Photo illustration by Joelle McKenna
What went down at Ample Hills?
The couple behind the local ice cream chain enjoyed unimaginable success, until it all melted down. Now they're back for a second scoop
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The flagship shop on Vanderbilt (by christopher.berry, licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
On March 16, Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna signed a lease on a storefront for their new ice cream business, The Social. As it happens, March 16 was one year to the day that Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for Ample Hills, the ice cream company they founded a decade ago.
And what a decade it had been: Ample Hills started small—selling funky hand-churned flavors like maple ice cream with “bacon bark” out of a pushcart in Prospect Park—and absolutely rocketed to success, receiving accolades from Oprah and striking deals with former Disney CEO Bob Iger in just a couple years. But ultimately the company would grow too fast, take on too much investment, expand too aggressively, make a few too many bad decisions—until it was no longer sustainable.
“There’s no singular one decision that we couldn’t have come back from,” says Smith, who with Cuscuna is a guest on this week’s episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” “The relationship with Disney was in particular a difficult one because it’s the thing that gave us the greatest sense of momentum, the greatest launch pad, the greatest trajectory up. But it’s also the thing that took us farthest from the core original brand and values and small local shop.”
After Ample Hills declared bankruptcy, the company was sold to a new owner for pennies on the dollar. But that’s not where the story ends. Ample Hills still exists, though it’s not their baby any more. Instead Jackie and Brian have plans to launch a new venture in Prospect Heights this summer. There will be ice cream, yes, but also doughnuts and floats. The Social gets its name from the old-timey idea of the ice cream social.
“That’s one of the things that’s important to us, especially coming out of this pandemic, to basically say … we want to bring people together,” says Smith. “Part of the thrill of this is the bizarre surreal opportunity to go in and compete with what is in effect ourselves. Ample Hills was us 110 percent and those ice cream recipes were us.”
On the podcast, the duo discuss their new business and offer a peek at a few of their new recipes (fans of Ooey Gooey Butter Cake will be pleased). They unpack what went wrong—and what went right—at Ample Hills, lessons learned, and new horizons.
“We’re really humbled by being able to have this opportunity, and terrified and excited and scared and everything else in between, to do this over again,” says Cuscuna. “When we opened Ample Hills to begin with, we really just didn’t know much. Now we know so much and we’ve learned a ton and we know how much hard work it is and to get to a point of even just stability as a business, and feel rooted and grounded is going to be a ton of work on our end. But we’re excited.”
Check out the podcast for more on what the two have planned—plus, see how they do on a pop trivia quiz about the history of ice creamy desserts. Oyster ice cream, anyone?
