For Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna, co-founders of Ample Hills Creamery, building an ice cream business has been a rocky road.
The husband-and-wife duo started with an ice cream push cart before opening their first Ample Hills shop in Brooklyn, New York, in 2011. At its height, Ample Hills was valued at $40 million, with 13 scoop shops and an online store that shipped ice cream nationwide.
Eight years in, the success melted away. In March 2020, Smith and Cuscuna filed for business bankruptcy. Six months later, they filed for personal bankruptcy. In June 2020, Ample Hills Creamery was bought by Schmitt Industries, a machine parts manufacturer keen on entering the food business, for $1 million.
Costly business decisions and strategic missteps led Ample Hills to hemorrhage money, even as its sales and popularity grew. The couple “lost everything,” Smith, 53, tells CNBC Make It.
But a year later, they opened a new Brooklyn ice cream shop called The Social. And in June, they partnered with some investors to reacquire the Ample Hills brand for just $150,000.
Here’s how Smith and Cuscuna built a $40 million ice cream company, slowly lost it all and quickly started rebuilding again.
‘The real impetus was just that joy’
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 made ice cream for his family and friends.
“The real impetus was just that joy that it brings when you make ice cream and you share it with people,” Smith said. “And I wasn’t really getting that same sense of connection and fulfillment out of writing those monster movies.”
Brian Smith making ice cream.
Zachary Green
Seeing her husband’s passion, Cuscuna “encouraged Brian to work towards creating a shop,” she says. The pair launched their push cart in 2010, featuring high-quality ice cream in flavors “that would speak to the 7-year-old inside of the 47-year-old,” says Smith.
The following year, they spent their life savings of $225,000 to open a brick-and-mortar scoop shop, selling ice cream with cookies, cereal and potato chips folded inside. Ample Hills attracted “lines that went down the street for the entire summer,” Cuscuna recalls.
Celebrities from Steven Spielberg to Oprah Winfrey raved about their ice cream. Disney CEO Bob Iger invited them to open a shop at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. The popularity was the beginning of their downfall.
Not ‘enough money to get through the winter’
In 2014, Smith and Cuscuna came up with a solution for the high demand. “We needed to build a factory,” says Smith. “Well, in hindsight, we thought we needed to build a factory.”
They raised $19 million over multiple rounds of venture capital funding, creating more locations and opening their giant factory — the “Taj Mahal” of ice cream factories, Smith says — in 2018. The next year, Ample Hills had 13 shops, from New York to California to Florida, and $10 million in annual sales.
The pair was blissfully unaware of mounting problems. Their oversized factory ensured that supply always exceeded demand, their unique ingredients clogged its equipment and they overspent on custom rectangular pints — “a couple hundred thousand dollars” to design the containers, and roughly $450,000 for the machine needed to fill them, Smith says.
The machine regularly underfilled or overfilled the containers, resulting in too much wasted product, he adds.
“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,” says Smith. “We immediately started calling our investors and said, ‘We need to raise some more money.’ And their answer was no.”
After Ample Hills declared bankruptcy, and the duo filed for personal bankruptcy, the $1 million from the sale to Schmitt Industries mostly went straight to creditors.
“We felt like we’d let our kids down,” Smith says. “We let the community down.”
‘We can focus on the brand building again’
After the bankruptcy, Cuscuna took a “pivot course” for entrepreneurs looking to restart. There, she was introduced to a business advisor who ultimately became the investor for the duo’s new ice cream shop, The Social.
This time around, the pair has only a “small handful” of investors who are knowledgeable in the food space and “laser-focused” on profitability. They own 20% of the company now, with no individual holding a majority stake, Smith says.
They’ve also relinquished the CEO role to Lisa Teach, a company board member with a background in business coaching and entrepreneurship teaching, according to her LinkedIn profile. 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 reversed course, shutting down shops and furloughing employees to cut costs. Ample Hills went back on the auction block. Smith, Cuscuna and their investors won the bid with $150,000 five months later, taking back the brand and leases of four shop locations.
“It was like such a full circle, crazy moment,” Cuscuna said. “It was surreal.”
Now, their goal is to nurture both The Social and Ample Hills into flourishing businesses. Collectively, Smith says, the shops brought in roughly $350,000 in revenue in July, which was national ice cream month. Each shop is profitable, Cuscuna adds.
“In terms of growth, I mean, we’re going to approach it very slowly,” Smith says. “The focus is really getting those systems down [and those] operations tight so that we can focus on the brand building again.”
Disclosure: Syfy and CNBC are divisions of NBCUniversal.
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