Not Your Usual Startup Story...

A story of how we quit being lawyers, sold everything, and moved halfway across the world.

Our names are Michael & Victoria and we want to tell you a little story about how we quit our jobs as lawyers, sold everything we owned, and moved halfway across the world (to a place one of us had never even been to before) to start making plant-based vegan “ice cream” in sunny Santa Monica, CA.

2015 was a crazy year...sometimes we forget how crazy. But we digress...

One Rainy Day in London...

You see Frozen Fruit Co started its life on different shores, on a different continent, in a different time zone, and in a very different climate. We met like most couples do… being drowned by the Royal Navy as part of a team-building exercise on the first week of our MBA. We went to grad school together, we worked at the same law firm, and we started to spend so much time together that we even started to get confused for brother and sister (enough times to be concerned about it). Luckily this stopped as we got older.

Since we spent so much time together it just became a natural progression that we wanted to start a business together.

Fed up with the long ingredient lists and the crappy feeling (both mentally and physically) that plague so many frozen treats, we asked ourselves one question: “Why can’t ice cream be made with a simple ingredient list, taste amazing and let you eat a whole bucket and still feel amazing”.

So, on one rainy evening (well, we can’t remember if it was raining, but it probably was…this was London after all) we decided to take things into our own hands and make a plant-based, natural ice cream which didn’t compromise on flavor, taste or ingredients. Our approach was simple – ditch all the bad stuff and make everything just from fruit, plants, and natural fruit sugars (you know, the good stuff). The result astonished us and, at that moment, Frozen Fruit Co was born.

In the beginning, it was tough. We knew we were onto something with our recipes, but we knew nothing about making “ice cream”. We were lawyers! We spent every waking moment we could when we weren’t working coming up with new flavors and learning the “craft” (which we knew nothing about).

People thought we were crazy. In fact, a lot of industry insiders said it just couldn’t be done. Not easily deterred we continued testing in London selling to grocery stores and chains in our spare time. It wasn’t long before we won an Award (a BBC Good Food Award) and started to be featured in the press like Vogue, Tatler, the Daily Mail, and Jamie Olivier Magazine.

Soft Serve To Scoops...

Ever since we came up with our first recipe we always thought California and more specifically Los Angeles would be the perfect market to launch and firmly establish ourselves. Year-round sunshine, health conscious and birthing ground of so many great food trends. It didn’t take much convincing (despite the fact Michael had never even been to the States before, let alone Los Angeles). I mean how hard could it be to move to a completely different Continent and start a business.

Let us tell you – it was HARD. We were allowed only three months in the country to make the dream happen, get everything set up, find a lease and gather enough momentum to get our visa approved for the business. It was a tough three months – we thought we would never find anything. We had no samples to show anyone and only some dummy packaging. It was all down to our pitch.

At breaking point, it wasn’t right until the end that we stumbled upon Montana Ave and found our first store. It was meant to be.

We launched on 02 July 2016 and decided to make a drastic change to what we originally did. Instead of serving scoops, we decided we wanted to turn our ice cream recipes into soft serve. Inspired by the likes of Pinkberry we wanted to create a vegan, plant-based soft-serve version. It was probably a rushed decision. We had never done soft serve before or even knew if our recipes would go through a soft serve machine.

We should have known there were going to be issues when the first time we ever used the machines it turned out they had been wired the wrong way. Making them go backward instead of forwards. We solved a lot of the problems, but the reality was our recipes were made for scooping.

We stuck with soft serve at the store for two years before finally making the switch to our grassroots and becoming a plant-based vegan ice cream store. YAY!

The Big Move To Los Angeles...

WOW, you read this far...

Wow, you read this far. Thank you for reading our little story. We hope you feel inspired and encouraged that anything is possible when you put your mind to it.

We don’t know what the future holds, but we promise you this…INGREDIENTS MATTER! As long as they do, we will continue to strive to make the delicious, clean, and short ingredient list plant-based ice cream you can feel about eating and feeding your families.

Big Love

Michael & Victoria