Ice Cream for All: Van Leeuwen Launches New Vegan Line
By Lorrie Baumann
Van Leeuwen Ice Cream came to the Winter Fancy Food Show this year ready to win the dairy avoidant back to the pleasures of ice cream with seven flavors of its new oat milk frozen desserts. Van Leeuwen Ice Cream has been making vegan ice creams since 2013, but with its new oat milk ice creams, the company is ready to offer a vegan ice cream that Ben Van Leeuwen, the company’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer says has a texture and taste that wows even dairy lovers. “The mission is to make ice cream for everybody. We’ve got you covered,” he said. “Our dairy customers switch between both, which is really exciting to us. To us, this is the ultimate vote of confidence that the vegan is just as good as the dairy.”
The company’s new oat milk ice creams are offered in seven flavors: Chocolate Oat Milk Cookie Dough Chunk, Oat Milk Brown Sugar Chunk, Brownie Sundae Raspberry Swirl, Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Swirl, Oat Milk Mocha Latte, Oat Milk Caramel Cookie, and for the traditionalists, Strawberry. “With ice cream, we want to do flavors that are familiar, but made in our way, sourcing the best chocolate, the best strawberries,” Van Leeuwen said, adding that the familiar flavors add a level of comfort for customers who are uncertain about trying a non-dairy ice cream. “Vegan ice cream is new to a lot of people,” he said. “Even the term ‘vegan’ is not fully understood by everybody.”
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The ice creams, like all of the Van Leeuwen products, are made in small batches in the company’s Brooklyn, New York, facility, from premium ingredients, so it competes directly in the ultra-premium space, as it has since Van Leeuwen and business partners started making ice cream and selling from their truck on the streets of New York in 2008, Van Leeuwen said. “We added vegan ice cream in 2013,” he said. “Our customers were asking for it, and we obviously wanted to serve them…. We were never trying to make good vegan ice cream; we were just trying to make more good ice cream that happened to be vegan – just as good as the best dairy ice cream.”
In those early days in business, Van Leeuwen was inspired both by the summer job he’d had in college, when he drove a Good Humor truck, and by his experience traveling around the world after leaving college. “I was going around the world to countries where high-quality food was more widespread, and I was really excited about the accessibility of good food. The ice cream truck seemed like a really good model to launch into because it’s so accessible…. That was before food trucks were cool,” he said.
While he was driving ice cream in those early days, it’s the ice cream that drives him now, he says. “It’s an overall love for food that’s made with a lot of care and intention and with quality as a number-one goal,” he said. “My favorite part of the business is the sourcing and visiting the farms and learning how the food is grown.”