For Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna, co-founders of Ample Hills Creamery, building an ice cream business has been a rocky road.
The couple started with an ice cream truck before opening their first Ample Hills store in Brooklyn, New York in 2011. At its peak, Ample Hills was worth $40 million, with 13 ice cream scoops and an online store that shipped ice cream nationwide.
Eight years later, the success melted away. In March 2020, Smith and Cuscuna filed for corporate bankruptcy. Six months later they filed for personal bankruptcy. In June 2020, Ample Hills Creamery was purchased for $1 million by Schmitt Industries, a machine parts manufacturer eager to enter the food business.
Costly business decisions and strategic missteps caused Ample Hills to lose money even as sales and popularity grew. The couple “lost everything,” Smith, 53, tells CNBC Make It.
But a year later, they opened a new ice cream shop in Brooklyn called The Social. And in June, they teamed up with some investors to reacquire the Ample Hills brand for just $150,000.
So Smith and Cuscuna built a $40 million ice cream company, slowly lost everything, and quickly started rebuilding.
Opening an ice cream shop was risky. Cuscuna, 54, was a teacher for more than 20 years. Smith was a Syfy screenwriter who also produced and directed audiobooks.
But when Smith wasn’t working, he was making ice cream for his family and friends.
“The real impetus was just the joy that comes from making ice cream and sharing it with people,” Smith said. “And I didn’t really feel the same sense of connection and fulfillment while writing these monster movies.”
Brian Smith makes ice cream.
Zachary Green
Recognizing her husband’s passion, Cuscuna “encouraged Brian to help start a business,” she says. The couple launched their pushcart in 2010, offering high-quality ice cream in flavors “that would appeal to the 7-year-old inside the 47-year-old,” Smith says.
The following year, they spent their $225,000 savings to open a brick-and-mortar scoop shop, selling ice cream with cookies folded into it, cereal and potato chips. Ample Hills “attracted snakes on the street all summer long,” Cuscuna recalls.
Celebrities from Steven Spielberg to Oprah Winfrey raved about their ice cream. Disney CEO Bob Iger invited them to open a store at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. The popularity was the beginning of their downfall.
In 2014, Smith and Cuscuna developed a solution to the high demand. “We had to build a factory,” Smith says. “Well, in hindsight, we thought we needed to build a factory.”
They raised $19 million through multiple rounds of venture capital funding, added more locations, and opened their massive factory in 2018 — the “Taj Mahal” of ice cream factories, Smith says. The next year, Ample Hills had 13 stores in New York from California to Florida and annual sales of $10 million.
The couple was blissfully unaware of the mounting problems. Their oversized factory ensured that supply always exceeded demand, their unique ingredients clogged up the equipment, and they overspent on custom-made rectangular pints—”a few hundred thousand dollars” on designing the containers and about $450,000 on the Machine needed to fill it, Smith says.
The machine regularly underfilled or overfilled the containers, resulting in a lot of product wastage, he added.
“The finance director came to us and said he didn’t think we had enough money to get through the winter of 2019 to 2020,” Smith says. “We immediately started calling our investors and saying, ‘We need to raise some more money.’ And her answer was no.
After Ample Hills filed for bankruptcy and the duo declared personal bankruptcy, most of the $1 million from the sale to Schmitt Industries went directly to creditors.
“We felt like we were failing our children,” Smith said. “We have failed the community.”
After bankruptcy, Cuscuna embarked on a “pivot course” for entrepreneurs seeking a fresh start. There she met a business consultant who eventually became an investor in the duo’s new ice cream parlor, The Social.
This time around, the pair only have a “small handful” of investors who know the food space and are “laser-focused” on profitability. They now own 20% of the company, without any individual holding a controlling stake, Smith says.
According to their LinkedIn profile, they have also relinquished the CEO role to Lisa Teach, a company board member with experience in business coaching and entrepreneurship education. Smith and Cuscuna oversee the marketing and creative processes.
Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna, co-founders of Ample Hills Creamery.
Zachary Green
In December 2022, Schmitt Industries changed course, closing stores and laying off employees to cut costs. Ample Hills returned to the auction block. Five months later, Smith, Cuscuna and their investors won the contract for $150,000 and took over the brand and the leases for four stores.
“It was like a complete circle, a crazy moment,” Cuscuna said. “It was surreal.”
Her goal now is to make both The Social and Ample Hills thriving businesses. Together, Smith said, the stores generated about $350,000 in sales in July, which is national ice cream month. Every shop is profitable, adds Cuscuna.
“As far as growth goes, I think we’re going to take it very slowly,” Smith says. “The focus is really on shutting down these systems [and those] Operations are streamlined so we can focus on building the brand again.”
Disclosure: Syfy and CNBC are divisions of NBCUniversal.
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