 This is Start of the Store Front. If you were born before a certain point in time, hearing about a good humor ice cream truck might conjure up nostalgic memories of a carefree summer. Younger generations might be more familiar with good humor products found in the freezer section of grocery stores all over the country. This is the story of how a single ice cream truck grew into a chain with national distribution, but it is not the good humor story. Our guest today is Ben Van Luen, co-founder of Van Luen Ice Cream. Ben's first experience with ice cream came from working in one of those good humor ice cream trucks, and his tale parallels theirs in many ways. He eventually branched off and created his own ice cream, selling it out of a truck on the streets of New York City before expanding into storefronts and grocery chains nationwide. But in order to get the full story, you'll have to listen in as we cover everything from why his vision for the company was massive from the get-go, the importance of mentorship, and why making good ice cream isn't rocket science. Now, on to the episode. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Ben, the founder of Van Luen. Thanks so much for joining for the crazy amount of small people who don't know what your company is. Please tell them, and then we'll jump right into it. We are called Van Luen Ice Cream. We make ice cream in Brooklyn, New York and sell it in our own scoop shops and grocery stores across the country. My wife wanted me to tell you that she is a top 5% on Uber Eats because she literally orders Van Luen every night to the point of which I had to tell her just order like 20 and then you don't have to order them every night and then they're in the freezer all the time. And so I'm excited to talk to you. You make an amazing product. Getting into the ice cream category is crazy. It's probably one of the hardest markets. And so I wanted just to get your take on, did you start in the ice cream category? What made you wanna jump in? What's your background? Just give us a sense of why ice cream. Sure, when I was 18 years old, I was finishing up high school, needed a summer job and I responded to an ad in the newspaper for a good humor truck. I drove a good humor ice cream truck where I grew up in Connecticut for three summers and that was my foray into the ice cream business. Where in Connecticut did you grow up? I grew up in Riverside, Connecticut, part of Greenwich. And fast forward, I'm graduating from college. I need a job. I was walking around Manhattan and I saw Mr. Softy truck and I thought, why don't we do really good ice cream with really good ingredients and sell it off of a truck? I thought it was a great idea because the overhead on a truck is gonna be fairly consistent whether you're in North Dakota or New York City, very different than storefront. So the vision was big right away. The vision was to have these trucks all over. To have hundreds and thousands of these trucks selling ice cream made with pistachios from Sicily and Michelle Clizzo chocolate, which we used to use and strawberries ripened in the sun in Oregon. And we quickly, about a year and a half, two years in realized this truck model is so hard. It is so operationally challenging and storefronts work a lot better. What was challenging from the truck perspective was it just the cost? Was it finding the right style? Was it the retrofit? Because we know there's a coffee truck literally right inside of our studio space that we put, I'm a real estate developer. And so we put a coffee truck that was right around the pandemic and we permanently parked it in the building, which now serves all these wonderful people on Santa Monica Boulevard and West Hollywood. And I wanna say they put about $120,000 into the retrofit, but it's a beautiful 1957 French Citroën vehicle. But the problem was, and so just to give you like their example, if something breaks down they're ordering parts from France and there's only one mechanic in Los Angeles that knows how to fix this vehicle, which does not make a good business. And so when you say on your side of it, the truck was kind of difficult, what was the part that you were kind of like you couldn't get passed or couldn't scale? A number of them. One, the regulation varies from town to town, city to city. The permits you need to run the truck, the permits you need to work on a truck. So in a store we can hire someone and they can fill out their payroll paperwork and start working in two hours. In New York City it takes someone eight to 12 months to get permitted to work on an ice cream truck and I'm not exaggerating. If you have a brick and mortar storefront, almost no matter what, that storefront's gonna be there every single day. In a truck you need to find this parking spot. That storefront's gonna have electricity every day and it's gonna have water every day. On a truck you need a working generator that's gonna break a lot and you need to make sure your water system's working, your water tank's been filled, when it gets cold out that your water tanks aren't freezing and then you have the space issue, right? You have very, very little space which makes it hard to store stuff and harder to work in. Now there's benefits to a truck too, right? It is a much lower cost to enter the business. I mean, we built our trucks for less than $30,000 in God on the Road. I mean, we've always been and we remain super-duper scrappy. You know, we wanna put money into places where it affects the customer's sensory experience. We were always really careful about how we spent money. Now the hardest part about your business is getting the product right. And so how long were you in R&D? How many different flavors did you try before you had the bangers, let's say the eight that just made it great? Like how long did you spend there in that time of just R&D? We spent probably six months doing R&D. I mean, the R&D is never ending. I mean, literally we do R&D every single day on both new products, but also the sort of less PR effective R&D is just saying, how do we constantly work to make our staples like vanilla, honeycomb, chocolate, strawberry, pistachio even better? You know, that stuff we don't market. We're just tweaking, constantly tweaking. I mean, can we make this better? Can we change this source? Can we change the amount of eggs or milk powder to make it taste better? So early on though, yeah, it was about, you know, six months or so to sort of get to a place where we thought this is really good, but our ice cream is better today than it was then. I think in six years and 10 years is gonna be better and always get better. And when I say better, I also mean serving the sensory preference that the general market has, because that changes as well. You know, you have a background going before Van Luen ice cream to good humor ice cream, but you know, you're driving a truck, you're not actually making it yourself. And you know, it comes already prepackaged and ready to go when you're serving it in a good humor truck. What was that like when you were first experimenting with all these flavors? I mean, you have no background in making ice cream. So what were your first couple of batches like? I mean, be honest, were they any good? Yeah, no, I mean, making ice cream is easy. So the first batch I ever made, one of the cookbooks I owned was a Thomas Keller cookbook, Bouchon. There's a vanilla ice cream recipe in there, creme anglaise. I made it and I was shocked because I said, whoa, A, this was really easy. I mean, if you follow the directions, in B, this is, at least for me, it's far better than anything. Truly, I had had outside of, you know, I hadn't been to many fancy restaurants then I was just a kid with very little money. So it was probably the best ice cream I had ever had and I made it myself. And I'm, I'm a good cook, but you know, I'm not a trained pastry chef. So I said, whoa, this is a really cool opening in the market. There's this product that isn't that hard to make that's preserved state is also at serving states. You don't need to do any preservatives. So that was the first batch I made. And what was different about that than say a Haagen-Dazs, which, you know, I like Haagen-Dazs, it's not bad ice cream, was the butterfat level and the amount of eggs. So there was a lot more fat and a lot more eggs. And we steep whole vanilla beans. So that makes a difference too. But, you know, making good ice cream or making what we consider good ice cream isn't rocket science. Over the years, people say like, do you keep the recipe secret? Like, no, like anyone can make it like this. They just have to spend a lot more money. I mean, we, we work to find efficiencies in places. Again, which I was saying before that don't affect the product. So let's get really smart with our supply chain with our fulfillment so we can keep making an 18% butterfat, 6% egg yolk ice cream with cold ground whole Tahitian vanilla beans, which is gonna be what makes your experience awesome, you know, because if the experience, when you strip all the marketing and a wave in the packaging design away from the product, if that experience isn't distinct, then honestly, I'd say, I wouldn't wanna be in this business. I wouldn't wanna be doing what I'm doing. Because I do see, just to become a little negative, I see so many food products and new products period come under the market where when you strip all of that away, there's no distinction from the competition. And to me, that is the most boring thing in the world. If I'm gonna do that, I just wanna go into banking. Is the hard part from your perspective, just like dealing with the, so you kind of mentioned this before, right? So you're dealing with like an evolving consumer where either everyone becomes sugar conscious all of a sudden or carb conscious all of a sudden or the dairy market is moving into like the coffee shop here, they don't serve any dairy. It's all nut milks. And so you have this like consumer who's maybe trying to change or have you found it, it doesn't really matter actually, like your product is so good or your customer is so loyal that you just keep pumping out the same thing, making small refinements, but it's not like you're trading maybe sugar for like a stevia or do you do that? I mean, the goal is to serve the customer, right? I mean, I can make ice cream for myself, but that's not why I started VanLew and I didn't just serve people. So it's listening to the customer. And I mean, we're still a relatively small company so we don't have a consumer insights team. You know, our consumer research is done by our sales team and our marketing team and our very small R and D team, but in a sort of undisciplined, intuitive, gut-driven way. So we do constantly want to just sort of try to get a sense of what they want and serve people more effectively, you know, with a goal of just making something that they want to eat more of. When you first started, how did you go about, did you just bootstrap this or did you raise capital at some point? No, we bootstrapped it. We started with $60,000 that we raised from friends, family, anyone we really knew who would invest. That's all we could get. We wanted to raise more, but we couldn't get a penny more. Nobody wanted to invest. You know, I guess most people just didn't believe in it. And I was surprised because it wasn't reinventing the wheel. I was like, I'm going to make really good ice cream and sell it off of a truck in one of the wealthiest cities on earth. I think this is going to work. So yeah, so we went off that $60,000 for about eight years. Then we were able to get a small SBA loan, which allowed us to build a really, our own sort of new manufacturing plant in Green Point, Brooklyn. And we're still there today. We did a big renovation on that two years ago, right at the start of the pandemic. But since then, in the last five years, we've done a series A and then a series B. You know, it's interesting, the point that you talked about before where you said that a store is infinitely more manageable, but as a higher startup cost and what you were able to raise when you were just starting out, because people didn't necessarily believe in the idea or whatnot, it seems like there was no option at all to go into a storefront right away. But knowing what you know now, do you still feel the same way that you would, if you had to do it all over again, would you start with a truck or would you go for a storefront and just try, you know, understand that you'd have to raise a little bit more capital? Yeah, I mean, if I had to do it, if I was doing it all over again, I would raise more money in open stores and I'd raise a lot more money. But if I was doing it all over again, you know, I'd have 15 years more experience than I had then. So I knew a lot more. I think for my experience at that time, a truck in $60,000 was a great way to start because I didn't have the experience to, sure, $250,000 would have been better. But we, Pete, Laura and I, my two business partners, I didn't have the experience to take a few million dollars and deploy that smartly and successfully. We also had it honed the product, the retail experience, our team member training programs in a way that was ready for a lot of capital. The one thing that is a constant is every year that goes by, every two years that goes by, if you're a growing business and you're working hard and motivated, you look back and say, wow, I can't believe we were doing it that way then. How did we not see this? How did we not know that we should have done it this way? So to us, that's kind of a fun phenomenon that occurs because we say we're improving. So we know it's always gonna change. But about three, four years ago when we started raising money, we felt we were in a place that was knowing that it would always evolve and continue to get better. We felt like we were in a place where we could really grow rapidly, where we had sort of brought the business model to a place that was ready to scale. Well, this provides an interesting segue. So you were on Deal or No Deal, not as a contestant, but as a mentor. And what you just said, like all the things that you wish you would have known now if you had to do it all over again, you'd have 15 years of experience under your belt. The concept of mentorship is just a fascinating one. In whatever you do in life, I think it's very necessary to both have a mentor and to be a mentor when you get to that point. You were brought on to Deal or No Deal to mentor the contestant who was starting out her own ice cream business. And I'm curious to know your perspective on what being a mentor means to you. And if you had a mentor in your early developmental entrepreneurial stages that kind of helped you along. You know, I had no mentor. I think it was probably a, I didn't have a mentor because of a combination of like insecurity on my part, probably a little bit of arrogance, lack of network. You know, I found as I get older and more experienced in business, I realize how little I know for sure. You know, when we started Van, which I think was a good thing, we knew exactly the way to make ice cream. We knew exactly the way to design a store. We knew exactly how everything should be. As every year passes, answers to anything and how anything should be to run a business successfully become less and less concrete. I mean, there's the constants of keep your team happy, keep your customers happy, right? But how to do that becomes more and more mysterious. And I think that's just, you know, humility as you get older. But then in terms of being a mentor, I'm not officially a mentor to anyone, but when I get emails or phone calls or texts from people, you say, hey, I'm thinking of doing this, you know, can you help me? You know, can I talk to you for an hour or two? I'm always happy to do it. And it's very selfish because I actually enjoy it. I like hearing about what they're doing and it really is fun for me being able to hopefully impart some like lessons I've learned, quick tricks that you can do to avoid making bad decisions because I didn't have that. And I don't know if it would have resonated with me had I had a mentor. Cause when I talk to people who are in an earlier stage of starting a business or haven't started yet, usually there's people who want to absorb and then there's people and this is how I was, which is I think a less intelligent way to be who just know exactly what they want to do and kind of just want to sit there and talk and tell you what they're going to do. And regardless of what you say, they're going to do it their way. And that's not a bad thing. They're going to do it their way. They're going to make mistakes. They're going to learn. But I was kind of like that. I knew exactly what I was going to do. And I think when I talked to people, I just wanted to tell them what I was going to do. And if they said, nah, that's a bad idea. You should try this. It would make me so upset. How many stores do you guys have today? We have 29 stores today. Okay. We're in West Hollywood. West Hollywood has, I think, the highest minimum wage in the United States at present. When it goes to running and opening your stores, what's the hard part? Like, is it labor? Is it the changing labor rates that make it harder to pencil? What's the thing that really is like, ugh, this is getting sticky? The hard part for us historically, which we're in a really good place on now, but it was labor control. Beyond what the labor rate is, the margins in food retail are really thin. So you might be looking at a 5% to 10%, maybe 15% profit margin. So if your labor's over by like 5%, 10%, that could make the entire business model not work. And it's very, very easy for that to get out of control because labor control is, it's intuitive in one sense. If there's three people working and it's not busy in an ice cream shop, you kind of know that's too much, but it doesn't intuitively correct itself. So without really good management who's super on top of things, even if everyone has the best intention, you can easily be overstaffed. So labor control will make or break a retail business. And then the other part is obviously finding rent deals that make sense for the business. What we look at when we're considering real estate is we build P&Ls and then we do stress tests. So we say we think this store is gonna make $100 a year, but what happens if it only makes $50 a year? Are we in the red or are we still in the black? And we're actually very conservative in that way. So we like to go into stores where even under extremely stressful financial conditions, we can keep paying the team, we can keep paying our rent. And so far it's worked, like we didn't close a single store even during the pandemic, let alone from the pandemic. So everything stayed open and everything. I think there was a few months when we were in the red, but other than that, we were okay. And it was hard, but we made it work. Has Uber Eats fundamentally changed your business or has just made it like a very, like a, yeah, it's been a lever for growth, I imagine. Yeah, it's been amazing. So Uber Eats, Caviar, Postmates, every one of the apps just been absolutely awesome. I mean, not only for generating revenue on those platforms, but it's, it levels the playing field on building brand awareness, you know, in markets where particularly vehicular markets like Los Angeles, where you don't have a lot of people walking around, we're getting exposure to a lot of people on the apps. So they're trying us on the apps and then coming into the stores and discovering us. And I know a lot of business owners, and I see this on social media, complain about the 15 or 20% cut they take. If you spend 30 minutes doing a P&L and looking into what it would cost for you to do that delivery aspect yourself, you are gonna be so much higher than 20 points. So like, for us, we're really happy with those. As you closed your B round, is the play here now? You have a model that works. It sounds like you have the efficiencies there. At least the retail model makes a lot of sense or at least you understand it. Is the play just stores, 100, 200 stores? Yeah, I mean, we do wanna, we will and want to keep expanding the scoop shops. I mean, I don't have a number, I can't say 100 or 200. I would love to do 200 if there's 200 locations where there's demand for a Van Luin ice cream. I think there probably are, you know, close to that in the U.S. But we're also really focused on the grocery channel, the CPG. There's a synergy between both of those channels. So sometimes people find us in a grocery store and then learn about the scoop shop and go there or the reverse can happen as well. So we find that in markets where we have scoop shops, our grocery sales are higher. What grocery stores are you guys in right now? We are in Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target, Walmart, Heneford, Meyer, Chul, Safeway, Stop and Shop, Shopry. All of them. You lost me in the middle there. I'd never heard of some of those. It sounds like a lot. Our ACV is probably around 20%. So we're probably in the 20% of U.S. stores. So it is a lot, but, you know, Haagen-Dazs and Ben and Jerry's are gonna be in 99%. So we're still small. And then the other thing to think about with doors is not only how many doors are you in, but how many skews, how many products do you have in each door? So we might say we're in, you know, we're in 200 doors and Haagen-Dazs is in 300, but we're in 200 with seven skews. Haagen-Dazs might be in 300 with 30 skews. So every door is an equal. Is the challenge then become like distribution and more of, I know you mentioned your facilities in Brooklyn, but would you like that to be like one on the West Coast, one on the East Coast or how difficult is just the shipping of this? It's difficult. It's also really expensive. So I would define difficult as mistakes are made. You know, so when a pallet of vanilla is ordered, sometimes they send a pallet of honeycomb instead or when a mixed pallet is packed and it's sent to a retailer, you will get fined if there's even one case missing. So you'll get like a $500 fine for one case missing. So your costs on that can go up a lot. But since the pandemic, we've seen fulfillment costs almost double. So like truck from Utah to New Jersey, it's gone from 4,000 to 8,500. So huge cost increases there. So we're actually in the process of- Why? Why has that gone up? I don't know exactly why. I mean, I think labor shortage, fuel costs have gone up, vehicle costs have gone up, so everything. And then the supply chain was backed up. But yeah, the fulfillment costs have risen a lot. So our scoop shops can absorb that because the margins better. But in the grocery channel, you have to increase prices to absorb that. So we're about to do a really small increase. Almost all of our competitors are doing the same too. That makes sense. I have a question more as a real estate developer side. And so we're entering this world that I call like the post-pandemic world. And so things have to change. And so, especially in Los Angeles, so if you were a business in Los Angeles, the government, because of the mass mandates, could shut you down. You were open one day, closed the next day, but you could have an ice cream shop in San Diego and be totally open. But in Los Angeles, you're not. And so there was this weird like, from a business perspective, staying alive becomes a problem. PPP loans come in, sure, but it's paperwork and annoying. And from a, it just, it doesn't work. It's hard. There's stress, there's friction. When it comes to how you think about just a retail strategy, does anything change? Does it become like more indoor outdoor? Are you thinking more about like garage doors in these markets? Or is it just, no, we're, no. Yeah, no. I mean, the pandemic didn't change our, our retails, our scoop shop, sort of location selection strategy, although except in one place, because the pandemic drove online delivery sales up so much, we do sometimes consider the delivery opportunity in an area. So we actually haven't opened a store based on this yet, but there might be an instance where we say, we're actually going to do more delivery out of there because it's sort of a dead zone for our deliveries, even if we think the walk-in's not going to be that good. We haven't done it yet, but we've talked about it. So in that case, you're basically just getting a bigger fridge, is that kind of the play? Or is it just more of like, there's no like indoor seating, it's just basically- It might be something like that, yeah. But we'd still always be open for walk-in. Like we're not, we're, we've never considered just doing just like fulfillment storefronts. One thing I always order are cookies when I go into the store. Are you also in the cookie business, is this going to become a growing thing for you? No. We tried that many years ago when we used to sell coffee in all of our stores because we wanted to de-seasonalize, make our business not seasonal. So we tried to be a coffee business as well and we actually opened our own pastry manufacturing facility and we used bio-dynamic flowers and made our own chocolate ganache and rolled our own croissant doughs out. And we made really, really good stuff, but it was a great lesson because we realized it's expensive, it's low margin, but it was also really hard to, no matter how well you do something else, it's hard to be more than one thing to people in the sort of quick service retail business. You know, no matter how well you're doing the other thing, we were an ice cream shop. People came to Van Loon to buy ice cream. You know, Blue Bottle Coffee, they go to Blue Bottle to get coffee. You know, I think if Blue Bottle started serving ice cream and they actually served our vanilla for a time with affogados, but it just, it wasn't a fit for them either because there's this friction in the consumer psychology of saying, wait, I don't go to Van Loon for coffee, that's the ice cream shop. I'll say this much, I go to Van Loon probably more for cookies than ice cream. My wife goes solely for the ice cream. I don't think she's ever touched a cookie or brought a cookie. What's on the agenda? What's next for the future of Van Loon in this year, 2023? Continue to make good ice cream that makes you feel good. I mean, that's kind of our tagline. And you know, what that means is constantly try to improve the product, constantly try to improve the team member experience, the customer experience, and expand. So sort of expand as much as there is demand for the expansion and as much as our capital can support and also sort of balance that in a way that all of our stakeholders, whether they be our team members, our investors are kind of on board with everything and feel really good about it. You know, with that in mind, you know, continuing to make good ice cream, I know that you guys made a Kraft Mac and cheese flavor that kind of went viral and I thought that was a great bit of marketing on your part just because like when you're able to partner with a massive company to the publicity that you're going to get from people being initially grossed out by the idea. But then the feedback was generally good. Like, you know, people loved it. I'm curious about if you've got any other flavors up your sleeve that you are kind of like teasing out for a release in the future. We do. I don't, I think they're all quarantined right now. That's a funny word for it. I will say with the shock flavors, with the flavors like the mac and cheese, we will never do a shock flavor for the sake of it being a shock flavor. We'll only make things that we think are delicious and that people will want to eat. Right. What really excited us about the mac and cheese was, Kraft came to us and they said, do you want to do this together? And my initial reaction was, I don't think we can do it because the label is probably not in line with our ingredient guardrails. We don't use palm oil. We don't use artificial coloring. And I looked at their label and I said, wow, you know, it's basically cultured milk, salt, and turmeric, and an auto for coloring. So he said, this could work. And then we made it and we said, this is really good. And on top of that, it's not even weird tasting. If it wasn't orange, you'd just be like, oh, maybe sort of vanilla, but a little bit tangy. So with those shock flavors, we want to do stuff that is shocking sometimes because it's a good PR mechanism, right? And we're a small company with virtually no media budget. So we need to do stuff like that to get attention. But on the flip side, it was really sort of genuine to us in that Kraft mac and cheese are this iconic American product. And we love the juxtaposition of that in an artisanal brand, but also a huge part of our mission is we say make good ice cream for everybody. Artisanal food is easy to make. Making artisanal foods that in America that are accessible, both distribution wise and price wise is much more challenging. And that gets us really excited. And part of what inspired me to start this business was I took the profits from the good humor ice cream truck that I drove when I was 19 years old. And I didn't go back to college and I traveled with a backpack around Europe and Southeast Asia by myself. And I never really left the country, but I was so into the food when I was traveling. I was so like shocked by how good food in most of Europe and Southeast Asia was normal. The word foodie isn't a thing there. If you're in Italy, you're a foodie. You care about where your olive oil is from and getting really good produce. So that idea of it being normal really excited me. Cause again, like, you know, doing a $300 tasting menu, like it's awesome. It's a cool experience. But like, yeah, it better be amazing, right? But like being able to make something that's, you know, a pint for five or six bucks or a scoop for five bucks, which I know isn't cheap, but is, you know, accessible to a lot of people and making it a really awesome culinary experience to us. That that's the mission. And that's something that we'll like constantly strive for what I say before it is constantly trying to make that experience better and more distinct and just memorable in a positive way for people. That's awesome. Do you have a favorite flavor? I mean, it changes every day, but this week, and it's been this for a year. It's the Praline Butter Cake followed by the Cherry Chip. I have not had either one of those. Neither one of those is in the fridge at home at the time. I'll have to check these out. You know, I'm sure that you've experimented with a lot of different recipes, a lot of different flavors. And I'm sure that, you know, you have your mix of like those that just blow you away and those that you just not too keen on, but have there ever been any that just like are really like awful? Like truly, truly bad that you're just like, oh, I can't believe this turned out as awful as it did. I mean, we don't make awful flavors anymore because we've gotten really good at this. But in the early days, we were so militant in our sourcing and we wanted to make a licorice ice cream. Licorice ice cream is generally made with anise. You don't actually use licorice. Licorice is like a medicinal root that grows in the Himalayas. And I was like, no, we are using wild harvested licorice root. You know, I found an importer and we made this licorice infused flavor and it was terrible. It was absolutely awful. And around that same time, I made this one, I really liked, but nobody else liked. I did a tarragon ice cream, which is actually good. And that is kind of licorice-y tasting. But then I also made a peach habanero sorbet, which everyone said tasted like salsa. So those ones were kind of misses and people didn't want to eat them. But then there's other flavors that we make that we absolutely love that just don't sell. So like an example is my business partners and I love passion fruit. It's also like quite an expensive flavor to make. So we've tried like three passion fruits over the years, passion fruit cheesecake, passion fruit layer cake. We have a vegan passion fruit with chunks of blondie in it right now. And for whatever reason, those ones just don't move at all. When it comes to the vegan category for you, what milks are you using? Is it almond milk? Is it oat milk? What do you go with? What's better for making ice cream? Cause I know the consistencies can get really difficult between the three. Yeah, so with ice cream, we're looking for fat and solids. So we're using coconut cream, which is going to give us both fat and it's going to give us some non-fat solids. And then depending on the flavor, we'll also use like some oat milk that we make in house or cashew milk that we make in house. Both sort of give a different texture, a different flavor. And some customers love the cashew coconut, some love the oat coconut, but then to really bulk it up and give it that sort of fatty rich taste that dairy has, we use cocoa butter, which is the fat from chocolate actually. And then we'll also use raw extra virgin coconut oil. When it came to going down that road was just shelf life a challenge though, since all of these milks can be temperamental or no? No, not at all, because with ice cream it's frozen. So you'll never have any shelf life issues, yeah. You'll see issues in ice cream with the supply chain. If it gets hot and cold, it will never go bad cause it's never going to get that warm, but you'll sometimes eat our ice cream or other brands of ice cream that through the supply chain have experienced what we call temperature shock and they might taste a little icy. Well, listen, Ben, anything else we should know? Anything else you want to tease about Van Luen and what's to come? You know, we're continuing to open stores this year in New York, Los Angeles, Philly, Denver, Dallas, Houston and we're just, we're excited to keep growing and I hope I see some of the folks listening in the stores would love to say hi. So thanks for having me on guys. Yeah, of course. When you open the one in LA, let us know and we'll stop by. Absolutely. Studio city's the next. So, please do come. Not right now. Well, thank you, Ben. I appreciate it, man. Thanks so much for having me, guys. That was our conversation with Ben of Van Luen Ice Cream and since you're still here, please consider subscribing if you're not already or better yet, leave us a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever else you get your podcast. We are found at Startup Storefront on every social media platform with the exception of Twitter where we can be found at STS Podcast LA. The team consists of Diego Torres Palma, Natalia Capolini, Lexi Jameson, Owen Capolini and me, Nick Conrad. Our music is by DoubleTouch. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next time.