How Van Leeuwen Turned Mac and Cheese Into a Winning Ice Cream Ingredient

Three years ago, Kraft Foods approached Van Leeuwen, a New York City-based gourmet ice cream brand, with a very strange proposition.

Kraft, a 120-year-old cheese brand, wanted to team up with Van Leeuwen to create a new ice cream flavor inspired by Kraft’s famous boxed macaroni and cheese. 

Co-founder and CEO Ben Van Leeuwen had never collaborated with a mass-market brand before, but he thought an idea that strange would attract some attention. And that’s exactly what his business needed at the time. Van Leeuwen was growing in the New York and California markets, but was still a relatively niche player in the frozen food aisle–and had no budget for advertising. Any stunt that could bring public attention to Van Leeuwen ice cream seemed like a good idea. 

“The juxtaposition of mac and cheese and ice cream is so good and so extreme that it shocks people. That kind of shock really excited us,” recalls Van Leeuwen, who says it took about a week to concoct the recipe for the bright orange flavor. “It was such a shock flavor, but actually really good when you tasted it.”

Van Leeuwen assumed the wacky flavor would generate news headlines and social media buzz, but not actually sell that well, so the company only produced about 5,000 pints. The mac and cheese ice cream sold out on their website “in like 30 seconds,” Van Leeuwen says. “We really weren’t expecting that.”

Six months later, Van Leeuwen launched a bigger batch of the flavor, selling about 25,000 pints in the span of a week. “That’s not nothing at ten bucks a pint,” says Van Leeuwen, who brought the flavor back for a third time this past October on a much larger scale in Walmart stores. 

Before launching a collaboration like this, Van Leeuwen advises other founders to make sure their brand is established enough on its own. Otherwise, Van Leeuwen cautions, your brand equity runs the risk of getting “watered down” by a partner with a household name. He purposely did not start rolling out these “wacky mass-market collabs” until 13 years into business. And to make the weird factor really work, Van Leeuwen says the collaboration still has to feel genuine to your brand and be pertinent to your customer base.

While Kraft and Van Leeuwen seem like very different brands on the surface, Van Leeuwen sees both companies as comfort food producers. Plus, when it comes down to the flavor profile, the ingredients are not actually that strange when combined. Kraft’s powdered cheese mix is cultured milk, which works very well in ice cream, Van Leeuwen explains. 

Van Leeuwen developed these rules for making weird work in part from other odd collaborations that were not as successful. When he tried a similar flavor partnership with Hidden Valley Ranch, the collaboration garnered plenty of attention, but customers did not actually want to eat a whole scoop of ranch ice cream. The flavor was too much. Van Leeuwen had the opposite problem with its Grey Poupon collaboration. The ice cream was delicious, but Van Leeuwen says the flavor, which included bits of pretzel, turned out too normal, too similar to other ice cream flavors that consumers could already find at the grocery store. The collaboration was not weird enough.

“It can’t be shocking for the sake of shocking. It has to be shock with some relevance, ” he explains. “We’re not going to do a canned tuna ice cream.”

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