Building an ice cream company has been a difficult journey for Ample Hills Creamery co-founders Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna.
Before founding their first Ample Hills store in Brooklyn, New York, in 2011, the husband and wife team began with an ice cream push cart. At its peak, Ample Hills had 13 scoop shops, a website that offered countrywide ice cream delivery, and a $40 million market value.
After eight years, the success vanished. Smith and Cuscuna declared their company insolvent in March 2020. They made a bankruptcy filing six months later. Schmitt Industries, a producer of machine components eager to join the food industry, paid $1 million to acquire Ample Hills Creamery in June 2020.
Ample Hills lost money while increasing its sales and popularity due to expensive business decisions and strategic errors. According to Smith, 53, the couple “lost everything,” as reported by CNBC Make It.
But a year later, they built The Social, a brand-new ice cream shop in Brooklyn. Additionally, they teamed together with a few investors in June to repurchase the Ample Hills name for just $150,000.
This is the story of how Smith and Cuscuna developed a $40 million ice cream business, gradually lost it all, and then started building it back up.
It was hazardous to open an ice cream shop. The 54-year-old Cuscuna taught for more than 20 years. Smith was an audiobook director and producer who also wrote Syfy television scripts.
However, Smith created ice cream for his loved ones and friends while he wasn’t working.
The delight that making and serving ice cream to others offers was the underlying inspiration, according to Smith. And scripting those monster movies wasn’t really giving me the same sense of fulfillment or connection.
Cuscuna “encouraged Brian to work towards creating a shop,” according to her, after seeing her husband’s enthusiasm. In 2010, the two started selling premium ice cream from a push cart in flavors “that would speak to the 7-year-old inside of the 47-year-old,” according to Smith.
They used their $225,000 life savings the following year to build a physical scoop store where they sold ice cream with cookies, cereal, and potato chips folded within. Cuscuna recalls that Ample Hills generated “lines that went down the street for the entire summer.”
Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg gushed over their ice cream. They were invited to create a store at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, by Disney CEO Bob Iger. Their decline began with their rise to fame.
Insufficient funds to get through the winter
Smith and Cuscuna developed a remedy for the rising demand in 2014. We had to construct a factory, adds Smith. Well, looking back, we should have built a factory.
They opened their massive facility, which Smith refers to as the “Taj Mahal” of ice cream factories, in 2018 after raising $19 million through many rounds of venture capital funding. They added more sites. The following year, Ample Hills had 13 stores with $10 million in yearly sales, spread across New York, California, and Florida.
The two were blissfully unaware of the growing issues. They overspent on special rectangular pints, spending “a couple hundred thousand dollars” to design the containers and “about $450,000” for the machine needed to fill them, according to Smith. Their enormous plant insured that supply was always greater than demand, their distinctive ingredients clogged its machinery, and they overspent on ingredients.
He continues that the machine frequently overfilled or underfilled the containers, resulting in excessive product waste.
“The finance director came to us and said that he didn’t think that we would have enough money to get through the winter of 2019 into 2020,” recalls Smith. “We started calling our investors right away and telling them that we needed to raise more money. Their response was “no,”
Schmitt Industries changed course in December 2022, closing stores and laying off workers to reduce costs. Ample Hills was put back up for bid. Five months later, Smith, Cuscuna, and their investors won the bid with a sum of $150,000, regaining the brand and the leases on four shop sites.
“It was like such a full circle, crazy moment,” Cuscuna remarked. It was bizarre.
Their current objective is to grow The Social and Ample Hills into thriving companies. Smith estimates that the businesses collectively earned about $350,000 during national ice cream month in July. Cuscuna continues that each store is successful.
Smith explains that “in terms of growth, I mean, we’re going to approach it very slowly.” “Really bringing those systems to an end .
