course, as efficient as you can possibly be from a fulfillment standpoint, from a trade spend standpoint, and from a COG standpoint. They’re manufacturing as efficiently as possible. So that makes the CPG business really just a game of scale.

BERMAN: Was there a moment on the Van Leeuwen journey where you thought you might not make it?

VAN LEEUWEN: Never a moment where we thought we wouldn’t make it, just ’cause I’m really optimistic, and I knew we could, but plenty of tough moments where we were about to run out of money. I celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah, but a week before Christmas, gosh, probably only 10 years ago, there was no finance team. I did the books. And I said, “Wait a minute. We’re going to be negative $200,000 in a week.” And I’m like –

BERMAN: Not a good moment.

VAN LEEUWEN: Yeah, not a good moment. I don’t know how we got here, but that’s not going to work. We did not have any bank relationships. There was no way to borrow money. Somehow, through a little bit of Googling, I found a nice 34% hard-money loan approved in 24 hours. Money was in the bank by Christmas, and it saved the day. But yeah, it was super stressful. But even then… Because before that, maybe a month or two before that, we had turned down an offer to sell 15% of the business for $250,000. I was not capital market savvy then, but I was still like, “Yeah, I don’t like that. That doesn’t seem like a good idea.” So borrowing this money that I knew I could pay back in a year and a half, this is a lot cheaper.

Creative collaborations and unconventional brand building

BERMAN: Yeah, right. So, Ben, you all famously have not spent heavily on marketing, and one of the ways you all have built the brand is through some really creative collaborations. Where did those start, and what are some of your favorite ones?

VAN LEEUWEN: We fell into learning about how collaborations can help you build brand awareness. The first big collaboration we ever did was Kraft Mac & Cheese. It was right as the pandemic was ending, and their marketing agency in New York City called us. And I was talking to someone there, and she said, “Do you want to do this?” And actually, I said, “Absolutely.” I was like, “This is going to be awesome. This is a no-brainer.” I thought the juxtaposition would be really cool of this classic American product with a small, artisanal ice cream. Also, in a shocking way. If it was a classic American dessert mass market, it’s too obvious, right? It’s just like-

BERMAN: Yeah, it’s too on the nose.

VAN LEEUWEN: And we’re really strict with our… We call them ingredient guardrails. But it was actually a clean label product, which I didn’t know. I don’t eat a lot of Kraft Mac & Cheese. But colored with turmeric and annatto, salt, cultured milk powder, cheese powder. And it was really good. Kind of a weird-tasting flavor, but still tasty. And we launched that flavor on our website, and within minutes, the website had crashed. And I think within 10 minutes, they’d all sold instantly. I think 12 billion media impressions, whatever that means. Does it help the brand? I actually don’t know.

BERMAN: Did you get a ton of inbound after that from other brands saying, “We want to do a version of this with you”?

VAN LEEUWEN: We got a ton of inbound, and we actually started partnering in a way with bigger brands where they would pay us to do flavors. It’s a win-win. We’re still super selective. The ingredients had to make sense. I’m glad we did it. We’ll continue to be open to crazy collaborations like that, but it’s not core to us. New York Times last year, Wirecutter called Van Leeuwen vanilla the best vanilla ice cream in the country. That made us really happy.

BERMAN: I understand that gimmicky, media-driven ideas aren’t necessarily the ones that you’re excited about and want to do, but can I throw a couple brands at you and see what, just off the top of your head – 

VAN LEEUWEN: Yeah, absolutely.

BERMAN:  If Spirit Airlines came to you and said, “We want to do a collab,” what are you immediately pitching Spirit Airlines as the flavor you want to do with them?

VAN LEEUWEN:  Oh my God. What am I immediately pitching to Spirit Airlines? I would do something that would be artisanal and Middle American, so like smoked hay ice cream.

BERMAN:  Oh, yeah, because you get the yellow in there with the Spirit logo.

VAN LEEUWEN: Yeah, exactly.

BERMAN: Yeah. Okay, different Spirit. Spirit Halloween, the costume store.

VAN LEEUWEN: I mean, let’s try to not do the obvious. The obvious would be a pumpkin ice cream colored with more turmeric, and then a charcoal ice cream, which we’ve done, so this orange and black. The less obvious, we would do a butterfly pea flower ube, really purple ice cream.

BERMAN: Nice.

VAN LEEUWEN:  Swirled with a bitter dandelion green ice cream that we add more chlorophyll to make it bright green, so you have green and purple.

BERMAN:  I love it. Okay, last one. LinkedIn. LinkedIn ice cream.

VAN LEEUWEN:  So something really boring. What’s cardboard made of? Yeah.

BERMAN:  I mean, sure. Why not?

Innovation, future growth, and cultivating a culture of creativity

VAN LEEUWEN:  Yeah, that’s it.

BERMAN:  Okay, I love it. If we were sitting down a few years from now, what do you imagine the conversation we’re having about where the business has gone between, let’s say, 2025 and 2028, ’29, ’30? What’s the growth trajectory you’re hoping to achieve?

VAN LEEUWEN: Two or three years from now, we anticipate we’ll be at around 200 stores. We hope there’ll be a lot of international presence then too.

BERMAN: Are you international right now, or not yet?

VAN LEEUWEN: Not yet.

BERMAN: No.

VAN LEEUWEN: We do have one location in Singapore. That was our little franchise test. And what excites me most just from a, this is what I enjoy doing, this is fun, standpoint, is innovation. So I hope we’ll have even more new flavors that are really popular, and more innovations even beyond flavors, so different kinds of product offerings in the scoop shops, always that incorporate ice cream. But we’re opening, which I’m very excited for, the Van Leeuwen Flavor Lab.

BERMAN: What’s that?

VAN LEEUWEN: The Flavor Lab is an innovation kitchen where our entire innovation team will work out of, and a tasting room, and then in the front is an ice cream shop. And everything is separated by these cool, retractable glass walls, so you see through the entire space. So all of the innovation now will happen at the point of sale where our guests come in, not just for show, but what we realized was not only getting immediate feedback, making a new flavor and saying, “Let’s put it out there and see what people think,” but there’s something about making the products where you’re serving the products that just, for me, cultivates better ideas, more excitement, brings out people’s passion more. So I think we’ll be even more successful at innovating out of that space.

BERMAN: Ben, thank you for being on Masters of Scale.

VAN LEEUWEN: Thanks for having me.

BERMAN:  After spending time with Ben Van Leeuwen, it’s clear why the company has been such a success. Their humble, hardworking mindset allows them to balance high-quality products with innovative brand growth and a slow and steady approach to scale. Also, the ice cream is undeniably delicious. If you haven’t had the chocolate caramel cheesecake, you have no idea what you’re missing. I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.