BENTONVILLE, Ark. — A Bentonville couple is bringing a new ice cream shop to the scene in Northwest Arkansas, and it’s on wheels.
Hunter and Carson Gowen are the owners of Honeybean Ice Cream Company, a new Bentonville food truck repurposed for serving super-premium scoop ice cream, smoothies and coffee.
“One of the things a lot of big cities have is a really nice premium ice cream place, and we've noticed that’s something that there's kind of a little bit of up here, but not a lot of,” Hunter said.
The Gowens say the ice cream truck started with a childhood dream.
“There’s lots of stories of me as a young kid, selling my lunch in the lunchroom to other kids. I’ve always been a big seller and wanted to have my own business,” Hunter said.
That dream became a reality this summer.
“One day in May, Hunter texted me that he found this truck on Facebook Marketplace and I was like, ‘Carson, we need to buy this,’” Carson said.
With a little creativity and freezers full of homemade ice cream, the empty truck became the Honeybean Ice Cream Company.
After months of perfecting their craft, the Gowens were ready to hit the road, opening their doors and windows at the end of August.
“We did a ‘flight night’ so everyone could taste our different flavors,” Carson said. “We wanted to know, ‘Hey, is this ice cream actually good? What could we tweak? What can we make better?’ We really were expecting just close friends and family, but we had over 100 people there.”
Since that night, they say their calendar is already filling up with bookings, and as they prepare to announce more events in the future, they say the truck is just the beginning.
“I want to be able to share the ice cream with as many people as possible, and one way to do that is to get it in stores and to get into the storefront,” Hunter said.
For now, the Gowens say they’re already enjoying serving their community, one scoop at a time.
“It’s really endless we don't know how much we could grow or how many people we could serve,” Carson said.
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