Meet The Australian At The Helm Of A Cult New York Ice-cream Brand

From a single ice-cream truck in NYC, Melburnian Laura O’Neill has churned her business into an American phenomenon.

The Australian Financial Review, 2025

As the co-founder of one of the best-known ice-cream brands in the United States, Laura O’Neill has experienced her fair share of meltdowns.

In the scrappy early years of building Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, she recalls opening a freezer to find hundreds of tubs of ice-cream reduced to soup – victims of a blackout or a door accidentally left ajar. “It never gets easy to see melted ice-cream,” she says, grimacing at the memory.

But O’Neill, who is from Melbourne, was confident the business she co-founded with brothers Ben and Pete Van Leeuwen would be a success. “I think when we tasted the product, we knew we were onto something. It’s the real deal.” Millions of Americans would agree.

Today, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream is sold in 75 stores (with another 25 due to open across the US this year) and carried by 12,000 retailers, including supermarket giant Whole Foods. Its distinctive, minimalist packaging has become synonymous with premium ice-cream that’s packed with high-quality ingredients and free of the fillers and gums found in many other brands.

“We’re having a birthday party for [daughter] Rada in a few weeks and we’re going to get the truck to come, which is a real flex,” O’Neill says.

And yet, despite the success of Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, O’Neill tends to fly under the radar. Here in Australia, few people realise that a warm, energetic Aussie is at the helm of such a sizeable American company – one that’s attracted $US17 million ($26.4 million) in investment over the past eight years from the likes of Morgan Stanley’s private equity division. O’Neill’s journey from Melbourne event producer to one of the top 20 female founders in the US (according to Inc. magazine) reads like a playbook on how to scale a business from scratch.

There’s even a dash of romcom-like serendipity thrown in to sweeten the story. It began on the dance floor of a nightclub in London in 2006. The then 24-year-old O’Neill was visiting her brother, and met Ben who was spending a semester abroad. The pair hit it off and when O’Neill returned to Australia, Van Leeuwen offered to fly out and visit. “Which was a bit daunting at first,” laughs O’Neill, who still lived at home with her parents in Melbourne’s Balwyn.