The Rocky Road of Running an Ice Cream Truck This Summer

“The next generation of children probably won’t have ice-cream trucks like this,” Mr. Weiss told me as I savored a Drumstick cone that tasted like childhood.

He’s doing everything in his power to prove himself wrong. Now in their third year of business, Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel are having their best summer yet. By the time I hopped off their truck, I understood why. I was also very full and deliriously happy.

For the owners of a small business that operates mostly in crumpled dollar bills, Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel run a sophisticated operation guided by amazingly granular data. They know the most popular items, their most productive hours and precisely how much they make every day. In the month of June, their biggest hits were ice-cream bars like Cotton Candy (392 sold), Bubble Gum (309) and Strawberry Shortcake (231), followed by top sellers like Bomb Pops, Screwballs and, of course, Choco Tacos.

But almost every item on the Ice Cream Social menu costs more this summer in response to inflation threatening to gobble their margins. Two years ago, they paid 86 cents per Bomb Pop, and they charged $3. Now they pay $1.20 and have to charge $4. They had to raise prices to help cover their rising costs, like gas expenses, which were 140% higher when they peaked in June compared with last year, one of the many risks of running a business on wheels.

It didn’t take long for me to see the effects of inflation as I sweated next to a freezer in the back of the truck. Mr. Weiss flipped the switch of the music box and turned right into the neighborhood route, where the first customer was a young boy who ordered a Sonic the Hedgehog bar. He handed over his $5 in singles. It’s a ridiculous price they hate to charge, but the same box of pops costs 132% more than two years ago.

Ms. Roedel waved goodbye. Mr. Weiss rang the bell and reminded kids to look both ways before crossing the street. The truck crawled ahead and waited to be stopped.

It was not particularly likely that Mr. Weiss, 33, and Ms. Roedel, 30, would ever find themselves in this position. They met as young, ambitious colleagues at a social-media agency in New York, where they became the best of friends and dreamed about running their own firm. Over Champagne one day, they even picked a name: Ice Cream Social.

It became real sooner than either one of them expected when they lost their jobs in the spring of 2020 and decided to start that new social-media agency. Within a few days they were also in the market for an ice-cream truck.

Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel put dozens of trucks for sale across the U.S. into a spreadsheet, sorting by make, model, year, mileage, price, location and estimated costs of repair, before they found a 1968 vintage Good Humor truck available for $8,500 not far from where Mr. Weiss happened to grow up.

Mr. Weiss’s father, a financial planner, crunched the numbers and determined that it would be a good investment. His professional advice was to buy an ice-cream truck. Ms. Roedel encountered a slightly different reaction when she moved into her business partner’s childhood home for the summer to sell novelty ice cream.

“My parents thought I was insane,” she said.

But there are few lines of work that bring so much joy to so many strangers. The sights and sounds of ice-cream trucks have a funny effect on Americans of all shapes and sizes. Adults pull cars over to the side of the road. Parents walk outside without shoes to eat ice cream for dinner. Kids sprint down the block and stare at the menu, paralyzed by indecision, before counting out their money and ripping into their frozen treats.

Other sane people had the same idea as Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel as they re-evaluated their life priorities during the pandemic. It turned out they wanted to spend their days making the days of others.

Monica Pidhorecki had thought about it long before 2020, but getting laid off by the New Jersey restaurant where she worked for 20 years was the push she needed to search Craigslist, where she noticed a truck for sale with a filthy interior and faded paint. It looked perfect. She found that getting her new office ready for the road gave her a purpose. “I had nothing else to do,” said Ms. Pidhorecki, who now goes by The Ice Cream Lady. “I enjoyed every minute of scrubbing.”

Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel took a few weeks to clean, sand, paint and spiffy a rusty truck that required its own cosmetic makeover. A third business partner, Kurt Mogan, needed another few weeks to repair the engine. By the end of July 2020, they were open for business.

The only thing they knew about ice cream was that they had to sell enough to pay off their ice-cream truck.

They now had two jobs, running their agency and driving their truck, and that summer was a boom time in their second business. Parents were miserable. Children were trapped. Family vacations were canceled. We all wanted ice cream.

A disco ball, left, hangs inside an Ice Cream Social truck. At right, the box where the owners store their cash.

Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel studied the Good Humor vendor’s manual they inherited for tips (“you don’t save time by driving fast”) and picked up other tricks of their charming trade (when it’s too hot outside, customers stay inside). But what they really learned on the job was something more existential: People are desperate for the connection that an ice-cream truck provides.

“You meet everyone,” said Kim Sloan, who runs Dottie’s Ice Cream Truck in Maine. “It’s like being a bartender.” (Except most customers are blissful and some are toddlers.)

Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel were so fulfilled by one truck they splurged on another. They named their first Baby—as in driving up a hill and pleading: “Come on, Baby!”—and called the second truck Mami.

What began as a stunt for another business has since become a real business of its own.

But there was more competition for ice-cream trucks even before the pressures of the economy created more headaches this summer. The business model is changing, and only the smart and savvy will survive. Efficiency requires creativity.

“The days of an ice-cream van just showing up on a corner or doing a neighborhood route are probably a thing of the past,” said Steve Christensen, the executive director of the North American Ice Cream Association.

Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel were nimble enough to adapt. They optimized their routes, hitting the same three neighborhoods twice a week, so their customers know when to expect them, and slashed their hours from late afternoon until dusk, taking advantage of the busiest time of the day. It’s not hard to stray from historical practices when you don’t have much history.

The greatest inefficiency of the business this summer was driving around in vehicles that guzzle fuel. It was a problem with a counterintuitive solution for ice-cream trucks: less driving.

They’re doing more events instead. Ice Cream Social ventured beyond its suburban neighborhood routes for night runs to Detroit breweries and clubs, where people lose their minds when they see an ice-cream truck after midnight. Ms. Roedel books parties through Instagram direct messages and targets locals with highly specific

Facebook

advertising. But for all their attempts to diversify, some things don’t change: They still depend on word-of-mouth.

“What do you got?” said one man who rolled down the windows of his pickup.

“I got a lot of things, man!” Mr. Weiss said.

In fact, he did. He had old classics like ice-cream sandwiches and Chocolate Éclairs and new favorites like SpongeBob and Spider-Man pops among the dozens of items in stock. He even had two flavors of dessert for dogs. Their most delighted customer of the day was a goldendoodle.

Not far behind the dog was every person who ordered a Choco Taco. The dearly beloved concoction was mourned this summer after it was killed by Klondike, which blamed the abrupt discontinuation on the pandemic supply chain. Now one of the world’s largest remaining collections of Choco Tacos lives in a freezer inside a garage in the Michigan suburbs. As soon as they heard the solemn news, Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel hoarded enough boxes to last the summer, and they scribbled on a blackboard:

YES It’s true! Choco Tacos are going away.

NO We don’t know why.

YES We have them.

The inexplicable saga of the Choco Taco helps explain why some drivers have a frosty relationship with

Unilever,

which owns Klondike, Good Humor and other recognizable ice-cream brands. Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel say the company is discontinuing favorites like the Toasted Almond bar without inventing new ones. They don’t understand why products that do exist suddenly disappear or why they have to scramble for supply during summer. They sneer at Unilever’s experiments with self-driving ice-cream trucks. They are left feeling like they are no longer a priority for an international conglomerate.

Russel Lilly, Unilever’s general manager of North American ice cream, said in a statement that the company discontinued two popular Good Humor products this summer due to supply-chain issues but still offers many novelty items. “We remain focused on ensuring the ice cream truck community and ice cream fans nationwide enjoy frozen treats whenever and wherever they want to,” he said.

Riding the Ice Cream Social truck was a useful reminder that people like Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel in every community, not big companies, are going to keep inching toward the future no matter how many roadblocks get in their way. There will forever be demand for what they’re selling.

“Ice-cream truck’s always worth running for,” said one panting father who ordered three Cotton Candy bars, one Screwball and—why not—a frozen Snickers.

By now the blue skies of a beautiful Michigan afternoon had turned dark and flickered with lightning as a storm rolled in. The neon signage in the window was glowing. They weren’t done with the route, but the weather had other plans. Mr. Weiss turned off the music.

Then came the familiar sound of giddy screams. Three little girls down the street were running outside to brave the rain. He flipped the jingle back on.

Summer was almost over. But first there was more ice cream to sell.

Write to Ben Cohen at [email protected]

“The next generation of children probably won’t have ice-cream trucks like this,” Mr. Weiss told me as I savored a Drumstick cone that tasted like childhood.

He’s doing everything in his power to prove himself wrong. Now in their third year of business, Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel are having their best summer yet. By the time I hopped off their truck, I understood why. I was also very full and deliriously happy.

For the owners of a small business that operates mostly in crumpled dollar bills, Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel run a sophisticated operation guided by amazingly granular data. They know the most popular items, their most productive hours and precisely how much they make every day. In the month of June, their biggest hits were ice-cream bars like Cotton Candy (392 sold), Bubble Gum (309) and Strawberry Shortcake (231), followed by top sellers like Bomb Pops, Screwballs and, of course, Choco Tacos.

But almost every item on the Ice Cream Social menu costs more this summer in response to inflation threatening to gobble their margins. Two years ago, they paid 86 cents per Bomb Pop, and they charged $3. Now they pay $1.20 and have to charge $4. They had to raise prices to help cover their rising costs, like gas expenses, which were 140% higher when they peaked in June compared with last year, one of the many risks of running a business on wheels.

It didn’t take long for me to see the effects of inflation as I sweated next to a freezer in the back of the truck. Mr. Weiss flipped the switch of the music box and turned right into the neighborhood route, where the first customer was a young boy who ordered a Sonic the Hedgehog bar. He handed over his $5 in singles. It’s a ridiculous price they hate to charge, but the same box of pops costs 132% more than two years ago.

Ms. Roedel waved goodbye. Mr. Weiss rang the bell and reminded kids to look both ways before crossing the street. The truck crawled ahead and waited to be stopped.

It was not particularly likely that Mr. Weiss, 33, and Ms. Roedel, 30, would ever find themselves in this position. They met as young, ambitious colleagues at a social-media agency in New York, where they became the best of friends and dreamed about running their own firm. Over Champagne one day, they even picked a name: Ice Cream Social.

It became real sooner than either one of them expected when they lost their jobs in the spring of 2020 and decided to start that new social-media agency. Within a few days they were also in the market for an ice-cream truck.

Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel put dozens of trucks for sale across the U.S. into a spreadsheet, sorting by make, model, year, mileage, price, location and estimated costs of repair, before they found a 1968 vintage Good Humor truck available for $8,500 not far from where Mr. Weiss happened to grow up.

Mr. Weiss’s father, a financial planner, crunched the numbers and determined that it would be a good investment. His professional advice was to buy an ice-cream truck. Ms. Roedel encountered a slightly different reaction when she moved into her business partner’s childhood home for the summer to sell novelty ice cream.

“My parents thought I was insane,” she said.

But there are few lines of work that bring so much joy to so many strangers. The sights and sounds of ice-cream trucks have a funny effect on Americans of all shapes and sizes. Adults pull cars over to the side of the road. Parents walk outside without shoes to eat ice cream for dinner. Kids sprint down the block and stare at the menu, paralyzed by indecision, before counting out their money and ripping into their frozen treats.

Other sane people had the same idea as Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel as they re-evaluated their life priorities during the pandemic. It turned out they wanted to spend their days making the days of others.

Monica Pidhorecki had thought about it long before 2020, but getting laid off by the New Jersey restaurant where she worked for 20 years was the push she needed to search Craigslist, where she noticed a truck for sale with a filthy interior and faded paint. It looked perfect. She found that getting her new office ready for the road gave her a purpose. “I had nothing else to do,” said Ms. Pidhorecki, who now goes by The Ice Cream Lady. “I enjoyed every minute of scrubbing.”

Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel took a few weeks to clean, sand, paint and spiffy a rusty truck that required its own cosmetic makeover. A third business partner, Kurt Mogan, needed another few weeks to repair the engine. By the end of July 2020, they were open for business.

The only thing they knew about ice cream was that they had to sell enough to pay off their ice-cream truck.

They now had two jobs, running their agency and driving their truck, and that summer was a boom time in their second business. Parents were miserable. Children were trapped. Family vacations were canceled. We all wanted ice cream.

A disco ball, left, hangs inside an Ice Cream Social truck. At right, the box where the owners store their cash.

Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel studied the Good Humor vendor’s manual they inherited for tips (“you don’t save time by driving fast”) and picked up other tricks of their charming trade (when it’s too hot outside, customers stay inside). But what they really learned on the job was something more existential: People are desperate for the connection that an ice-cream truck provides.

“You meet everyone,” said Kim Sloan, who runs Dottie’s Ice Cream Truck in Maine. “It’s like being a bartender.” (Except most customers are blissful and some are toddlers.)

Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel were so fulfilled by one truck they splurged on another. They named their first Baby—as in driving up a hill and pleading: “Come on, Baby!”—and called the second truck Mami.

What began as a stunt for another business has since become a real business of its own.

But there was more competition for ice-cream trucks even before the pressures of the economy created more headaches this summer. The business model is changing, and only the smart and savvy will survive. Efficiency requires creativity.

“The days of an ice-cream van just showing up on a corner or doing a neighborhood route are probably a thing of the past,” said Steve Christensen, the executive director of the North American Ice Cream Association.

Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel were nimble enough to adapt. They optimized their routes, hitting the same three neighborhoods twice a week, so their customers know when to expect them, and slashed their hours from late afternoon until dusk, taking advantage of the busiest time of the day. It’s not hard to stray from historical practices when you don’t have much history.

The greatest inefficiency of the business this summer was driving around in vehicles that guzzle fuel. It was a problem with a counterintuitive solution for ice-cream trucks: less driving.

They’re doing more events instead. Ice Cream Social ventured beyond its suburban neighborhood routes for night runs to Detroit breweries and clubs, where people lose their minds when they see an ice-cream truck after midnight. Ms. Roedel books parties through Instagram direct messages and targets locals with highly specific

Facebook

advertising. But for all their attempts to diversify, some things don’t change: They still depend on word-of-mouth.

“What do you got?” said one man who rolled down the windows of his pickup.

“I got a lot of things, man!” Mr. Weiss said.

In fact, he did. He had old classics like ice-cream sandwiches and Chocolate Éclairs and new favorites like SpongeBob and Spider-Man pops among the dozens of items in stock. He even had two flavors of dessert for dogs. Their most delighted customer of the day was a goldendoodle.

Not far behind the dog was every person who ordered a Choco Taco. The dearly beloved concoction was mourned this summer after it was killed by Klondike, which blamed the abrupt discontinuation on the pandemic supply chain. Now one of the world’s largest remaining collections of Choco Tacos lives in a freezer inside a garage in the Michigan suburbs. As soon as they heard the solemn news, Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel hoarded enough boxes to last the summer, and they scribbled on a blackboard:

YES It’s true! Choco Tacos are going away.

NO We don’t know why.

YES We have them.

The inexplicable saga of the Choco Taco helps explain why some drivers have a frosty relationship with

Unilever,

which owns Klondike, Good Humor and other recognizable ice-cream brands. Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel say the company is discontinuing favorites like the Toasted Almond bar without inventing new ones. They don’t understand why products that do exist suddenly disappear or why they have to scramble for supply during summer. They sneer at Unilever’s experiments with self-driving ice-cream trucks. They are left feeling like they are no longer a priority for an international conglomerate.

Russel Lilly, Unilever’s general manager of North American ice cream, said in a statement that the company discontinued two popular Good Humor products this summer due to supply-chain issues but still offers many novelty items. “We remain focused on ensuring the ice cream truck community and ice cream fans nationwide enjoy frozen treats whenever and wherever they want to,” he said.

Riding the Ice Cream Social truck was a useful reminder that people like Mr. Weiss and Ms. Roedel in every community, not big companies, are going to keep inching toward the future no matter how many roadblocks get in their way. There will forever be demand for what they’re selling.

“Ice-cream truck’s always worth running for,” said one panting father who ordered three Cotton Candy bars, one Screwball and—why not—a frozen Snickers.

By now the blue skies of a beautiful Michigan afternoon had turned dark and flickered with lightning as a storm rolled in. The neon signage in the window was glowing. They weren’t done with the route, but the weather had other plans. Mr. Weiss turned off the music.

Then came the familiar sound of giddy screams. Three little girls down the street were running outside to brave the rain. He flipped the jingle back on.

Summer was almost over. But first there was more ice cream to sell.

Write to Ben Cohen at [email protected]