Before founding Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, CEO Ben Van Leeuwen spent two summers driving an ice cream truck, an experience that sparked a bigger vision. After saving his earnings and traveling across Europe and Southeast Asia for nine months, he saw firsthand how many cultures treat high-quality food not as a luxury, but as an everyday standard. That realization would go on to shape the brand’s philosophy and set a new standard for the ice cream industry.
The next time Van Leeuwen saw an ice cream truck, he wondered if he could turn the dessert into a high-quality experience. “I thought, ‘What if we did an ice cream truck with really good ice cream made with milk, cream, egg, sugar, nothing else; and then ingredients like pistachios from Sicily, and sun-ripened strawberries from Oregon,'” he said.
In 2008, Van Leeuwen turned his bold ‘what if’ into reality, purchasing two 1988 Chevy post office trucks from eBay and retrofitting them into ice cream trucks. Alongside co-founders Pete Van Leeuwen and Laura O’Neill, he parked the two trucks on the corner of Green and Prince in SoHo, officially launching Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. Soon after, a friend offered them a 90-square-foot space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Eighteen years later, the company has grown to 103 brick-and-mortar locations across 15 states.
Challenge: Growing in the toughest market in the country
From the beginning, building Van Leeuwen in New York City meant operating with little margin for error. “It’s grow or die, especially in New York,” Van Leeuwen said. “There were times where I said, ‘Unless we make this thing bigger, unless we generate more revenue, we’re out.'” In the beginning, he and his co-founders managed cash flow themselves, often relying on business loans to keep the company moving forward.
He recalled a time where the team drove around in the middle of winter, emptying the cash register of every truck to make payroll with only $37 left in their account. Fortunately, the team made payroll then, and every time since, but the co-founders needed a better way to manage their finances, especially as they sought large-scale growth.
“I foolishly believed when I was younger that growth would sort of cure all ills, that once we got to this size, it would be smooth sailing. And then I realized it’s never smooth sailing,” he said. “The problems just change.”
Solution: Driving growth and financial clarity with Square Loans
In 2012, Van Leeuwen turned to Square, seeking the financial infrastructure the business lacked in its early years. Square Loans quickly became a critical growth lever.
We can borrow money in about six hours [with Square]. Square’s cash-flow-based lending was incredibly helpful, and I used it almost immediately to help build stores.”
Ben Van Leeuwen → CEO, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream
Beyond easier access to cash, the Van Leeuwen team appreciates the predictability of Square’s flat processing fees, which removed the complexity that once made reconciliation difficult and time-consuming as the business tried to scale.
“I like the flat processing fee. We didn’t have a real accounting or finance team when we started, and trying to reconcile reports from traditional processes was painful. We’d see thousands of transactions with different percentages depending on the card type, and it was hard to tell if we were getting a fair deal. Square’s flat fee made things much clearer.”
With over 100 locations, clarity is essential to managing business performance at scale. Square reporting tools give the team real-time visibility into sales data across every store. “Through the data, we can understand the performance of all of our menu items across the fleet and make decisions on which items to remove,” Van Leeuwen said. “We have a lot of limited time offerings and we use the data to understand which of those items to promote to our core menu…We just launched frozen yogurt in our flavor lab store, and I can see every few hours how many units we’ve sold.”
Clarity is also key when understanding customer behavior. The Van Leeuwen team leverages Square Marketing to see exactly how many customers are going into stores based on messaging around everything from limited time offerings to core menu items. “The attributable sales metric is incredibly exciting and helps us measure the effectiveness of our messaging and offers,” Van Leeuwen said.
With integrated insights, Square gives the team a single source of truth, replacing the uncertainty of the early days with the visibility needed to scale Van Leeuwen Ice Cream confidently.
Impact: Scaling with confidence through data and efficiency
With a strong handle on critical aspects like finances and customers, the team is able to expand with greater confidence and precision. “Data analytics are especially helpful when evaluating new markets or store locations. Analytics are never perfect, but having fast, accessible insights helps drive better decisions,” Van Leeuwen said.
With Square providing real-time visibility across the business, growth decisions are combined with actionable data and instinct.
Being able to quickly access important information helps keep the business on track so the team can spend more time focusing on the ingredients. For Van Leeuwen, high-quality ingredients are the foundation of the brand. With Square’s integrated tools reducing operational complexity, the team has more time to source the best from across the world. “To maintain excellence at scale, so much of it is about sourcing. We have to buy more Piedmont hazelnuts, more Sicilian pistachios, more whole vanilla beans, more chocolate that’s grown in Ecuador. We need to go to these places,” he said.
Balancing excellence with efficiency is the recipe for growth at Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. “It’s clear that the creative part is definitely the fun part, right? It’s where people like us definitely thrive,” Van Leeuwen said. “But there’s the other side of it that makes it so that we can keep doing the things that we like, and that’s the serious part, right? And that’s where Square comes in.”
By powering the operational side of the business, from payments and reporting to marketing and capital, Square enables Van Leeuwen to protect what makes the brand loved while continuing to scale nationwide.
