Earlier this year, Ben Van Leeuwen had a problem.
The latest Van Leeuwen scoop shop in Washington, D.C., had recently opened for business. But due to unexpectedly high demand, it had run out of ice cream halfway through the weekend.
Ben, who as CEO had long since left the responsibilities of making deliveries behind, was surprised to find himself on a text chain about the new store.
“It’s 11 p.m. on a Saturday night and nobody can deliver that ice cream,” Ben tells CNBC Make It. “And I was like ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’”
Which is how the 39-year-old found himself pulling up to the Van Leeuwen factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, eight hours later to load a refrigerated truck full of hundreds of tubs of his famous ice cream before making the five hour drive to D.C.
“The plan was to drop off all of this ice cream and drive straight back to New York, because the next day is Monday and I have to work,” he says.
But he arrived to find 100 people already waiting in line and decided to help hand out ice cream for an hour to alleviate the crush. “I ended up scooping till midnight because it was so busy,” he says. “It was so fun.”
Days like that are few and far between for Ben, who since founding Van Leeuwen in 2008 has grown it into a nationwide brand. Van Leeuwen has nearly 50 scoop shops in seven states across the country, and its pints are sold at nearly 10,000 grocery stores including Walmart and Whole Foods.
Here’s how Van Leeuwen went from a lone ice cream truck in SoHo to a multimillion-dollar business capable of bringing in upwards of $300,000 a day from its scoop shops alone.
An introduction to ice cream
As a rising college sophomore in need of spending money, Ben came across a newspaper ad offering $500 per week to sell ice cream. Soon, he was behind the wheel of a Good Humor truck slinging Chipwiches, SpongeBob SquarePants ice cream bars and other frozen novelties.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, his experience with Good Humor would play a direct role in…
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