On entrepreneurship and ice cream
The short version of the Van Leeuwen Ice Cream story tends to jump quickly from a promising young man and a little yellow ice cream truck to a $55 million business.
In summer 2008, Ben Van Leeuwen ’07, his brother Pete, and his partner, Laura, started Van Leeuwen Ice Cream with $60,000 raised from friends and family, the energy of three 20-somethings, and a hustle mentality.
Van Leeuwen Ice Cream is now a household name – the colorful pints are in grocery stores across the U.S., and the ice cream has made recent appearances on "The Drew Barrymore Show" and in the Anne Hathaway movie "The Idea of You." Ben even appeared on an episode of "Deal or No Deal."
But the fairy tale version of any startup story, he says, does a disservice to aspiring entrepreneurs.
“A lot of entrepreneurial founding stories without the details make it sound easy, which I think is bad,” says Van Leeuwen, who majored in management and business at Skidmore. “It’s disempowering to people who want to start their own thing or want to be an entrepreneur but haven’t done it. It sounds like, ‘Gosh, I’ve barely started and it’s already hard. I don’t want to do it if it’s not going to work.’”
That $60K investment? It couldn’t buy a new truck, which would cost $85,000. So Ben, Pete, and Laura bought a 1988 post office truck on eBay for $2,500, painted it yellow, and spent $40,000 to convert it. “It was an absolute piece of shit, it broke down all the time, but it allowed us to start.”
They couldn’t afford research and development, so they taught themselves to make ice cream from cookbooks. They drove six hours to make ice cream at a small upstate dairy farm because they couldn’t afford a manufacturing facility.
They worked every day, rotating shifts working on the truck and on the business – from making caramel in their apartment to learning QuickBooks — while holding down other jobs. In 2010, they opened their first Van Leeuwen Ice Cream shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
“In the first 10 years of our business, the cash flow was so extraordinarily tight that there were many times when we’d drive from truck to truck in our little car, from store to store, emptying the cash registers, getting that money into the bank before 5 p.m. so payroll would clear,” Ben recalls.
It wasn’t exactly a fairy tale. But Van Leeuwen had one advantage over many other aspiring entrepreneurs: “We sell ice cream – it’s almost a commodity. It’s all in the execution.”
He says that’s one of the most valuable lessons he learned about
creating and running a business. And he took it from a silversmithing class at Skidmore
with Professor of Art David Peterson.
Peterson, he says, gives “incredible focus” to craft and detail, taking pieces from idea to completion. “He taught me that a great concept is nothing without great execution.”
Van Leeuwen exemplifies Skidmore’s “mind and hand” philosophy: In management and business classes, he was intrigued by how people execute their own concepts.
“Learning about the theoretical aspects of running a business did not engage me. What got me excited was the case studies.”
And great execution remains a top priority for the company. “We’re really into finding the best ingredients,” he says. Van Leeuwen Ice Cream sources South American chocolate, Sicilian pistachios, and hazelnuts from the Piedmont region of Italy. The summer Vegan Mango Sorbet uses Alphonso mangoes. The company frequently partners with chefs to create one-of-a-kind flavors like Sour Cherry Creamsicle, a swirl of vanilla ice cream and Sour Morello Cherry Sorbet, a collaboration with Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
An assortment of Van Leeuwen vegan flavors
Recently, Van Leeuwen released its first dog ice cream – Peanut Butter and Banana – a joint effort with pet food delivery service Ollie.
Their ice cream always looks as good as it tastes. The company Instagram displays bold rainbows of pint containers, pastel-toned shops, and beautiful scoops of ice cream, like Vegan Planet Earth (a blue amaretto ice cream with pieces of green matcha cake), not to mention the original “buttery” yellow truck. “I’m really obsessive about aesthetics,” Van Leeuwen says.
While the entire experience has been an education – from how to make ice cream to cash forecasting – Van Leeuwen says he’s most proud to have learned “the people aspect.”
He says another seed was planted during his senior year at Skidmore when former General Electric Chief Financial Officer Dennis D. Dammerman was a guest speaker in Associate Professor Emeritus Marty Canavan’s Entrepreneurship and Small Business course.
“The executive said, ‘You learn with your ears, not your mouth. Listen. Let people talk. That’s how you learn, especially when you’re working with teams. Ask a question that you’re genuinely interested in.’”
Van Leeuwen strives to follow that advice. “I make an effort to ask questions to the team members,” he says. “I don’t ask ‘How’d we do?’ or ‘How much did you make?’ I ask things like, ‘You had a $1K hour. How did that feel? Did you have enough people?’”
Another key element of the company’s evolution has been hiring people with different skills and knowledge sets.
“In short, let’s hire people who are way smarter than us – hopefully overall way smarter, but at the very least smarter than us in different ways, right?”
From three young co-founders and a little yellow truck, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream has grown to a 65-person corporate team, adding a president and chief operating officer, and a chief financial officer, in 2018.
“We’re like this awesome leadership team of five people. And we work together so well. In some ways, it’s non-traditional. The responsibilities of CEO land on me, but big decisions are collective.”
The company employs more than 2,000 retail team members. It boasts more than 75 in nine states and Washington, D.C., as well one in Singapore. Plans are underway for dozens of new shops, which are expected to top 100 in 2025.
The founders of Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, brothers Ben (left) and Pete Van Leeuwen and Laura O’Neill, in their original ice cream truck (converted from an old USPS delivery truck).
One of the top factors the team considers when seeking out new locations is walkability. “The de-vehicularizing of cities is so good for us,” Van Leeuwen said. “We do 50% more sales in walkable areas.” Their top-selling Brooklyn shop, he said, is in Prospect Heights, on a street closed to nonessential traffic.
In August 2023, Ben, Pete, and Laura were interviewed on "The Today Show" and asked what advice each would give aspiring entrepreneurs.
Laura said, “Make sure it’s your passion.” Pete said, “It’s important to stay re-invigorated.” Ben didn’t answer the question. So, what advice would Ben Van Leeuwen give someone who wanted to start a business?
“Do something that you love,” he said. “It’s going to be really hard. If I was looking
at it rationally, other things would have made more sense than starting an ice cream
company. But I loved ice cream and I loved the people aspect. All the hardness of
starting it you can push to the side.”
A version of this article first appeared in the of Scope magazine.
