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

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Mm. I didn't really think it through.

1:38 Because I didn't have great grades, I'd done no internships. I really looked up to my sister. After college he worked at Goldman Sachs, so she said, Jenny, can you help me get a job like One of the ones you had and she said no. I can try, but it doesn't work that way.

1:54 Ben Van Luen left that meeting with his sister feeling discouraged. He had 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. Softy truck. Mr. Softy.

2:11 That classic New York City ice cream truck. I 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.

2:27 What if that was his calling all along? He scraped together just enough money to get started. We bought two use post office trucks on eBay. We found some to retrofit them into ice cream trucks. You know, all the credit cards were maxed out. On day one we probably had, you know, five hundred dollars in our bank accounts collectively.

2:49 More than a decade later, Van Luen is one of the fastest growing dessert brands in America. 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 fifteen thousand doors. By July we'll hit about two thousand total team members. So Growing rapidly. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally gonna be amazing.

3:35 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 out of a three-bedroom apartment. We haven't made it just how you do it. 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 Luen Ice Cream, Ben Van Luen. He's the mad scientist behind the company's wildest flavors. You may have seen their viral craft mac and cheese or hidden valley ranch ice creams online.

4:16 And also its incredibly delicious approach to classics. The New York Times wire cutter called its vanilla. the very best on the market. Fair warning. This episode. Might.

4:27 Make you drool. Then 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. 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? Entrepreneurial drive, I think it's in my blood. My dad

4:51 Has been a serial entrepreneur. S E R I A L not C E R E L Since he was in high school. So yeah, I think it's Part of my DNA. But Van Luen 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.

5:15 I loved the hospitality aspect, interacting with people. The product itself was pre packaged. Strawberry shortcake bars, which actually Van Luen makes a Van Luen version of that now, which is really good. I was always partial to the good humor chocolate Clare bars. Those were those were my favorite. Yeah, really good. Uhhuh. I did that for two summers. After

5:36 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 South East 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.

6:01 Ha. 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?

6:11 I never had great grades. Maybe two point eight. 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 my friends were like No no, Ben, we can't do that. You know, this is it's gonna look so bad on our resumes to take a year off college.

6:34 And I was like, but I want to do it. So 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 Luen going to open its hundredth store this year? Not because we're brilliant.

6:55 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, I assume. But Van Luen's gonna open their hundredth store this year and we're gonna be the Almost biggest artisanal ice cream company.

7:10 In the US, the biggest consumer market on earth. Simply because we decided to do it. Yeah. I mean, I 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, what did you learn about food and ingredients and then What'd you learn about yourself? I remember going to the first grocery store that I had 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.

7:53 'Cause I always say there's no foodies in Italy. It's just the tally. 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.

8:11 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. 'Cause I value it a lot. I mean my food experiences every day. It's like

8:26 You know, some of the most important parts of my day. Is eating and what am I going to eat? Um, so you 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 gonna do this? I'm gonna I'm gonna launch a nice room. 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 Newburger Berman.

8:51 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 wanna do that. And I didn't really think it through because I didn't have great grades, I had done no internships. So he said, Jenny, can you help me get a job like

9:10 One of the ones you had, and she's like, No, I I can try, but it doesn't work that way. Yeah and after meeting her one day in the city, I saw Mr. Softy truck. I didn't have an idea in that moment. I made a decision in that moment. So 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 gonna do. It was so clear and I was so excited. I saw this Mr. Softy truck. And by the way, don't think this was a Great idea.

9:36 But I said I'm gonna get an ice cream truck. And I'm gonna learn how to make ice cream. And I'm gonna find the best ingredients I can. Had you made ice cream before? No. No. No history. No. So where do you even start then? Long before

9:53 I had made 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've had more confidence that we could do it, I said, Okay, we better figure out how to make the ice cream. I had Thomas Skeller's Bouchon cookbook. There was a recipe for creme en glace, 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 you know the best vanilla ice cream I've ever had. And it was really easy to make.

10:29 And All it has is cream, eggs, sugar, milk. 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, Who you can make the best ice cream ever.

10:43 And it's completely preservable, you 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?

11:00 For some reason we came up with a quarter million is the number. 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

11:21 We set out to try to raise money and everybody said no. What were they telling you when they were saying no? What were you hearing? It's funny such a Way of not remembering anything that I don't love. It's good to have a short memory. I mean I was I I I I was annoyed by it and disappointed, but I wasn't discouraged. I was like I'm hard working. Have a good palate.

11:40 I know I'm gonna 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 sixty pages. And at this time I lived in Green Point with Laura O'Neal, who at that time we were in a relationship. Now we're just co founders and best friends on earth. I wanna come back to that. So it was her and I, my brother Peter and our friend One of my best friends Ben Colombo, all living this apartment on Driggs Avenue and McGinnis in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. So I got twenty five hundred dollars here, five thousand dollars here, fifteen from a college professor.

12:16 Fifteen thousand from one of Laura's best friends from Australia, my dad put in twenty five. So we cobbled together only sixty thousand dollars. So we tried to raise two fifty. We only raised sixty. 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 seventy thousand. We bought two used post office trucks on eBay. One was five days on eBay. You bought them on eBay. It was click click. Deliver it here.

12:44 They arrive on a truck. And one was twenty five hundred dollars, one was five thousand dollars. 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, you know, five hundred dollars in our bank accounts collectively. What I find really striking about what we were able to do with sixty thousand dollars eighteen years ago is I have so much more experience now. I know so much more about business. I am Fifty times more sophisticated in every business department.

13:19 Yet I don't think. I could do half of what I did then with sixty thousand 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 isn't age, but it's just the hunger and the

13:37 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 Nestle's

13:57 cannot do what we did. Yeah, cannot started even with all the resources in the world. Like 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 sixty grand. Two trucks. You got five hundred bucks left. How do you get to market? Getting to day one was hard.

14:18 You needed a special permit to vend in New York City. A mobile vending permit. And are you manufacturing in a home kitchen at this point, or you're manufacturing in a Copac or an upstate New York. Okay because We didn't have it. Any money to buy these hundreds of thousands of dollars in making it. Incredibly extensive an exhaustive recipe testing. So We

14:45 Tested, for example, over fifty 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. And the greatest party ever. Oh, it was awesome. Yeah. 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. If Van Luren were Yeah. And uh

15:21 regular way. 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 like miss those great spring months. You know, you have four months of really, really good sales. And then finally, I think it was June twenty first, we get our permit. And we are so excited. So 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 fifteen people. The truck looked really nice. It had this beautiful solid butcher block counter. So it had a homier feel than most food trucks.

16:11 And we're serving ten flavors of ice cream. So Hudson Valley red currant, Sicilian pistachio, a really good Michelle Cazelle chocolate. And That was day one. But it worked, I think, because of the distinctness of the truck. And then people were

16:29 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. Did you come back to that location the very next day? Did that become the truck? It was green in prints every day from ten A. And then Soho would kind of die. 'Cause it was mostly retail driven. Then we would drive up to university and twelfth street. University and twelfth or eleventh. in Greenwich Village and stay there till midnight.

17:12 So ahead, how Ben Van Luen earned billions of media impressions with some seriously unexpected ice cream flavors. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. Those who were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Khalyubi.

17:43 And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about

18:35 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more. On our YouTube channel.

18:57 Venlo and 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 two thousand eight. They divorced a few years later, but they remain co founders.

19:13 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 Sarah Perel on the show recently and she talks about how sixty five percent 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 divorce, this is hard to imagine. How have you managed to make this work?

19:43 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

19:58 being great friends and doing things together. Um Laura and her partner Greg, who are like my family have a four year old I'm super close with her. I mean we're Best friends but also like

20:10 Family. Was there a concern when you guys were separating on the personal side that would affect the business side? Zero concern. Wow. I do hear about the stories of founder strife Working with my brother, it's not always easy. With all that said.

20:27 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 is this worth it? Like

20:40 Is it? Worth it trying to build, you know, two hundred ice cream stores in the next 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

20:54 make it hard, you know, as if one founder said, You know, I'm gonna take six months off and travel the world, which is awesome. Nothing wrong with that. Sure. But I think we're fortunate that there were 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 in Laura, or that because we're so close There's no filter, right?

21:20 generally the fights, particularly with Peter and I are over I don't like the tone that you took in that email. You know? And it's like, you know, we're 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? 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.

21:43 We kind of all did everything early on. I always felt kinda 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

22:05 Delineated. With that said, it's pretty fluid. I mean we're growing at thirty to forty percent a year. So nothing stays the same. The challenges change every year. Yeah, I mean thirty to forty percent a year off of a pretty good size base now. How big is the business today? So In twenty twenty five, we started with seventy corporate owned scoop shops. We'll open thirty-five this year. So we'll actually grow fifty percent on our scoop shop footprint this year. Wholesale is in fifteen thousand doors. With over fifty skiws.

22:38 By July we'll hit about two thousand. Total team members most at the retail location. So Growing rapidly. Yeah. How did you guys grow off of those two tracks?

22:51 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. Why not? We loved the truck model. You could get a truck going for sixty thousand dollars There was no rent, you could put it wherever you want. As I'm saying this, why would you ever do brick and mortar, right? Truck 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.

23:24 For like twenty two thousand dollars. It was ninety-six square feet. It was a very small store. But you didn't need much more than that because people can line up outside and Exactly. To us, wow, this is much bigger than a truck, right? Bigger than the thirty square feet. within three hours. We said we're never building another truck. Really? Because This was Green Point, Brooklyn. Fourteen, fifteen years ago. Okay. So not nearly as affluent

23:51 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 what was different? Like it 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 gonna plow into brick and mortar? We wanted with no outside capital. Okay. Because you wanted to stay in control of the business or stay in control. We didn't want to sell equity.

24:23 I think the other part is like We knew we weren't good enough yet to really scale. We're pretty good, right? But Had we scaled then, you know, had in year three someone said here's

24:36 five million bucks, you know, which would have been enough to open ten, fifteen stores. Those stores would Not be the way We want them to be now. Right. You want it to l learn more and to 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? And getting started, it kind of sounds like that's a little bit of what you were doing. Like we're just gonna figure it out.

25:01 But then you took a more measured approach to scale. You 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 growing brick and mortar. The other's going on wholesale. And for anyone who's ever looked at the frozen foods market, it's tough, right? I mean, especially ice cream, it's like it's heavy to ship. You got to keep it frozen. You can't 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 the leap this year.

25:44 Going from seventy to a hundred five stores. in you know a single year. Until this year it was kinda 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 gonna come of it. So we said yes toll sale. But yeah, to what you just pointed out, toll sale is a much harder business. If we didn't have the brick and mortar, I don't know where we'd be'cause

26:22 That has subsidized the wholesale business many, many years. Just looking at my wholesale P L today, which like Will be Not surprising to anyone with any literacy around selling frozen CPG products, you know, the margins are absolutely razor thin. Why are they so thin for folks who haven't been in the spending? Fulfillment costs. Fulfillment means just moving the product around. Trade spend, which is not unique to ice cream, but ice cream is really competitive. Who has all of the market share, you know, the Ben and Jerry's the Haganda Silenti, and they are Of course.

26:54 as efficient as you can possibly be from a fulfillment standpoint, from a tradesman standpoint. And from a Cog standpoint, right? their manufacturing as efficiently as possible. So that makes the C P G business, you know. Really just a game of scale.

27:11 Was there a moment on the Van Luen journey where you thought you might not make it? Never a moment where we thought we would make it, just'cause I'm really optimistic and I knew we could. But plenty of tough moments, you know, where we are about to run out of money. I mean I celebrate Christmas then okay, but a week before Christmas Maybe gosh, probably only like ten years ago.

27:32 There was no finance team. I did the books. And I said, Wait a minute. We're gonna be negative two hundred thousand dollars in a week. I'm like not a good moment. Yeah, not a good moment. I don't know how we got here, but That's not gonna work, right? We did not have any bank relationships. There was no way to borrow money.

27:51 somehow through a little bit of Googling, you know, I found uh a nice thirty four percent hard money loan. Wow. You know, proved in twenty four hours. You know, money was in the bank by Christmas. And it saved the day. But yeah, it was super stressful. But even then because

28:07 before that, maybe a month or two before that, we had turned down an offer to sell fifteen percent of the business for two hundred fifty thousand dollars. I was not like 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. Yeah. Right. So then you all sort of 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?

28:45 We sort of fell into learning about how collaborations can help you build brand awareness. The first big collaboration we ever did was craft mac and 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 wanna do this? And I actually said, Absolutely. I was like, this is gonna be awesome. This is a no-brainer. I thought the juxtaposition would be really cool of this sort of classic American product with the smaller tisano. I assume also

29:20 In a shocking way. Right. If it was a classic American dessert mass market, it's too obvious, right? We're really strict with our we call them ingredient cardrails, but it was actually a clean label product, which I didn't know. I don't eat a lot of craft mac and cheese. But you know, colored with turmeric and noto, salt cultured milk powder, you know, cheese powder. And it was really good. Kind of weird tasting flavor, but still tasty.

29:47 And we launch that flavor on our website. And within, you know, minutes the website had crashed. And you know, I think within ten minutes they'd also instantly. I think twelve billion media impressions, whatever that means. Does it help the brand? I actually don't know. Did you get a ton of inbound after that from other brands saying we want to do a version of this with you? We got a ton of inbound. And we actually started

30:12 partnering in a way with bigger brands Where they would Pay us. to do flavors. And you know, it's kind of a win win. I mean we're still super selective, the ingredients had to make sense.

30:25 I'm glad we did it. You know, we'll continue to be open to crazy collaborations like that. But it's not core to us. You know, New York Times last year wire cutter. Called Van Luen Vanilla the best vanilla ice cream in the country. That made us really happy. I understand that gimmicky media driven ideas aren't necessarily the ones that like 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. Yeah, absolutely. Um if

30:52 Spirit Airlines came to you and said we want to do a collab. What are you immediately pitching Spirit Airlines as as the flavor you want to do with them? Oh my. God. What am I immediately pitching to spirit airlines? I would do something that would be

31:09 Artisanal and middle American. Uh-huh. So like smoked. Hay ice cream. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Different spirit spirit Halloween. The costume store. I mean let's try to not do the obvious, right? The obvious would be like 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 like a butterfly pea flower. Ube.

31:42 You know, really purple ice cream swirled with a bitter dandelion green ice cream that we add more. chlorophyll too to make it bright green. So you have like green and purple, like it's sort of yeah. Okay, last one. LinkedIn. LinkedIn ice cream. So something really boring.

32:02 Uh. What's cardboard made of? Yeah, I mean sure, why not? Yeah. That's it. 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 twenty twenty five and twenty twenty-eight, twenty nine, thirty?

32:19 What's the go trajectory you're hoping to achieve? Two, three years from now we anticipate we'll be at Around two hundred stores. We hope a lot of international presence then too, through Are you international right now or not? We do have one location in Singapore. Uh-huh. Um, that was our little franchise test.

32:39 And what excites me most just from a this is what I enjoy doing, this is fun standpoint, yeah, 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 Luen Flavor Lab.

33:04 that's that but 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's 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 guests come in.

33:26 Not just for show. But what we realized was like not only getting immediate feedback, you know, 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 like 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.

33:52 Ben thank you for being a master of scale. Thanks for having me. After spending time with Ben Van Luen, 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

34:14 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. Masters of Scales await what original.

34:57 Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our senior producer is Trisha Bobida. The production team includes Masha Makutunina and Brandon Klein. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holiday.

35:16 Our head of podcasts is Le Tal Lalad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter.

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