Interview with Ruthie Vishlitzky
By Kathryn Gordon of Food
Startup Help
Kathryn: Hi Ruthie,
I met you a few months ago in a CAPS ice cream theory class at ICE. Since then, you’ve opened up at the Essex Street Market!
How did you get the idea to open
an ice cream business? And where does the name come from?
Ruthie: My co
founder, Catherine Oddenino, and I both had very different careers. I was working in health and human
services for local government while Catherine was in the corporate world in online media. We are both
passionate food people with keen palates,
so we started with the idea of making ice cream that was less sweet and playing
with flavor combinations that were less readily available, and did a lot of
experimentation on nights and weekends.
When we got such great feedback from people who are tremendously choosy
eaters we knew we had something really worth pursuing. We both left our “day
jobs” this spring and have been working to really grow and establish the
business since then.
Luca is Catherine’s Maltese
terrier, and Bosco is my chocolate Lab!
Kathryn: When did
you make your first ice cream?
Ruthie: I made my
first ice cream for the first time in October 2011. When
we started we
bought a bunch of recipe books and started experimenting, it
didn’t take long before we were writing recipes instead of following them to
create “our style” of ice cream. We’ve taken ice cream science courses like the
one at Penn State that helped us understand a lot more of the food science
around freezing temperatures and textures, but ultimately, that course
approached ice cream as a very processed food. The Michael Laiskonis CAPS at
ICE was great since it covered a lot of the science, but ultimately approached
ice cream as a culinary creation. The CAPS course served as a great reminder of
some of the core ice cream basics, but I definitely feel like all the course
materials will be great to have as a reference when we look to tweak our
recipes.
Kathryn: What are
your current business goals?
Ruthie: We just
opened our first retail location at Essex Street Market, which helps us grow
our brand, but we’re still currently producing out of an incubator space. That’s
been a great learning experience but definitely impacts and limits what we can
do given the fact that we have limited storage and rent the kitchen by the
hour. So we’re looking to move into our own kitchen in early 2014 and establish
a wholesale business to restaurants, as well as selling pints wholesale to
markets/stores.
Kathryn: How do you
come up with flavors?
Ruthie: We love to
explore flavors, and are frequently inspired by different experiences, meals,
travels, and seasons to create different flavors! If anything, we often have to
reel ourselves in, since we always need to balance serving up the basics as
well as showing people successful though unexpected flavors. Our ice cream is
significantly less sweet than others, and we use more milk than cream (so it’s
not super high in butterfat). That
helps enhance our flavors.
Through the store we learned
that we always have to carry more straightforward flavors like chocolate and
vanilla, but we’ve been really surprised by our customers’ favorable reactions
and also plan to always carry more unusual flavors like honey lavender, Drunk & Salty Caramel
with bourbon, and Whiskey
Fudge Rebellion. We both take great joy in watching our
customers’ reactions as they taste a sample of a flavor they were slightly
skeptical about – & order Goat
Cheese and Rosemary Olive Oil!.
Kathryn: Do you
have a business plan?
Ruthie: We have an
ever-evolving business plan that we keep updating and editing as we learn our
business realities or realize new opportunities. We’re a good example of a business that tries to take
advantage of a lot of resources that are already out there. We’ve gone to tons
of free workshops, we applied and got into the incubator program at Hot Bread
Kitchen (HBK) which has given us a lot of support and guidance, and we’ve taken
advantage of opportunities working with the City of New York through the
Economic Development Corporation which is how we got our space at Essex Street
Market with lower rents than usual since it’s operated by the City (we
otherwise wouldn’t be in the position to have a location in the Lower East
Side).
Our financing so far has ranged
from self-funding, credit cards, friends and family loans, small business micro
loan and even a Kickstarter crowd sourcing campaign (this is how we raised money to purchase our Emory Thompson
batch freezer). Funding is definitely a huge ongoing challenge; especially
since ice cream equipment is so incredibly expensive and it’s hard to get
financing when you’re a startup.
Kathryn: Where are
you doing your production?
Ruthie:
We’re currently producing our ice cream at the HBK incubator
kitchen. At first we used to use
dry ice when needing to transport it from place to place, but that has its own
issues since then it hardens the ice cream too much, and we had to learn how to
properly temper it to feed it to folks.
We recently
bought our own hardening
cabinet/freezer so that we can now have a dedicated space for our ice cream (we pay HBK
rent for it to sit in their space)! It’s such a relief to now know that no one
is opening and closing our freezer (and hence slowly but surely degrading our
product). Our freezer is so cold
(as low as -30 degrees) that the ice cream now makes
it from East Harlem to the Lower East Side and is
still cold
enough to be too hard to scoop on arrival! So no more need for dry
ice for local transport and that’s a huge savings on time and money.
Kathryn: What key
lessons have you learned?
Ruthie: I think as an entrepreneur you
always have to keep learning and adapting to your realities and opportunities.
We always try to make the most out of every situation, whether it’s learning
from our mistakes/lessons or forming new relationships that could be helpful
for the future.
I think some of my personal
surprises/unexpected lessons have been:
1) As someone who was in mid-level management before this
business, I definitely took for granted the basic infrastructure in a working organization.
As an entrepreneur you have to get involved in a host of tedious and
uninteresting topics from payroll, insurance, to your POS system and email
addresses. It’s not like prior jobs where there was an IT guy to setup my
email, and an office manager to get all my supplies from, someone else to
schedule things etc. As an
entrepreneur you have to create all of that stuff that those
ins
larger organizations take for granted… So much entrepreneurship is
unfortunately not about ice cream or food, and consumes a ridiculous amount of
time.
2) We really thought we could make a lot of money by
participating in events like Smorgasburg or New Amsterdam Market. We initially
projected it as a revenue stream in our financial projections, but after a few
times at it, we realized that really it’s more of an expense (or break even),
but for us is just really good for the marketing/buzz. It was super rewarding
getting people’s feedback on our product before we had our space at Essex
Street Market. But we learned that there are definitely things that were very
different in reality than in concept.
3) Our last reality check was learning that a commercial
kitchen, and especially producing a food in a large quantity, is extremely
different than cooking in your home kitchen (which is where it all started for
us).
We have definitely come a long way in the last couple of years from making ice cream at home, to moving all of our production to a commercial kitchen.
Kathryn: Thanks
Ruthie! Anything else you’d like
to share with our readers?
Ruthie: Really the most important
thing to us is that we get to make people happy on a daily basis. Seeing that look of surprise and
delight on people’s faces when they try a new flavor, or watching a kid gets
that perfect scoop with sprinkles is the kind of immediate reward and
gratification that either of us rarely got while sitting in front of a computer
every day.
