While Deb and I were in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco last month, Vivian emailed me to recommend an ice cream place near the corner of Octavia and Hayes.
We expected something like an old-fashioned ice cream parlor.
Turns out, though, that Smitten Ice Cream doles out its frozen goodies from what was once an old, rusted shipping container.
Pretty nifty.
But best of all, Smitten’s made-to-order ice cream is delicious.
Yeah, you heard me right.
Made. To. Order.
Smitten founder Robyn Fisher invented a turbocharged liquid-nitrogen machine to rapidly freeze ice cream one order at a time. No need for crappy preservatives, emulsifiers, and stabilizers to stretch product shelf-life.
So Smitten is not only tastier but healthier than everyday ice cream.
After two years, Robyn now serves some 17,000 customers a month in Hayes Valley. And she’s opening two more locations.
Robyn’s brilliant and tenacious (and good lookin’), but here’s why I’m REALLY smitten by her…
A year or so before she started running her business out of a shipping container, she would bungee-cord her liquid-nitro contraption on top of a little red Radio Flyer wagon and sell ice cream on the streets.
She’d tweet her Twitter followers, “Come and get it before the cops come.”
“It was totally not legal,” Robyn admits.
Don’tcha love pirate businesses?
OK, here’s the deal. YOU can run a business from just about anywhere yourself, just like Robyn.
A ballpark, a park bench, a coffee house…
Hell, you can figger it out for yourself. But here’s the basic idea.
“Life’s pretty good, and why wouldn’t it be? I’m a pirate, after all.” — Johnny Depp
