Back in 2008, when Ben Van Leeuwen was scooping ice cream from a truck in New York City, his goal even then was to grow and scale Van Leeuwen Ice Cream.
“We wanted to get to a place where we could do more in every department of the business, starting with innovation and sourcing, which is the most exciting part—our product,” he said.
As co-founder and now CEO of Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, he has steered the concept to double-digit growth, increasing brick-and-mortar scoop shops by 37% and sales close to 39% year over year. “In the last seven years, our revenue has grown ten times, and we went from ten scoop shops to 100 by the end of 2025,” he said. “Plus, we went from selling [pints] in 100 grocery stores to 12,000.”
Investments helped fuel that exponential growth. In 2018, Strand Equity Partners led a $3.9 million Series A round, and that was followed in 2020 with a $18.7 million Series B from Next World Evergreen. Then in 2022, the company secured an investment from Stonegate Capital to further fund expansion and increase wholesale production.
But Van Leeuwen has never taken his focus off the product. The chocolate ice cream perhaps tells the story best.
“Almost every ice cream on the market uses cocoa powder in their chocolate, but we like using coverture chocolate, or melting chocolate,” he said. “And one of the challenges of scaling is how do you do things just as well as you did on a small scale when you're getting much bigger?” To reach the volume they need, the ice cream is now produced in larger factories, but Van Leeuwen was told those only use cocoa powder.
“So we found a factory in the Netherlands that would take the chocolate and turn it into powdered chocolate, which is really hard to do because you need to keep it very cold when you're grinding it, otherwise it melts,” he said. “But our sourcing is an obsession, not only in the quality of ingredients, but we also need to be really creative and really innovative with processing.”
>Innovation is as passionate an obsession, so Van Leeuwen Ice Cream opened a Flavor Lab at its Brooklyn, New York headquarters two months ago. A small production facility and scoop shop are also on the premises. “We wanted to connect innovation to our retail operation, so we’re able to make something and walk ten feet and start selling it to hear what our guests think,” said Van Leeuwen. “I come from working in restaurants and as we scaled up, I missed having the production so close to the guest.”
Meanwhile, the CPG channel has experienced such tremendous growth that grocery stores are running out of product. Van Leeuwen didn’t budget or forecast for the unexpected surge in sales. “Every time I go into Whole Foods, I can never find our viral flavors, like Mango Sticky Rice and Japanese Matcha,” he said. “The grocery stores outsold our forecast five times to one.”
Van Leeuwen sees a lot of opportunity to expand in both retail and scoop shops in the markets the brand is entering. “We’re going to focus on existing and newer markets, like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Boston and D.C., but we’re looking to open more stores in Southern California and Texas as well,” he said.
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