The B Team Podcast
Talking all things Business, Bentonville, and Bourbon. Hosted by Josh Saffran, Matt Marrs, and Rob Nelson. New episodes every Thursday!
The B Team Podcast
Ep. 70 - Ice Cream Dreams: From Food Truck to Flavor Success
A surprise lineup of teenage taste-testers takes over the B-Team Podcast as Josh welcomes Hunter Gowen, founder of Honeybean Ice Cream, for a delicious exploration of entrepreneurship and artisanal ice cream in Bentonville.
The episode transforms into an educational ice cream flight as Hunter shares his remarkable journey from mechanical engineer to ice cream innovator. With candid humor, he reveals how a simple text message to his accounting-minded wife evolved into a thriving business, highlighting the challenges of marital entrepreneurship and the creative problem-solving required to launch a food truck enterprise.
What separates Honeybean from ordinary ice cream becomes deliciously apparent as Hunter breaks down the science behind super-premium ice cream (14% milk fat) and his decision to incorporate Arkansas honey into every flavor. Our teenage panel, comprised of Matt and I's daughters, provides authentic, enthusiastic reviews as they sample unique creations like "30,000 Feet" (Biscoff cookie with cookie butter), "Grandy's Medicine" (chocolate named for his grandfather), and "Wild Sweet Williams" (Earl Grey tea with blackberry and dark chocolate).
Beyond flavors, Hunter demonstrates the strategic thinking that's propelled Honeybean's growth – from private events to restaurant partnerships to their physical location on 5th Street. His business philosophy of "say yes and figure it out" embodies the entrepreneurial spirit, while his three-day production process reveals the craftsmanship behind each scoop. The conversation illuminates both the technical aspects of premium ice cream production and the heartfelt storytelling that makes each flavor memorable.
Ready to experience Bentonville's sweetest success story? Visit Honeybean at 5th and J Street, Thursday through Sunday, and discover why these handcrafted flavors are becoming a Northwest Arkansas favorite. Follow @honeybeanicc on Instagram to track their journey from food truck dream to dessert destination.
Welcome to the B-Team Podcast. I am your host, josh Saffron, with my co-host, matt Morris and our permanent guest Rob Nelson. We're here every week to talk to you about all things Bentonville, bourbon and business the B-Team Podcast Be here. Welcome to the B-Team Podcast. I'm your host, josh Safran, with my co-hosts.
Speaker 2:Kay Wuff and me.
Speaker 1:And my permanent guest, mallory. Okay, so, for those that are loyal followers of the show, halfway through season two, this is not Bobby and Matthew. We have upgraded our talents significantly and, quite honestly, we're talking about ice. Significantly and quite honestly, we're talking about ice cream, and so we'd rather have teenagers who probably are ice cream experts. So, kayla, you are my daughter, 14 years old. Yes, maeve, stepdaughter 16. Yep, mallory, not my daughter, not my stepdaughter, but you are part of the Madden-Carrie clan.
Speaker 3:Shout out to Madden-Carrie yes, Second one middle child.
Speaker 1:Number two Yep, and are you guys excited to be here today to film?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I mean eating ice cream. What could be so bad?
Speaker 4:right, you did your homework, you nailed it on the new guests, I mean would there be anything better. This is a professional operation.
Speaker 1:Having three old guys eating ice cream, I mean we did good for you today.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you definitely did good. We're subbing out the bourbon for the ice cream, so it makes sense that we're subbing out the crowd. Winner. Winner as well, you know what I mean Chicken dinner.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Now. There's going to be high pressure on you today. Yeah, I know, maeve is a six taste tester.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's. That's. That's the type of, that's the type of talent we're looking for here.
Speaker 1:Yes, at Honeybean, I mean we want she is going to know the ingredients down to. I'm tasting the praline a little bit of cinnamon.
Speaker 4:Yeah, You're going to get. You're going to get notes.
Speaker 1:We're going to get some notes and I trained correct. Can you give me your qualifications, your real ones?
Speaker 3:So through a Bentonville Schools program called Ignite, I'm like three-fourths of the way through my associate's degree in culinary school. Heck yeah, and then I'm attending BYU for my bachelor's degree in pizza. Nice Congrats, that's really cool, thanks.
Speaker 1:These are novices. These are just ice cream eaters. We have a professional here today.
Speaker 4:More professional than me.
Speaker 1:I. These are novices, these are just ice cream eaters. We have a professional here today, more professional than me. We're going to get to you. I'm excited about this. We're here every Thursday for all things business, bentonville and bourbon. We're going to cut the bourbon today because I'd probably go to jail having teenager strength bourbon. But today we're bringing in Hunter, who I had a privilege of meeting a few weeks ago, a couple weeks ago, three weeks ago, and you are the owner, proprietor, founder, of Honey Bean Ice Cream Truck.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so me and my wife started Honey Bean about it'll be two years. I guess our LLC is two years old, but we opened at the beginning of August two years ago. So coming up on our two-year anniversary and me and my wife have been working hard on it for a couple of years and having a really good time with it, now we're going to get into a little bit the dynamics of working husband and wife, because I work with my wife.
Speaker 1:Shout out to Emily, shout out to Maeve's mom, and it's not always rosy, no, not always, it's not always rosy. You have to church and state a little bit of divide on who does what, for sure Stay in your lanes If If we're going there later, I'll save that content for when we get there.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we have a great working relationship.
Speaker 1:It's very comfortable, but there's been some rocky moments, well as with any working relationship, but at night you're ready to put your head on the pillow and it's like at night. Let's talk about what happened with the ice cream.
Speaker 4:It never goes away. It never goes away Me more than her. She would probably like't put it away very often.
Speaker 1:Struggle with that a little bit, do you agree? We talked about the Jen's Place. Shout out to the Jen's Place All the time in the house, right, mm-hmm yeah.
Speaker 4:Is he obsessed?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:That kind of happens. Breakfast topic Carmeline job talking stuff yeah, all the time, all the time. Yeah, there's no clocking out. So two years. So where were you located before? Because now you're over on Fifth Street, right on the corner with Jay, by the Walmart campus. Shout out to Walmart, shout out, great location.
Speaker 4:Walmart's kind of a big company. So shout out yeah, so we have not had a location. This is our first time we started doing private events. Our first event was kind of just a pop-up mostly our friends and family, and honestly we had a bigger turnout than we expected, which was really fun to see. My hands, I like, was using the wrong type of ice cream scoop. My hands were bleeding the first night. It was quite an adventure. That's part of the growing pains of starting a business. You find out all the things that you never knew, you didn't know. And then we booked a wedding for some people we went to college with that we kind of knew in college and then from there we were off mostly doing private events. We tried to do the Rogers Farmer's Market last year but it ended up being it was a little early in the morning and then we ended up booking so many weddings specifically that our weekend schedule got too booked, with both me and my wife working full time on top of running the ice cream.
Speaker 1:So you guys had jobs and still have jobs on top of it.
Speaker 4:Yes, so, as of six weeks ago, I'm doing the ice cream full time. Thank you. Yeah, I'm more excited than my wife is, but we're having fun with it. It's a good thing. I did because we've been slammed busy since we opened our location on the corner of 5th and J. That was kind of the reason we had to. We bought a second food trailer in about March and so that's going to be our private event trailer that we're doing weddings with and things like that, and then our bigger trailer that's placed on the corner of 5th and J. That's our spot where we kind of build some brand stability, some consistent customer interaction and and get more of like roots planted in bentonville what made you get into ice cream?
Speaker 1:like, was it a hobby? Like, how did you get into this? Yeah, so act like you're interested. This is exciting because he's an entrepreneur. This is exciting stuff, exciting stuff.
Speaker 4:So uh, my degrees in mechanical engineering. I kind of went that direction because I've always been a problem solver. But in like high school I wanted to start a food truck and my dad really pushed me like, hey, don't do business, do engineering you. You have the mind for engineering. You're more of a problem solver, you're more of a math guy. So push me towards engineering. Did my engineering degree, worked in engineering for about five years because dad kind of dad kind of pushed me that way in, in, not like discouraging my dreams, but more of like let's get some. You're going to college, you're going to get a job. Make, yeah, yeah, make some money. Have the stability to be able to go back to engineering. If you decide it's probably right, he's right, yeah, yeah, I would say he's 100, because dads are right most of the time yeah, dads give the best advice.
Speaker 1:Parenting lessons today on yeah, absolutely, dads are right. Most of the time.
Speaker 4:So um, he's a state farm agent so he kind of runs his own business yeah, he's stay.
Speaker 2:Farm is there? Yeah?
Speaker 4:my uncle's a state farm agent. My sister and my cousin are both selling to train to be state farm agents. My uh other uncle is a farmer's agent, so we're a very insurance heavy family. But I it's a rough industry. Right, I went through wrong. It is to train to be state farm agents. My other uncle is a farmer's agent, so we're a very insurance-heavy family. It's a rough industry right now. I went through wrong. It's tough. It's tough. They're battling some things, but they're working through it. They're working through it. So I went the ice cream route.
Speaker 1:Why ice cream? I mean, it's not easy to make ice cream, no, people go, hey I. Not easy to make ice cream, like people go, hey, I want to. Whoa, watch the chair. Sorry, okay, I'm going, babe, could you do that? I'm going back up, like, like me, I want to make sandwiches all right, you get the bread and like right, but ice cream's not easy you know and temperature controlled and in a food truck yeah, generators here there's a lot of elements adding more value than matt by the way already.
Speaker 4:Yes, yeah, there's a lot of elements to it that have been difficult and, to be honest with you that I'm kind of drawn to that, Like I'm drawn to the difficult. The reason we picked it was because we didn't feel like there was a lot of like premium scoop ice cream in Northwest Arkansas. There's some good ice cream here, but in general we felt that there could be more options and as someone who's been kind of obsessed with the idea of a food truck and wanting to go that direction I love ice cream I saw that hole in the market as something that was a little bit lacking when I moved up here and thought you know what, I want to give it a shot. So I talked to my wife and I said what if I Tell?
Speaker 1:me how this conversation goes. Is it over dinner, Like do you sleep talking or no?
Speaker 4:It definitely starts with a text message. I need her some time to process what I'm thinking, because what happens to me is I get overwhelmingly excited about the idea so I'm like, out the gate, I've got a vision for it. I'm talking five year plan. She just wants to hear the basic. So I start with a text message, just a little teaser to get the mind going. What's the text message say?
Speaker 4:text message is basically hey, I noticed that there's not a lot of ice cream in town. I thought what if I start trying to figure out how I could sell it straight in.
Speaker 4:You didn't even fit. No sweet talk, no sweet talk. Okay, no sweet talk. My wife she's so she's accounting degree master's in information system. She did in four years. She's very like, very structured, very by the book. She just wants the information. So, um, the sales pitch doesn't often work on her. She needs the numbers. So, starting, starting straightforward, just give the information right right to her.
Speaker 1:Let her start thinking about it um, now is it like, are you watching the dot dot dot? Like she's typing, like and you're saying I can't wait to see what this is.
Speaker 4:It was a long time before the dot dot dots even show. Oh, you didn't even. She hadn't even read it, she hadn't, she hadn't read it, or she did read it and she was processing. So, which is not always a bad thing, you know, not always a bad thing I like an immediate shutdown, you know, that's the immediate dot dot dot would have been bad, could be bad, could be very bad. You're out of your flipping mind, right, yeah, yeah, I guess. So bullet. And then, um, just started that conversation, talk about what that would look like. So I'll, I'll sell it at the farmer's market. We'll bring a deep freezer, we'll get a booth and we'll start selling pints now is your wife like my wife?
Speaker 1:my wife's title is chief hole poker. When I have these brilliant ideas, yeah, she starts to like, think, can't like. Then I'm like just here's. Here's why you can't just start off by saying it's amazing. However, I don't believe. Learn that. Did you get the?
Speaker 4:it's amazing. However, yeah, I, I, yes, I. I didn't get the. It's amazing. However, I guess I more got the. Like that sounds fun. Oh, that's good, you can look into it more. Like this is gonna be your part. This is gonna flame out like most of hunter's ideas typically flame out. Um, yeah, I looked into it. Like you're saying, time, temperature, safe, very important for ice cream.
Speaker 3:Gotta have a commercial kitchen where do you do your production?
Speaker 4:easiest.
Speaker 4:So well, let's step into that because it's a great question, great question and it's and it's valued. It's the number one thing that, like keeps us from being able to like go further in terms of being able to get our product out there. So, um, the easiest way to get that commercial kitchen is a food truck. So we do our production out of our food truck. Okay, so it's based out of our food truck, we do our production out of our food truck and like. To take those steps was way more difficult than I thought it would be. So it's just been an adventure the whole time. Let me back up, because I'm jumping to the commercial kitchen but my brain is still backtracking. So convince my wife, let me look into it. So I'm looking into it. You have to have a commercial kitchen. Cheapest way to get a commercial kitchen the food truck. So she probably assumes this is where this dream dies because it went from. Maybe I'll make some ice cream in our kitchen and sell it at the farmer's market to.
Speaker 1:We have to make an investment in a food truck which means it's going from haha, cute hobby, I love you to this can I have some money to buy a food truck like?
Speaker 4:the seriousness of this has taken a big shift. So, um, I found one on facebook marketplace and just sent her a link. Basically, is this a local food truck? This is a local food truck Facebook Marketplace. It was in Huntsville, arkansas. I had been messaging back and forth with them to kind of figure out what price range we were looking at. It set our basic needs of what we were looking for, checked off what we need commercial kitchen-wise basic needs of what we were looking for, checked off what we need commercial kitchen wise, and um convinced her.
Speaker 4:On like a wednesday night I was like let's go look at this food truck, let's just go look at it, let's go check it out. She was. She was not interested at this point but, being a kind yes, wife, she was willing to go with me and so decided to go with me. Um went and looked at the food truck it was a really and looked at the food truck. It was a really good fit. The food truck's really cute. You've seen it, you've been to our spot.
Speaker 4:That's the food truck that we found on Marketplace. It kind of has like it's really big. It kind of has almost a shipping container bar type feel to it. It's got these cool backlit Edison type lights. It's a cool truck. It like Edison type lights. It's a cool truck. It's a cool truck, yeah. So we thought, you know, this is a good price. We had that we could pay cash for it. Were you able to negotiate on the price a little bit? We negotiated it down just a little bit. Facebook Marketplace classic, nothing huge, just like you know. They've listed it here. They probably expect to sell it a little bit less than that and, honestly, we just ended up developing a pretty good relationship with the people that we were selling it with and they had a food truck business, obviously. So they were kind of sad to part ways with it, shifting their business model a little bit, and we're excited to see us take it and, like that, the food truck was going to keep going.
Speaker 3:Why did you choose to go food truck and go commercial kitchen versus like following the cottage laws and selling at the farmer's?
Speaker 4:market.
Speaker 3:So because it's time, temperature safe so, like that's not, there are no cottage laws.
Speaker 4:So cottage laws have been. A lot of cottage laws have been ruled out when it comes to ice cream or anything that's milk or meat basically because that's like I saw like decorated sugar cookies and that's what I followed through that over getting an llc.
Speaker 3:It's like I didn't know there, okay, yeah that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's the best.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So much easier than jumping through old hoops, Matt.
Speaker 1:I got to be honest with you. Much more value than your dad what I'm going to roll for you.
Speaker 3:Well, I can't drink bourbon, but I can always.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, but these questions are much better than shout out to Matthew and Bobby. This may be something where I'm going to have to negotiate with your mom for your time.
Speaker 3:Hey, you got me for a couple more months. I love it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, heck, yeah, I believe you Heck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right. Well, the girls I'm sure are very excited to start trying. Unless you guys have any questions, I do. Oh, I did want to ask a question. Yeah, well, as you started taking them out, you have really unique flavor names and flavor profiles. It's not like vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, pistachio. So, as you're going through, kind of walk through what we're eating and then how you smell with the names, yeah, so this is waffle guns.
Speaker 4:I didn't want them to break, so there we go, we have to have these. I mean, what we've done with our product is like intentionally market as a high quality boutique product. So in ice cream there's two major factors that determine how high quality the ice cream is there's milk fat percentage and there's overrun percentage you know this stuff right and milk fat percentage basically, in layman's terms, it's like how heavy is it? So you use more cream rather than milk. So the cream to milk to 1% milk. Right, we use more cream than most ice creams that you buy in the store, because we're a super premium ice cream which is the highest rated in terms of milk fat percentage, which we're at about 14.1 to 14.5, depending on which flavor we use.
Speaker 1:So like Breyers, like what's the?
Speaker 4:like how, like a standard like briars is probably regular, uh, or like low-end premiums, so you're looking at them like at like 10%, I mean this is significant so this is significantly higher. So with this you're looking at Haagen-Dazs and, like Jenny's and Salt and Straw, that's where you're looking in terms of a super premium ice cream. Are you girls getting excited now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is.
Speaker 4:So then, with that, so leading into the flavor names, you don't want to have basic flavor names for something that you consider to be like a premium product. So we don't want to just be chocolate, because we don't want people to see that and just think it's just, that's just plain chocolate ice cream, right? So we wanted to name it in a way that gets people reading, gets people thinking about the ice cream, gets people processing why, what makes this significant and why the name was chosen well, when I was, I, when I was sitting, when I was standing there, at why don't you, ladies, hold it up?
Speaker 1:right, like, hold up the ice cream. But the nice thing where you just said is, just like you can see it, look right there, right, look at you, look at our camera and I'll show it this way. Hey, there you go. Look at the food truck, though you're standing there and reading for a period of time because you're really trying to understand, like, if you go into I don't know wherever the place, give me a pistachio in a cup with sprinkles, great, like you're moving on, but you're literally studying the menu because you're reading the intricacies of what's in each of the different flavors, right, which is super cool.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's fun and it gives us a lot of time to interact with our customers as well, so we get to build this personal relationship as they work through and process. We really encourage sampling. We want everybody to go home happy and feel like they had a real personal connection. We're not trying to move people in and out, really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that because you and your wife are both there typically.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and you're having good conversations. We are as much as possible, so my wife works full time, so I'm going to be there more often than she is. We do private events and we kind of have to divide and conquer, but a lot of the times, yeah, we get to work together, which is a lot of fun, and we get to work with each other's strengths, which is cool.
Speaker 1:All right, ladies.
Speaker 4:Hajo, where do you want us to start? Looking at the bottom right, bottom right, kayla, which?
Speaker 2:one's your right.
Speaker 4:That one. There is a pretty blue and white textured a little bit of purple in there. That is our Mammy's Kitchen. It's a blueberry cobbler-based ice cream. It has pie crust in it, so it's got a little bit of buttery pie crust and it's got that blueberry reduction.
Speaker 2:Ladies, that one's really good.
Speaker 1:How are we feeling?
Speaker 2:Good about that?
Speaker 1:Yes. Do you taste the blueberries Like, give us a little bit more than it's good.
Speaker 2:Well, I like that. It has like the actual, like fruit, like sauce in it. It's really good. Yeah, it's kind of good. It tastes like.
Speaker 1:And you probably think it's healthy because it's got blueberries in it, right?
Speaker 4:I mean, I think it is. Yeah, it's vitamins, mallory, what do you think?
Speaker 3:It's good. You can taste like the inclusions. I like that they're like evenly dispersed rather than like you know.
Speaker 4:Well, thank you.
Speaker 3:Like when you said Jenny's, like that's our favorite ice cream, right? We a lot of the times it's sort of like we don't. We mainly shop at Walmart, dad, we're a house down there in Publix that's literally all we get is Jenny's and it's like it's very similar.
Speaker 1:Dad treats for premium ice cream. I thought dad would go in with a coupe.
Speaker 3:Sometimes we go. We go to Aldi for the regular grocery shopping. When Publix has a BOGO, we can go to Publix.
Speaker 1:I was thinking, I didn't think you were telling tall tales here.
Speaker 4:Jenny's rules. So, yeah, I yeah Hard support Jenny's. Yes, their ice cream is incredible. I mean, that's kind of what we're chasing is a similar model to a Jenny's type model.
Speaker 1:All right, ladies. So on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being you would never eat it again and 10 being it's the greatest thing you ever ate how would we rate in the first one?
Speaker 3:no-transcript was so. My dad mentioned you guys using local honey in it. Yeah, I taste it, so walk me through that decision to use honey. Is that your main sweetener?
Speaker 4:yeah, so um we I. I kind of brushed over, maybe we didn't get to this part of the story, but honey bean is um is as we were developing the recipe. So I just read some ice cream books. I don't have any like culinary experience I've I've worked in an ice cream shop before I'm like that for my nap ice cream o'clock alarm literally um, but yeah, so we started using, working through recipes, looking at what other other companies have used in the past and um, a lot of like.
Speaker 4:we still have cane sugar in our recipe, but we use honey in every single flavor that we do in place of what most people use is a liquid glucose. So instead of using a liquid glucose, we use Arkansas honey and I think it brings out a unique flavor. We don't over sweeten it so you can still taste the honey. Is that part of the name? Honey bean? That's basically where honey bean came from. So the honey bee is the state insect of Arkansas and we're both Arkansas natives and my wife, so, as we were throwing around names, arkansas obviously was was part of kind of um where we wanted to draw our roots back to um and looking at honeybee. Obviously, on online, whatever there's honeybee could be anything if you google that and it was important to me that we created some sort of our own word um just for Google search, how we're going to pop up our SEO performance, all that stuff.
Speaker 1:SEO, search engine optimization. May I help you guys? May I help you.
Speaker 4:So honey bean was my wife's idea. I was playing around with honey bee and she was like what if we do honey bean? Because we also use vanilla bean in all of our bases. So honey bean is kind of just like an ode to our recipe, our base, where we start, and it's been a really cool brand name.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm excited about hearing this, and so is Mallory.
Speaker 4:The girls, I could tell, are more interested in flavor number two Heck yeah, let's move to honey bean vanilla if we're going to stay on topic Top. Yep. So this is our basic base. It's the one we worked the hardest on because once we got this down, everything kind of evolved out of this place. So you can taste the notes of honey in this one. Yes, it's not over sweet and it goes really good. We do honey beer, which is our take on root beer. It's kind of an earthy carbonated root tea sweetened with honey. It's really good. It goes great with that. We're starting to do our nitro brew, so we're going to have nitro brew floats. It goes great with that. So this vanilla ice cream is really good as an additive and it's really good. You can eat a ton of it by itself because it's really not over sweet.
Speaker 1:Now vanilla is the easiest one to compare to everything else, because everyone makes a vanilla yep, that is outstanding. Like you're catching so many different flavors and at the end you're catching the honey.
Speaker 3:That that's and it like leaves that coating on your tongue to where?
Speaker 4:you can tell that there was a high like yeah, that milk fat percentage actually sits around in your mouth for a while. Yes, yeah, it does grades.
Speaker 1:What are we?
Speaker 2:um, I really like this one. Yeah, I really like it too, like it's really creamy. Like you said, you add more cream in it. I really like it.
Speaker 1:Do we have a number? Did it surpass blueberry?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean it's vanilla, so it basically is really good.
Speaker 1:On a vanilla scale, it's a high.
Speaker 2:It's a good amount overall ice cream scale. It's more of like a six because it's vanilla, I give it like a seven and a half. Seven and a half, okay. Seven and a half, yeah, I'd say probably like a seven because, like you, have so many cool flavors that other stores don't have, so I wouldn't normally go for vanilla okay I like it.
Speaker 4:good observation, I like that observation. Okay, let's, let's move quick, because I gotta melt. We're seeing some meltage, so let's keep moving. Let's go back. Middle is going to be the BSC. I believe they're changing shape. The back, yes, back. Middle, yep, right there. So that's a brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tart. Oh, what do we think? I know it's different than a lot of ice cream. People don't use cinnamon a ton, so you get chunks of Pop-Tart in there as well. It's got to give you that dry bite that a Pop-Tart can bring, and then also that cinnamon sugar.
Speaker 1:See, I wouldn't order that, because that's not something, but I would order it now, having tasted it.
Speaker 3:And especially with a waffle cone.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, by the way, crack into those whenever you want break them apart, just dig in with the waffle.
Speaker 1:Well, we need to talk about the waffle cones for a second, because it's probably as good as the ice cream is, and the ice cream is amazing like these cones are the best cone I ever had in my life the the cones are like I will sit in the truck and just eat, eat cones.
Speaker 4:Like they're hard, they're hard to stay away from is. But I mean, if you want to talk about what a waffle cone is, I mean it's, you're talking that's fried butter with enough flour and sugar to hold it together. So it's fried. Basically, it has so much butter in it that you can see the butter bubbling out of it as it's cooking. And then you drop it and roll it and let it sit for about 20 seconds and you got a waffle going Cone. Amazing. They're pretty easy to execute because it's actually just fried butter Yum Critique on the
Speaker 4:cone Amazing. They're pretty easy to execute because it's actually just fried butter.
Speaker 3:Yeah, critique on the cone.
Speaker 1:That's good. I'll take it. I'll take it. Any t-shirt does it, it's good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's good All right as we're melting.
Speaker 4:Well, let's keep moving. So the front middle is our strawberry. We call it Arkin strawberry. I'm from cersei. We're right next to bald knob, which is like they have the best fresh strawberries come springtime, and we don't get to use bald knob strawberries in all of our ice cream because of how far away we are. But, um, we use fresh strawberries every time. Wow, no, there's no strawberry extract, there's no frozen to it. That's just, um, a strawberry reduction that we make every time and it's, I think it's good. It has a very fresh like taste that sits in your mouth after you eat it.
Speaker 1:It reminds me of like growing up summer eating strawberries at grandma's house kind of thing that is wow.
Speaker 2:Well, strawberry is my favorite kind of ice cream and it doesn't taste like artificial. I get to, yeah it can really flash.
Speaker 1:So that was so far your favorite of the group. Yeah, this is my favorite. So does that mean that you'll get to the bottom of that one and not have dinner tonight, and then I'll get in trouble with your mom? Yep.
Speaker 4:Okay, let's keep going. That's the way you're supposed to do it. Okay, let's keep moving and let's go front left, front left. So front left is probably our most popular flavor and, to be honest with you, it might. This is our 30,000 feet. That's your favorite, it's my favorite. No, no, no. Front left, sorry, front left, it's our 30,000 feet. It's Biscoff cookie with cookie butter, and we do this with the Biscoff and the Oreo, but basically we put Biscoff in a food processor until it gets super fine. Do you know the Biscoff story?
Speaker 1:No, wait, what Bcoff story well, biscoff is when you fly american. You make little cookies.
Speaker 3:Well, that's my little sister she grew up she's allergic to milk and dairy actually, or dairy and eggs and so, like when we'd all have peanut butter and jellies, there wasn't a lot of like peanut butter alternatives like cashew butter and stuff, so she'd always have like biscoff sandwiches, which is not at all a peanut butter and jelly but, but we had Biscoff in our house forever. That's funny.
Speaker 4:Well, when I kind of like first had the like, the full urge to like, we're going to go for it. I was on a work trip in Florida, sitting in an ice cream shop eating an Oreo ice cream that was far and above anything I'd had in Bentonville and I was like you know what? I just need to see if I can figure this out. And on the flight home had a Biscoff cookie, was sitting there thinking about ice cream and thought you know what, maybe I'll do a Biscoff ice cream. And it's turned out to be probably our most beloved flavor. People who love Biscoff like love this ice cream. So it's been fun to see.
Speaker 1:But what's interesting now is every time I fly I think of you in this. It's strange. I've been on multiple American flights since then. Shout out to America and I'm like oh, the Biscoff, the ice cream. I bring home the Biscoff. She loves those.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, it's fun and we named it 30,000 Feet. So we kind of try to come up with something a little creative with all of our flavors. We named it, but it's a Ben Rector song about flying and talking to a stranger and having kind of a moment on a on a plane. So, um, kind of that song reminds me of this flavor now and this flavor is named after it and we actually got to give Ben Rector a pint of that when we went to a concert of his in Searcy, which is a lot of that's super cool yeah, it was a lot of fun rating on this.
Speaker 1:Girls you're gonna go. I knew you were gonna go. 10 out of 10 best one.
Speaker 2:I give it a 9 because the strawberry is still my favorite me too, I go 9 ok, well, let's move to the last spot.
Speaker 4:Y'all all have different ones. You have our s'mores. Are your killing me, s'mores? Shout out to the sandlot. You have our gold standard. This is a golden oreo ice cream with pecans and caramel. Oh, I had that the other day. That's good. We did that for private events. We'll do a custom flavor, and we did that for Shiloh Christian, their homecoming event. They wanted to do something gold, so we came up with that one and it's definitely stuck around. And that one over there is our Brandy's Medicine. It's our chocolate flavor. I have to go try all of these just to be clear.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I've got another flight in here that has some of our more unique flavors that we can do a quick run through. But that Grandy's Medicine. It melts in your mouth really slow because we melt down chocolate and whip it into the base so it tastes almost fudgy. And the reason we call it Grandy's Medicine is because my grandpa grandpa who I call grandy obsessed with chocolate, really obsessed with everything sweet, but specifically chocolate. And when I was a kid, me and the grandkids would stay at his house and he'd start, he'd start coughing and he'd go over to the fridge, pull out a container of hershey syrup, put it on a spoon and take a, take a hit and go oh, much better. And all the kids would start coughing, run into the fridge trying to get some of grandy's medicine, as we called it, so this flavor now sounds like you're kind of a guy.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, he's the best.
Speaker 1:That's amazing, he's the best um, I am blow to like I've tasted it only a few days before. Each one is better than the last. I'm each like, oh, that's good, oh, that's even better, like it's really hard to pick one.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Well, I appreciate it. We obviously work. We work so hard on just the quality because we know that, like with with the business's success, the only way to get there is to have consistent, a good product that people can rely on. And we can mess up the words that we say to people, we can have a bad interaction, but if we continue to have an excellent product, people are going to keep coming back and forgive us for for our little moments, our little errors, and so we work hard on that this is one of those, but wait, there's more this is but wait, there's more so oh my god
Speaker 4:quick rundown on this one fruity pebbles. This one's called our wild sweet williams. It's an earl gray ice cream with blackberry and dark chocolate. This is our, our coldest brew, which is our coffee ice cream made with espresso and chocolate chips. This is, I believe, looks like some of the s'mores I don't know, these kind of these have melted enough that it's hard to recognize. Uh yeah, then this one is our homemade. It's our cookie dough, made with my mom's homemade cookie dough, minus the the egg, and this is our oreo overload. So y'all, y'all dig into that as much as you.
Speaker 1:Did I tell you podcasting is fun? You guys didn't believe me. Alright, I'm gonna. I had the Fruity Pebbles one the other day. Ian had that right.
Speaker 2:That one's my favorite.
Speaker 4:The blackberry, the little gray one. Yeah, that one's super cool.
Speaker 1:That's also very unique. That's the first time I had one. I had this. I thought it was very unique.
Speaker 4:So there's a bakery in Searcy, where I'm from, that does scones and I'll swear by them as the best scones in the world and they have a flavor that is an Earl Grey scone with blackberry and dark chocolate, and my mom will bring a 12-pack of them frozen to me, so I'll cook them and eat them, and I was doing it one night, going you know what? This wouldn't be such a bad ice cream flavor, so it's been pretty popular since we got it going.
Speaker 2:It tastes like the true fruit, you know, like the yes Horion does. It's really good.
Speaker 1:There you go. I don't even know what that is. Must be a teenage girl thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, things that mom gets no-transcript.
Speaker 1:Oh, that coffee one's good, yeah, whoa.
Speaker 3:What coffee do you guys use? Do you guys use a local?
Speaker 4:coffee? Yeah, we do, we use I like to mix up which roasts, but we use Onyx. Typically, we drink Onyx at home, yeah, so it's kind of what we fall in love with coffee-wise around here. Shout out to Onyx. Shout out, onyx, onyx rules Coffee. One to Onyx. Shout out, onyx, onyx rules Coffee was very good. Yeah, so we got an espresso machine specifically to be able to pull high quality espresso for that, and we're actually doing this Saturday night. We're doing affogatos at the truck, so we're going to bring this, we're going to bring the espresso machine in. Is that going to be a one-time thing? We're going to try it.
Speaker 1:See how it goes, you guys know. See how it goes. You got to know what affogato is. Nope, so you'll do better than me, but it's in essence it's coffee poured with ice cream, like it's like right, the ice cream's there and then you pour the espresso over it, espresso right over the top of it.
Speaker 4:So we'll take the ice cream, we'll make like a little bowl with the ice cream and we'll pour it's. It's fantastic cool. I mean you can make it a cold latte just by stirring it up, or you can eat and get a little bit of the bitterness from the espresso. So they're they're a lot of fun we're excited for for this saturday. Now, hunter, you sell this like you sell these little we do, yeah, so when it's a lot of ice cream, we charge $10 for those. So that's the best going deal we got. Is it a full scoop? It's not. It's not a half-size scoop, but we know everybody's going home happy because there's surely at least one of those flavors they're going to like. I think that's a brilliant idea. So it works great for us. It also from an inventory standpoint. We don't burn out on one flavor, so people try different flavors. We typically burn out on our Oreo overload because people are comfortable. Cookies and cream. It's easy. We'll burn out on one flavor. But given the opportunity for samples and flights, our inventory moves more linearly.
Speaker 2:Are these customizable? Do you pick which ones you want?
Speaker 4:Yep, I'll go back and scoop and you just yell them at me. You just yell them at me and I'll get you whatever you want.
Speaker 1:So if one of these ladies was going to have a boyfriend and come for a date of ice cream, would this be enough for two people, or this is for a family?
Speaker 4:Well, if one of these ladies has a boyfriend to come for ice cream, from my experience, being that age and a boy, you might need more than that. More than that For normal non-young growing boys. This is plenty for two. We have a family of five that comes and they get one flight. They're in and out for $10. We have a family of five that comes and they get one flight. They're in and out for 10 bucks. It's a couple with three kids and they each pick a flavor and then the parents pick three together and they just they dig in.
Speaker 1:See Mallory. On the last podcast, or one of the last ones, Matthew was voted the cheapest of the group.
Speaker 3:Really Well yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, and so I think that if Matthew came with mom and the three girls, for $10, you can have ice cream for the whole family Like that's going to. It's going to be a hit for them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and like once, me and Kennedy are both gone, it would be a hit for Natalie. Well, do you guys have non-dairy?
Speaker 4:Yeah, we do we have? We have one non-dairy flavor that we keep pretty much all the time much all the time.
Speaker 3:It's a coconut milk, coconut cream with honey.
Speaker 1:It's it's really good. Yeah, um, so she, they could go the whole family three. Yeah, natalie can down some ice cream but if dad costs him only ten dollars and then you have to pass her for the cone, so oh just an extra one dollar, one dollar we'll see, we'll see, we'll see um, can we touch on pricing? Because, I'm not gonna lie, I think you're way too inexpensive.
Speaker 4:Well, that's kind of the goal. That's kind of the goal at this point we're at the stage in the game that we're at. We know that, like, growth is our friend.
Speaker 1:Because one scoop in a cone is like $4.50, right.
Speaker 4:One scoop is $4.50. Add a cone $5.50. And it's a pretty hearty scoop. We do a kid's scoop for $3.50, which suffices for a lot of people. We don't limit that to kids, it's just what we call it. Our business model goal at some point is to adopt the brewery model, which is create a creamery. That's our central hub, that we distribute out of and we do retail. We sell to other ice cream shops to be able to scoop our ice cream and we also have shops that we get to sell by the. We call it by the scoop, by the tub and by the pint. So the goal would be eventually to have all three revenue streams fully up and running.
Speaker 3:I saw on your Instagram, at some point you guys were at Big Lieutenant. Walk me through how that so, um, cold emails, basically.
Speaker 4:Um, right, when we were getting started, I just wanted to see kind of what the market was like in terms of area cool restaurants looking for an ice cream supplier, and we, um, I emailed like four restaurants. Two of them got back to me and at one point we were in both of them, uptown kitchen, okay, and the big lieutenant the other two didn't get back to.
Speaker 1:We're not going to name them. Shame on them, shame shame, full shame, um.
Speaker 4:I don't even remember who it was, but shame, shame, um. But the uptown kitchen switched chefs and they no longer use us, which is honestly fine by us, because we kind of outkicked our coverage in terms of how much we can produce. Yeah, and we would rather focus more on our private events and scoop side right now, but we have a great relationship with the Big Lieutenant. We still supply their ice cream. They've upped their ice cream consumption over there and have sent a lot of people our way, wow.
Speaker 1:So it's been a good relationship, so you're shipping them like big tubs.
Speaker 4:Yes, I just drive it over when they'll send me an email. Three days later, I drop off three gallon tubs of ice cream yeah, at wholesale pricing for the Big Blue. And then, yeah, they serve it out. Big Blue also is Barclita.
Speaker 1:Barclita yeah, same people. Yes, I don't know if you're not Nothing with Wheezy, shout out to Wheezy.
Speaker 4:Nothing down at Barclita. Nothing at Barclita right now, but I think we actually reached out originally to barclay and they said, no, but that big blue would use you. So it's been. It's been a great relationship with the big one. You know where this would be a home run.
Speaker 3:Yeah, mars on main yeah, you guys should do a pop-up there yeah, that'd be fun, so I have to make that work they're doing. Did you see that jamble jams? Um, I can't remember. I think her name's ally, I can't remember any. Um, she makesams. Oh yeah, they're doing a pop-up of making blueberry pie there in that kitchen.
Speaker 1:So Mallory's dad, matt, is on the show. Fixer to Fabulous, yeah, with Dave and Jenny. And Dave and Jenny opened Mars on Main and they're featuring a lot of local stuff Having local ice cream in Mars on Main. We're going to push this. Yeah, I mean I'll have to have you do it because dad will never follow up.
Speaker 3:Or even if you did like a workshop I don't know if you guys are into like, I don't know. I feel like if you did like a workshop of like create your own flavor, that'd be fun. Like create vanilla and create your own.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that'd be fun. Going back to that, though, we do a custom flavor for every event. So we send them a form and they kind of fill out, hey, this is what swirls is what crunches we want in there, and, um, we make it happen for, like every wedding, we typically have a fresh custom flavor.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna give you your next marketing idea bring it on yeah, this now if my wife emily's here, chief hole poker so somebody could poke holes in this. But think about this put a contest on instagram and say, uh, we're gonna select somebody to name a flavor after them. It'll be a flavor that's named for. You know, follow us on Instagram and blah, blah, blah and this will be called Josh's. Whatever. If I win and I can come and be like look, here's my flavor of ice cream, I get to pick. Yeah, that's a good idea, right.
Speaker 3:They've done that at.
Speaker 1:Ozark, I stole it from them.
Speaker 4:Not that we really steal, and we definitely do it and my favorite part of my job is making new flavors, coming up with something new kind of letting the creative juices flow.
Speaker 1:Are you like making like you go on the internet and just scrolling through and finding things, or are you asking ChatGPT?
Speaker 4:to help you. No, most of it's internally inspired. I would say so. It's just. Yeah, I'm eating a dessert somewhere. I'm like I got to find a way to make this into an ice cream or I don't know something like that.
Speaker 1:It's, it's mostly, and there's a trial and look like is it testimony like this? Oh, this needs more fruity pebbles, it needs less milk, it needs more like yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, at this point I have a pretty good feel for, like, what it's going to take. I've made, we've, we've feel pretty comfortable, like I have a pretty good idea. This might need a little bit more of this, a little bit more of this after, but generally speaking, it's going to be within the range of of pretty good on the first shot are you guys in an ice cream coma?
Speaker 1:are you guys? Okay, show up, show up, oh god, bring it on bring it on.
Speaker 2:What's your favorite ice cream flavor?
Speaker 4:my favorite ice cream flavor is the oreo overload. So I love cookies and cream ice cream. I just it's just stable. It's the best. I'm surrounded by this all the time. So the unique flavors are fun and I'll get on a kick where I like, really want one of the unique flavors, but standard all the time the Oreo overload. It's the best, and I love Oreo ice cream. So I poured my heart and soul into making that what I think is the best Oreo ice cream on the planet.
Speaker 1:I would weigh 400 pounds. How Oreo ice cream on the planet? I would weigh 400 pounds. How are you not eating ice cream all day long?
Speaker 4:I've only been doing this full time for five weeks. Check me my wife keeps close tabs on me on that. She doesn't want me eating into the profits.
Speaker 1:Do you ladies have any?
Speaker 2:questions for Hunter. No, it was really good.
Speaker 1:Anything.
Speaker 3:It doesn't have to be ice cream related. Do you guys use an ice cream machine or how do you churn it?
Speaker 4:Yeah, we use an ice cream machine, so we have like a big industrial ice cream machine.
Speaker 3:Oh nice.
Speaker 1:I had a question for you. Yeah, bring it on. I have a few ladies I'm not going to name any names, maybe Kayla that are always looking for work, and what types of jobs you'd have for ice cream experts like these ladies.
Speaker 4:So right now we just we have two people that we just kind of like are starting to onboard. We're talking through the process of what that looks like to get them hired. We don't have a ton of work that we're ready to pawn off yet, because we really want it to be. We want to have our hands fully on the on the whole of the business right now. But we post some on Instagram cause we need somebody to help us cover when we have private events and we have to divide and conquer.
Speaker 4:We're getting to the point where we have a lot of times we're going to have two private events on the same day. So it's going to take problems to have, great problem to have, great problem to have, but it's going to take a lot of energy and it's helpful when we get more production time by having that truck staffed out or while we're at the event, feeling just like, hey, we have somebody who can cover, we don't have to worry about. I have a buddy who's been helping us out Weston. He's been great. He makes our honey beer. He's the best. But he's been helping us cover a lot of times.
Speaker 4:But in essence you need somebody that's responsible, that could take money and scoop ice cream, take money, scoop ice cream, have fun conversations with people and, ideally, have a ton of friends that will come visit them. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 3:How did you get to the point where you could take to private events in one day, Like, at what point of your kind of business were you like? Oh, I feel good being on this.
Speaker 4:So this is just kind of like a personal mentality, but just like we'll say yes and figure it out and we stole. We stole that from jesse itzler. I don't know if y'all know who that is he's. He's kind of a. I mean, he's like a billionaire. He ran a jet company but he does a lot of um speaking events and stuff like that. Now he wrote a book called living with seal. It's about him living with davgins, but anyways, we kind of took that from him as this idea of like we're going to say yes and we're going to work to figure it out. We're not going to always poke holes in everything and figure out what might go wrong in this moment. We're going to figure out how we're going to make it go right. Love that. So we never really decided to take two events in one day. We just decided not to say no when we were asked to take two events in one day.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And we have two setups. We have a trailer and we have, like a deep freezer that we cater out of. So we just throw the deep freezer in the back of the truck, take it. It's kind of built out to look really cute like an ice cream cart and we'll do an event in the trailer and event with the deep freezer on the same day. So we've done that, we've done that a couple of times now and it stretches us pretty thin, but we don't get to have to say no to people, which is something that's really important to us right now. Did you say you had a question too?
Speaker 1:No, I don't remember. It must've been important. Oh, you do. Yeah, come on Drum roll.
Speaker 2:How long does it take you to make one flavor?
Speaker 4:Oh, great question. Great question. It's like a three-day process. So there's the cooking, the base, and it's hard to define as like to make one flavor, because we do it I do it in such big batches that it's like I'm making six flavors at a time or whatever. So we cook the base, then that has to get down to temperature quickly in an ice bath, then it has to rest in a refrigerator overnight to settle. So that process takes about 24 hours the cooking, the cooling and then the settling, and then the next, the day after that, we have to run it through the ice cream machine and once it comes out of the ice cream machine we add all the mix-ins no-transcript, we add all the mix-ins and you're looking at like soft serve texture. It's got to sit in a freezer overnight to get to that hard scoop American style, philadelphia style ice cream. So all in all it's about a three day, 48 hour to 72 hour process, depending on how you time it up?
Speaker 1:Good question. I feel like we could talk ice cream and eat ice cream all day, but we're coming up on time. So before you go, I got final things Location, website hours, because you're only open a few days.
Speaker 4:Yep Only open a few days right now, so we'll start with that. I'll go backwards. So hours we're open 2 to 9 on Thursday and Sunday and 2 to 10 on Friday and Saturday. So a little bit more extended hours there on the weekend. Busy in the early afternoon or is it kicked in after lunch or depends, depends on the weather. Okay, so right now it's been very weather dependent. We've had some mornings where it was really pretty and we had a big turnout, and some days where it's rained all day and we have had not a huge turnout. So I'm ready for the summer sun to kind of push the rain away a little bit.
Speaker 3:Will those hours be seasonal, like where you guys change them?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So right now we're committed to being in that location until Halloween, basically Okay. So once the weather cools back off, then we're going to figure out what's the next step for us. So this may not be permanent home.
Speaker 4:This may not be permanent forever. Oh yeah, could be, but may not be. Okay, yeah, could be, but may not be. So just figuring out the next steps in terms of that will come at some point, but right now we're at the corner of 5th and J Street in Bentonville, right next to this big, colorful pottery studio that we really enjoy working with, and it's a great location.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a great spot. You got all the businesses right there on the 5th Street side as you're heading down with those brick buildings and towards the meteor and then everything going on the Walmart campus.
Speaker 4:Yep, it's very, it's very walkable, it's very bikeable right off the greenway. It's not immediately off the greenway, but just a little bit further. So if you're biking the greenway you're really close. So it's it's been a great spot for us. We've been it, um, but yeah, and then come see us on the basically extended weekends, thursday to sunday. What was the other social media? Social media? You can follow us, um, on instagram at honey bean icc ice cream company and then saying our website is honeybeanicccom are you guys following them already?
Speaker 4:yeah, I do you do yeah, I stalked you guys on instagram but I'll give you guys, give us a follow, come on, bring it on, bring on the follow.
Speaker 1:Is it fair to say that you ladies are going to push this through all of your super cool content? Because now you're famous and you had the best ice cream in town and therefore watch you?
Speaker 4:You're running a business here, so make sure you're charging influencer fees.
Speaker 1:If you're going to be posting about my brand, okay, yeah, ladies, anything that you'd like to say from your first podcast experience. How pleased were you that the first time we hear you're eating gourmet, high-end ice cream from Hunter, good, good day. We probably can't have you back because we won't be able to top this. I wouldn't think.
Speaker 3:No listen.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 3:Unless we have him back again.
Speaker 4:Yes, I'll make more flavors. We'll do a flavor taste.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Love it. Thank you for coming in. I'm excited for you and the business. I'm glad that we found you early on. I think you're going to be an absolute home run and I think that the way that you're making it personalize you and your wife, the way that you're thinking about expansion I mean this is going to be an absolute home run for the area. So I'm excited to continue to support you. I know these lovely ladies are going to share all this amazing content and you may have to open a few other days now because the demand is going to be so high. You may have to do it. I mean, we have millions and millions of followers on the beat game. Bring them on. Thank you, hunter.
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 1:Millions Tens. Good job, ladies. Thank you, Hunter. Yeah, you bet.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having me.