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

Visit the Ample Hills Creamery Website: https://amplehills.com/home

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, 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. 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.

Of course, you could make ice cream with just milk, cream, and sugar. But when you do that, you end up with something that's icier or thinner—there’s not as much "there" there.

Skim milk powder, or non-fat dry milk powder, is a tool that ice cream makers use. That’s basically all the milk solids without the milk water. It thickens or absorbs the water that’s there.