![]() ![]() The cautionary tale about ice cream expansion is that of Ample Hills, the spunky Brooklyn brand with creative flavors that opened in 2011 to talk-of-the-town acclaim. The company has not responded to a request for comment on the topic.įrom left: Laura O’Neill, Ben and Pete Van Leeuwen enjoy a scoop (Courtesy Van Leeuwen) Eater reported in November that in addition to not having paid the fine, Van Leeuwen was still not accepting cash at any of its several locations across the city. The biggest hiccup in their plans came last October, when the company was fined over $12,000 for not accepting cash payments, a practice that’s now illegal in New York City. Their financial planning has been savvy: During the 2020 pandemic year, when sales went down about 65 percent, the company didn’t close a single shop, and Ben says not a single employee was laid off. The three founders are still majority owners, and with the new funds they were able to expand their staff, hiring a chief operating officer and a human resources manager. “Maybe if we’d put our heads down and worked harder and been scrappy for longer, we could have held on to more of the company, but it was just too stressful,” Ben says. The tension between big goals and tight finances got a bit of a reprieve about four years ago, when the Van Leeuwens relaxed their grip on the company and allowed interested investors to start buying portions of it. If we had $30 million to build a bigger, newer factory, the product would be even better, because we’d have better temperature control … so the faster you freeze it, the smaller the ice crystals are.”īut growth is hard. “At an industrial scale, ice cream gets better. “If you make a homemade tomato sauce at home, it will be virtually impossible to find something in the supermarket that is as good,” he says. But he still manages to explain why he isn’t worried about trading quality for quantity in the expansion. A little closer to home, starting today you can stop by their new Park Slope location on Fifth Avenue.īen Van Leeuwen is slightly flustered in a Zoom chat from the company’s Greenpoint factory-he’s trying to fix a mechanical issue that’s preventing the pint lids from sealing properly. While Van Leeuwen has already started shipping across the country, dipped into the ice cream bar market and opened a series of scoop shops in California, Texas and Pennsylvania, it plans to get exponentially bigger: The goal is about 20 more cross-country shops in 2022 and 40 by 2024. Today, the New Jersey mall location, flanked by an H Mart and a T-Mobile outlet, could be a sign of what’s to come. They spawned many competitors along the way, as arguably one of the most important pioneers of the artisanal ice cream movement, which is still ever expanding. Van Leeuwen also made vegan ice cream that actually tasted good and became the envied standard bearer for tasty dairy-free alternatives. ![]() Think Earl Grey Tea and Honeycomb-a concoction popular in Australia and New Zealand that pairs vanilla ice cream with small chunks of crunchy honey toffee-flavors that seem tame today but were far from a given 15 years ago. But the mall is light years away from the world where the ice cream brand was born: late-aughts Brooklyn, the age of the “artisanal” food boom, during which young entrepreneurs and restaurateurs popularized a handmade, back-to-basics ethos using centuries-old techniques.įounded in Greenpoint in 2008 by brothers Ben and Pete Van Leeuwen and Laura O’Neill (Ben and Laura were dating at the time, but no longer), the company quickly became popular for its minimalist but inventive flavors made from high-quality ingredients. The site is not far, as the crow flies, from Van Leeuwen’s physical starting point-a single New York City truck. Just steps from Big Snow, as the slope is called, a few families sit scattered across tables at the first New Jersey outpost of Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. The mall, a behemoth complex spanning millions of square feet, contains, among many other things, the country’s only indoor skiing slope, a DreamWorks-themed indoor water park, two miniature golf courses and a string of luxury retail shops. On a recent fall weekday, just before the Omicron wave crashed into the tri-state area, dozens of people, mostly teenagers and their parents, lined up on an upper floor of the American Dream mall in East Rutherford, New Jersey, to go skiing. ![]()
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