The Amazing Growth and Predictable Death of Ample Hills Creamery

The story of Ample Hills Creamery is highly instructive. It goes something like this: couple starts modest, bootstrapped ice cream shop in Brooklyn. They make great ice cream, with innovative flavours. Couple gets Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, addicted to their ice cream. Iger sends ice cream to influential friends — including J.J. Abrams, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey. All of them love it; Oprah features the ice cream in her magazine. The couple raises money from investors. The business expands really, really quickly. They open many stores nationwide, including a massive factory in Brooklyn that costs a lot of money. The expansion then proceeds to kill the company. 

In truth, Ample Hills is an almost textbook example of what happens when growth kills a business. 

It is for this reason that it’s valuable to study what happened to them.

A Love for Ice Cream

Brian Smith married Jackie Cuscuna in 2002. Smith was a scriptwriter with a talent for making ice cream. Cuscuna was a public school teacher at City-as-School, an alternative high school in the New York City school system. During their courtship, Smith would host ice cream socials for their friends. After they married, Smith would continue serving experimental, innovative ice creams at dinner parties, to the delight of their friends.

After they married, Smith became increasingly unhappy with his career. Most of his screen credits were made-for-TV horror and sci-fi movies, like Flu Bird Horror and Alien Express. One particular highlight was directing the audiobook production of then-Senator Barack Obama’s recording of Dreams from My Father. But overall, Smith’s career in the entertainment business was middling; he found scriptwriting ‘formulaic and isolating’. 

By 2010, the couple had an infant son and a three year old daughter, and Smith was between jobs. In what he would later call his ‘mid-life crisis’ (he had just turned 40), he decided to attend an eight-week small business course sponsored by New York City, and then a one week Ice Cream Short Course at Penn State. This latter course was legendary: it had been taught for more than 120 years and included alums such as Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s.

Smith wanted to start an ice cream business right away, but Cuscuna argued against it. She thought it was too risky and wanted more proof that enough folks would enjoy Smith’s ice cream enough to support a full-time business. She also wanted to see if Smith would enjoy making ice cream full-time. These were all reasonable concerns, so the couple decided on an experiment: Smith would sell his homemade ice cream for a summer from a pushcart at the Celebrate Brooklyn arts festival. 

Smith’s ice cream style was to start with a base — such as vanilla, or chocolate, or something more exotic like espresso or purple yam. Smith would then ‘mix in’ delicious add-ons — baked goods like cookie crumble, or candy, or even bits of fruit. Ben & Jerry had become famous for innovative mix-ins, and Smith, who regarded Ben and Jerry as his personal idols, followed suit. One ice cream he made that quickly became a smash hit included maple candied bacon as a mix-in. 

The pushcart experiment was a rousing success. The cart experienced high demand, and word of mouth spread beyond Brooklyn’s Prospect Park neighbourhood. It had spread so far, in fact, that a woman from Minnesota called to beg them to ship her some maple candied bacon ice cream. Throughout that summer, Cuscuna would continue working her public school teaching job to support the family. Smith would apply for screenwriting and audiobook jobs at night whilst making ice cream in the day. But they were both more open to the idea of Smith starting a full-time ice cream business by the end of the festival.

Years later, Harvard Business School senior lecturer Lindsay Hyde would comment approvingly on this experiment:

“Brian had his whole period of doing it as a cart and really understanding demand and understanding what flavors were working; it was rigorous upfront testing to see if there was really a business there,” says Hyde. “This is one of the key lessons for people who are trying to understand bridging a passion project into a business.”

In October 2010, Smith and Cuscuna were walking by a prime corner lot on Vanderbilt Avenue. There was a ‘For Rent — No Restaurants’ sign hanging from the property. The couple contacted the landlord, Dan Noble, who was already in talks with Chase bank to use the front-half of the space as an ATM lobby. Years later, on a podcast about the whole experience, Cuscuna would recall: “They owned the building since the 80s; they lived in the building and they wanted an ice cream shop. They wanted something for their community. They didn’t want an ATM.” This was notable, because the bank was offering above-market-rates.

Noble agreed to the couple’s proposal. He gave them a discount, and — being a former contractor — agreed to redesign the space to accommodate ice cream production. The same week that they were to close on the lease, Smith was offered a job as an executive at an audiobook company. On a p ...

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