- Regardless of where you grow up,
the ice cream experience is deeply nostalgic.
It's something that kids everywhere remember begging for,
and we want to sort of amplify that.
For most of our customers,
ice cream is not an everyday thing.
So for them, we need to make our flavors very good,
but also classic and familiar and approachable.
I was looking for a summer job.
I saw an ad in the paper saying,
"Drive an ice cream truck, make 500 bucks a week,"
which was an unimaginably large amount of money to me.
I wasn't thrilled about the quality of the product.
Five years after,
I was in Manhattan one day,
looking at the Mister Softee trucks,
and for me it was an a-ha moment.
I wondered why there weren't any high-end ice cream trucks --
it seemed super obvious.
I called my business partner, Laura O'Neill,
and my brother Pete, and I said,
"Hey guys, do you wanna start an ice cream truck?"
But we had never made ice cream before.
So the original idea was to buy ice cream from someone else
and sell it off of the truck.
We started tasting everything.
There weren't a lot of artisanal ice creams in the country,
and most of the ice creams had a lot of stabilizers in them,
things that we feel don't make the ice cream better.
So the plan changed to make our own ice cream.
We tweaked recipes,
made them completely our own to make a more luscious product,
and that was the birth of Van Leeuwen.
Moving to our own ice cream store and factory
really allowed us to constantly strive
to make better ice cream.
A big part of it, too,
is being able to make all the add-ins in-house.
So the cookies, cakes, crumbles, brittles,
homemade chocolate chip cookie dough
with Askinosie chocolate chips.
We're pushing ourselves to find even better ingredients.
There's a classic Midwestern American flavor
called Blue Moon ice cream.
And it was bright blue ice cream,
it was flavored with a lot of artificial stuff.
We thought, oh, it would be cool to do our version of that.
The Planet Earth is a super-popular flavor.
Bright colors are really important to us,
but if we're going to do bright colors,
we need to do it not only in an all-natural way,
but a really, really delicious way.
What really Van leeuwnizes it is, to color that blue,
we use spirulina powder,
and we wanted to kind of make it look like planet Earth.
So we added chunks of cake
that we color and flavor with matcha green tea.
It's a classic flavor, but made in the best possible way
with the best possible ingredients,
that really differentiates us.
I was in San Francisco when someone said to me,
"Oh you have vegan ice cream and regular, that's awesome,
you have something for everyone."
I was like, no, "We have everything for everyone,"
because the vegan ice cream is not at all a sacrifice,
you're not sacrificing taste.
My personal favorite way to eat ice cream
is actually in a sundae, so with whipped cream, hot fudge,
walnuts, cocoa nibs, almonds, Kirsch-soaked cherries,
fruit compote on top, caramel.
What's really cool is we do vegan versions of everything.
So for the vegan. we have coconut whipped cream
that we're also making in-house,
and I actually think it's even better
than normal whipped cream.
Vegan chocolate sauce, most of the dry toppings,
the nuts and chocolate chips are already vegan.
We launched honeycomb ice cream as a special flavor.
It was inspired by Laura O'Neill, my business partner,
who's from Australia.
In Australia, honeycomb's a super-popular candy.
Laura was adamant that people would love it --
and that was four years ago, and it's never left the menu.
It was insanely popular, it's our No. 1 flavor.
We caramelize organic brown rice syrup,
we add some sodium bicarbonate to puff it up,
it cools and hardens, and we break it into these chunks.
Then we fold the honeycomb into the sweet cream base,
and it stays chewy and crispy on the inside,
and then bleeds ribbons of caramel throughout the ice cream.
It's an amazing flavor.
Another very popular flavor
is the peanut butter marshmallow crunch.
The inspiration was the peanut butter fluff sandwich,
like classic American.
So we're making this peanut ice cream,
and then folding homemade marshmallow fluff
and crumbled candy cocoa nibs and peanuts throughout.
We love taking these classic American things
which historically were not made with great ingredients,
and saying what happens if we do this
with incredible ingredients and incredible technique.
The sort of big picture goal
on all creation in Van Leeuwen is deliciousness.
Which sounds very, very obvious,
but it is important to just throw ego aside and be like,
we don't need to be cool or interesting.
We'd like to if we can, but No. 1,
what our customer wants is a really awesome experience
and to be delighted with delicious products.
If I'm having a bad day,
I'll go and have an ice cream sundae,
and it always turns my day around.
It's really bizarre -- like completely changes it.
The first day we were ever in business, I was like,
I'm gonna try a sundae, and I ate this sundae.
I'll never forget the moment,
and I never forget great food moments in my life.
It is just sugar and chocolate and flavors,
but it was like a real happiness.
So happiness, that's it, it brings people happiness.
And it brings me happiness.