Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna of Ample Hills

#92.
We’re kicking off Season 3 of The meez Podcast with an inspiring conversation about resilience, reinvention, and really good ice cream. In this episode, Josh sits down with Jackie Cuscuna and Brian Smith, the founders of Ample Hills Creamery. Jackie and Brian share candid insights on what it takes to start over in the food industry, the lessons they’ve learned about business and creativity, and how they’re keeping the magic of Ample Hills alive. 

They reflect on the highs and lows of entrepreneurship, from expansion struggles to the realities of bankruptcy. The pair also explores the importance of quality control, strategic partnerships, and storytelling in branding. Plus, offer insights into developing new food concepts and their unexpected pivot from ice cream to chicken wings.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, or just someone who appreciates a great comeback story, this is one episode you don’t want to miss.

Links and Resources:

Visit meez: https://www.getmeez.com

Follow meez on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getmeez

Follow Brian and Jackie: https://www.instagram.com/astheicecreamchurns?igsh=dmZ6cnJ5Ymdwbmk2

Chapters:

00:00 The Ice Cream Dream Begins
03:05 Crafting the Perfect Ice Cream
05:59 The Art of Flavor Creation
08:57 Behind the Scenes of Ample Hills
11:59 Innovations in Ice Cream Making
14:56 The Business of Ice Cream
17:53 Lessons Learned and Future Plans
22:52 Quality Control and Consistency in Ice Cream Production
24:23 The Journey from Neighborhood Shop to Scaling Up
26:28 The Role of Partnerships and Opportunities in Growth
28:44 The Impact of Disney and Celebrity Endorsements
33:20 The Rise and Fall: Navigating Success and Bankruptcy
42:04 Reinventing the Brand: From Ice Cream to Chicken
46:52 Creative Ideation: The Process Behind New Concepts

Transcript

Brian Smith

You know, Bob Iger was standing at the Gowana shop in Ample Hills, called Spielberg on his phone, and put him on speaker from his yacht. He was sitting there telling us how much he loved Nona D's Oatmeal Lace—it was the best ice cream he had ever had—and how we were going to have to work together later.

That was the moment. Everything after that was just incredible. If I could travel back in time to one moment—outside of getting married—that was it. Outside of our marriage, that was the main moment. Well, maybe the birth of our children too.

Josh Sharkey

You are listening to The meez Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Sharkey, the founder and CEO of meez, a culinary operating system for food professionals. On this show, we talk to high performers in the food business—everyone from chefs to CEOs, technologists, writers, investors, and more—about how they innovate, operate, and consistently execute at a high level day after day.

And I’d really love it if you could drop us a five-star review anywhere you listen to podcasts—Apple, Spotify, Google—I’m not picky. Anywhere works, and I really appreciate the support. As always, I hope you enjoy the show.

We’re in the lovely home of Brian and Jackie, and I am both excited and grateful because,I don’t know if you all know, but I might have been the biggest Ample Hills fan. My wife, for sure, was the biggest Ample Hills fan. When we left Brooklyn to move up to Westchester, the saddest thing was knowing we wouldn’t have Honeycomb ice cream anymore. So, thank you for making it!

We have a lot to talk about today. We’re going to dig into the history of Ample Hills, talk about some of the challenges you faced with growth and investors, and discuss your new concept—which we’re keeping a bit hush-hush for now. Plus, we’ll be getting into the kitchen a little bit.

To start, for anyone unfamiliar, Ample Hills is the best ice cream that has ever been created. It started in Brooklyn, and I have the founders here. I’d love to get a quick background from both of you because, honestly, I don’t know a lot, and I wanted to learn as we go. I know a little, but maybe you could share how you ended up creating an ice cream shop—because neither of you came from that world, right?

Brian Smith

No, absolutely not. Thanks for coming all the way down from Westchester to Brooklyn. I was 40 when we started Ample Hills, and I definitely think of it as a midlife crisis for me. I had been a writer, making bad TV movies for the Sci-Fi Channel—monster-of-the-week kind of movies. Yeah, don’t look them up. Then I worked in producing and directing audiobooks and radio plays.And what were you doing at the time?

Jackie Cuscuna

I was teaching. I was teaching at the high school I went to in Manhattan.

Josh Sharkey

Wow. So, the same high school you attended?

Jackie Cuscuna

Yep

Brian Smith

I’ve always loved ice cream. I made it at home, and it was something that connected me to childhood. There was nothing deeper than my personal love of making ice cream.

Josh Sharkey

How did you start making it?

Brian Smith

The Ben & Jerry’s cookbook was the first one I had. It was an old-school cookbook that used raw eggs—you wouldn’t see that now. But that was the first one I ever used.

Jackie Cuscuna

I think you started making ice cream from that book before we met, but once we did, it became an obsession. Any town we visited, we had to try the local ice cream. Up in the Adirondacks, where my family had a cabin, that’s where you really started experimenting with flavors—mostly to impress my parents because we weren’t married yet.

Brian Smith

I had a hand-cranked ice cream maker with rock salt, and we’d sit on the porch, making ice cream. It felt like a Norman Rockwell painting. I was just trying to impress her parents and become part of the family. But it was a slow burn. If Spielberg had called with a blockbuster instead of a bad TV movie, we never would have gotten to Ample Hills. But I never quite crossed over to the big leagues. 

When I hit 40, I was running out of options. We had a nest egg from selling an apartment, but it was slowly dwindling as I tried to sell the next great American screenplay. The low-hanging fruit was taking that money and buying myself a job—by opening a neighborhood ice cream shop in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. That was the dream: to make ice cream for other people. Am I remembering that right?

Jackie Cuscuna

Yeah, you are. We also had two little kids and wanted something in our neighborhood. Nothing  like Ample Hills was in our neighborhood. There were good ice cream places we went to, but there wasn’t a place where you could really spend time—where families, friends, and kids could hang out. As new parents, we wanted that for our community. That was my passion—not necessarily making ice cream, but creating a space for the community.

Josh Sharkey

I get that you were obsessed with ice cream, but Ample Hills wasn’t just another shop—it was insanely delicious. How did you perfect your craft? What made Ample Hills, Ample Hills?

Brian Smith

I couldn't go buy ice cream from somebody else. You know, lots of ice cream shops are perfectly good at doing that. Or even buying a base, you know, where you get the milk, cream, sugar and eggs and all that together, and you get it into a shop and then you add cans of flavorings, which most ice cream shops are doing that make their ice cream from scratch.

I knew I had to do it all from scratch, crack eggs, cook the ice cream base, you know, all of that just because. I wanted it to be a creative exercise. I saw it very much like trying to come up with the next crazy monster, like a half alligator man, half  duck monster, whatever it is.

I didn't come up with that one. But anyway giant killer birds or sharks flying in tornadoes. It was the creative muscle to come up with ice cream flavors that wasn't any different than in terms of the technical skill to make the ice cream. That was just a long period of trial and error of making ice cream, sharing it with people, making ice cream, sharing it with people,and getting a sense of what worked and what didn't work.

Brian Smith

I went to the ice cream school that Ben and Jerry famously attended when they started. Penn State has a week-long ice cream chemistry class in the middle of January, which I attended. That was really helpful.

First, everybody there says, "Don't make your own ice cream from scratch. Buy ice cream because it's chemically complicated." You know, getting the fats and the solids right and all of that stuff.

But again, I got the tools and the basic background there. That’s really how we got off and running.

The number one thing I think made our ice cream different at the time—and I do think other people are doing these things now—was increasing what are called the solids in the ice cream.

 Basically, you know, the number one ingredient in whole milk is water, and the number one ingredient in heavy cream is water. I mean, 60% of heavy cream is water and 96% of whole milk is water and water. You need the properties of water that turn into ice, the freezing properties of it, to turn your ice cream from a liquid into a solid, but nobody wants icy ice cream.

And, and of course you could make ice cream with just milk and cream, um, and sugar. But, uh, when you do that, you end up with something that's, that's ier or thinner. There's not as much there. And so skim milk powder, a non-fat dry milk powder is a tool that ice cream makers use. And that's basically all the milk solids without, ah, the milk water, you know, it basically thickens or absorbs the water that's there.

Yep. And gives you a milkier, more solid taste. And then, one of the things was just increasing the amount of solids. And then at the time with Ample Hills, we were using, um, eggs and egg yolks in the ice cream. Not enough that it became real. Custard flavor. But just enough to serve as another emulsifier, a thickener to the ice cream.

Later on when we lost Ample Hills and we started our second ice cream brand, The Social, we actually jettisoned the eggs because I was interested in seeing if I could make what's considered like a Philadelphia style ice cream. It's a cleaner, uh, flavor because ultimately the eggs do provide a flavor.

Yeah. Which is a nice flavor, but it's also a barrier to whatever the flavor of the ice cream is. And so people that are real Philadelphia style ice cream fanatics, like the cleanness of that product. And so I was really interested though. Can you make a Philadelphia style ice cream that still has the thickness and the richness and the chew? The sort of texture that we had at Ample Hills comes from all that body, from the solids of the eggs and skim milk powder.

And I found that using, um, glucose, which is a, you know, an invert sugar, a liquid form of sucrose or, or table sugar if you're using some glucose into it. It has this same kind of real thickening, um, chew gives the ice cream a real chew. And so I really don't think we miss the eggs. And you know, in that way you're also removing another allergen that some people have.And so anyway, those are some of the ways I think that we thought about how to make the ice cream better or different. 

Josh Sharkey

But even like the things you folded into like the honeycomb. One you gotta have a lot of honeycomb, which it did. But then, you know, the actual ingredients independent of the ice cream were also really good.Yeah. How did you, did you also try to spend time somewhere learning that? Or was that just trial and error?  

Brian Smith

I was just trial and error, making lots of brownies and cookies and cakes and all of those kinds of things at home. And the nice thing there and that I still love about making ice cream is you don't have to worry about what, uh, any of those things look like.

You know, bakers and people going to all those schools really have to worry about presentation. That's a good point. I really don't have to worry about it with ice cream, as long as I can chop it up into little pieces and put it into the ice cream. It only matters what it tastes like. And so it's kind of a freedom to really think about, you know, what's the densest, chewiest cake that I could put into an ice cream, or brittles or toffees, or cookies.

All of those kinds of things. Some of those recipes came from—one of them came from your mom or your grandma? The Nona D's, the Oatmeal.That was a good one. That was an oatmeal cookie that your mom made. 

Josh Sharkey

Yeah, that was a really good one. What's the key to Honeycomb?  To make it really good?  They're big pieces, but the texture is what's important, right? It's still something you can bite into. It doesn't break your teeth, but enough.

Brian Smith

It's funny because Honeycomb. If you just eat it, the same honeycomb that we would make if you would just eat it outside of the ice cream, it did have the effect of breaking your teeth or sticking to your teeth. Yes, it was not that pleasant. There's something about eating it within the milk and cream and the fats there that coat the experience.

Sounds a little funny, but like when you're eating it in ice cream. Is definitely a little better. But, uh, you know, honeycomb is really just, you know, sugar. We would make ours with some golden syrup, which again a form is sucrose but it is less refined, so it has some of those molasses or caramel notes to it.

And uh, is it baking soda now? Like it's been so long. Yeah. Baking soda. That air rates it when you, when you get to a certain temperature and then you spread it out and try to like, keep it from collapsing.Fun fact. What was that? 

Jackie Cuscuna 

Oh my god. A hundred acre wood. A hundred acre wood. A hundred acre Woods was an homage to Winnie. Winnie the Pooh a hundred acre wood. Mm-hmm.  I think it was a  sweet cream based with honeycomb candy and then we added gummy bears.

I didn't have that too, it was like all natural gummy bears. Wow. But we quickly realized how, yeah, we made it once. I mean like, no, we made it more than once. It actually made it into our cookbook, I think. Didn't it? Yeah. I don't, I don't know. I don't remember. 

Brian Smith

Now the problem with gummy bears when they're in ice cream is that they break your teeth.

Jackie Cuscuna

Yeah. Those were, those were vicious.

Brian Smith

Yeah. So we quickly took them out and then that's how we had ice cream. The flavor is called Sweet as Honey, which was, I think, the one you're referring to with the honeycomb. But it started life as a hundred acre wood, hundred acre wood, which was 

Josh Sharkey

Oh, interesting. It's so funny too, like the counter intuitiveness of flavors from, because I remember at Bark.  By the way, we tried to use your ice cream a lot, but we couldn't figure out how to get enough wholesale. We have an incredible laboratory. Oh. Which is not really ice cream, it's enchilada, but John's stuff is incredible and we realized that we had to like over season to make the milkshakes.

We needed this sort of custom, like super dark, dark, dark, dark chocolate with extra salt, because once you add the milk. You're diluting it, uh, you're diluting it, and to get it, like, or for the coffee ice cream, you know, we would, uh, using the Gorilla Coffee, but we'd have to like, use like a double strength cold brew mixed into the, into the coffee because the ice cream just mellows everything out, you know? 

Brian Smith

Yeah. I'll tell you, because we, it took us years to realize that, and we didn't actually do it at Ample Hills, but when we started the social, I knew that I wanted to get those milkshakes and, and raise them up a notch, and so we started making all of our own syrup. So we made chocolate syrup from scratch and vanilla syrup, and we made different flavored syrups that we would then add to the milkshakes. Yeah, so do the same thing you're talking about. Yep. Which would, uh, well, you know, if we made a chocolate milkshake, we'd put the chocolate syrup in, or the vanilla Yeah. Or an orange, uh, freeze.

Josh Sharkey

We'd add orange syrup to it, you know, because otherwise you're just simply diluting it. It's just how dumb we were for our vanilla milkshake. For the irst year or two at Bark, we scraped a vanilla bean into every vanilla shake and had vanilla ice cream.

It was like this custom vanilla bean. Yeah. I mean, John, it was John's, uh, you know, vanilla gelato, which was incredible. That was profitable. And we would scrape a vanilla bean into each shake. Yeah. Okay. The team, wow. They were like, what are we doing here? This is crazy. And you would have to like to order, scraping this.That's the dumb stuff. Yeah. 

Brian Smith

Well, when we started Ample Hills, we started by scraping hundreds of vanilla beans. We had a vat pasteurizer. Mm-hmm. The very first, when we started Ample Hills, we had a 15 gallon vat  pasteurizer. Within two weeks I had ordered a 50 gallon VAT pasteurizer, and by the end of the summer we had a hundred gallon pasteurizer because we just couldn't, it didn't, you know, we couldn't make enough ice cream, but we were. Scraping. 

We'd get a hundred vanilla beans and we'd scrape them, you know, into the thing. And then we would throw in like a handful of coffee beans, you know, into the vanilla ice cream as well. And then you strain all of that out. And it really was incredible. But I, you know, it's beyond one shop, you can't do that. It's just

Josh Sharkey

I dunno if you use a vanilla paste, but that stuff is incredible. Yeah. I remember vanilla like the, what's the company? Tahitian Gold. They make this like vanilla paste. I remember when we found it, that's when we stopped using the vanilla beans. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Yeah, I mean it was really expensive. Yeah. Really just like ground up vanilla beans. But really good. 

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Josh Sharkey 

Well, you turned this sort of idea into Ample Hills, which is pretty insane that you were not an ice cream person and then all of a sudden opened up like this incredible ice cream shop. But like what were, what were your roles when you guys opened? Were you both full-time in the shop? 

Jackie Cuscuna

No, I mean actually I was still teaching. I kept my teaching position. At night, I would be managing staff and scheduling and doing all front of house operations. Brian was kind of tied to the kitchen.  

Brian Smith

You came home, you know, occasionally tired. Yeah. But, you know, Jackie was responsible for all the hiring and so a lot of the students that she had, because she was teaching at a high school, and so her students would come and work for us.

So it  naturally sort of the role definition became, you know, I was back of house. She was at the front of the house and, and at the front of the house. It also was all the culture that sort of happened organically at first, that we then later codified into, you know, manuals and, and all the kind of things that you do. But that really came out of your background as a teacher and working with kids.

Jackie Cuscuna

Yeah, and then doing the birthday parties. That was a huge part of our business at Ample Hills in the beginning too. We had these little kids and we'd go to these terrible birthday parties in like  a cement bunker and like, you know, they'd just like churn the party out and you're like, oh my God, I can't believe the, you know,  um, I had to spend two hours of my life in this thing.

And so we were like, I was like, I can't, we have to make our parties like really fun and really experiential and um, and that's, I think it was like our last. Last like $5,000 that we had that everybody said, oh no, you wanna, you know, keep a, a buffer in the bank. You know? I were like, no, not that 5,000 would've been, it wasn't that much.

Brian Smith

But we spent that on the, uh, ice cream. The ice cream churning bicycle. Oh, I remember that thing. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah. I didn't have kids at the time, but yeah. I wish I could bring my kids too. 

We did so many birthday parties with that, with kids getting to ride the bicycle. Yeah. Our own kids had, you know, every birthday they had for the first. You know, three or four or five years the shop.  

Josh Sharkey

What is the food cost on ice cream?  The food cost? Like on a percentage wise?

Brian Smith

Oh, I mean, do like a, it, it, it should be like, you know, 25-30%. You know, oftentimes we were pushing 35%, um, just because we were, you know,  buying, you know, the best ingredients and the best cream and the best eggs, you know, and it 'cause. 

I mean, like anything, you know, you could, you can make ice cream with, you know, this heavy cream, which costs, you know, $80 for a five gallon bag, or you can pay $120 for a five gallon bag. But, you know, and maybe 75% of your audience isn't gonna tell the difference. But, you know, the 25 that can are gonna be the ones that are the brand ambassador. 

So I, you know, it, it, I think the answer is it depends on, you know, who's making the ice cream and where it's coming from. But our goal was always to try to get it around 30%. 

Josh Sharkey

Yeah. And was there one flavor that was the most profitable?

Brian Smith

I mean, the, the, the sweetest honey was, you know, was really good because it didn't take much honey to make honeycomb and it didn't have vanilla in it, which is expensive. Because the base was sweet cream. And that flavor was very popular. 

Josh Sharkey

So I guess that would probably be the, it sounds like you were responsible for this, but like.  Was there a lot of variability in the final product? Like how did you like QA and maintain consistency?

Brian Smith

I mean, the product I'm sure changed so much. I mean, mostly because I was constantly, uh, you know, tweaking it and changing it as we went. I remember listening to one of the episodes you did with Wylie Dufresne about how he  kept iterating and iterating, and I definitely suffered from that for the first while. But I mean, I was the only one.

I was the only one making the ice cream for a long time. And so that was really the quality control because I was just making it, you know, and I knew I would make it the same way and put the same amount of pieces of cookie dough or ooey gooey cake in, and then over time I had other people and I would train them.

It's a challenging thing because it's very hard to say, uh, you know, this flavor gets exactly three cups of cookie dough mixed into it. I mean, because you're mixing it in as you're going and so you're trying to get the layers to all be right. It’s not a machine that's doing it. It's a person.

Yeah. And so it's not just following, you can follow the recipe to make sure that, you know, it always has the same amount of milk and cream and sugar in it. But the actual churning of it, you might pull it a little sooner, a little later, it gets a little thicker. So those were all just learnings that had to happen over time to try to really get consistency.  

Josh Sharkey

Did you always plan to scale to more locations?  

Brian Smith

No. I mean, I guess at first it was really just. Let's have a neighborhood shop, you know, and if it can, uh, pay a salary for me and Jackie can keep teaching and, and then like, oh, wow. Maybe it could make enough money that Jackie could not be teaching.