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Danny Golik was supposed to be a medical doctor. Instead, he did some surgery on ice cream and built a $6.8 million franchise, according to QSR. After tasting flash-frozen nitrogen ice cream at a small Florida cafe, he spent a year in his parents’ garage perfecting the process. They agreed to back his business on one condition: if he failed, he was going back to medical school. Luckily for taste buds, he passed.
The result was Chill-N Nitrogen Ice Cream, now operating across 16 locations in Florida, Texas, Arizona, South Carolina and Tennessee. The secret weapon is a proprietary machine called Lola, which automates the thermodynamics of ice cream production, calculating the exact amount of base needed per order. (Different flavors interact differently with nitrogen.)
CEO David Leonardo, who joined in 2019 to professionalize the brand for national growth, is targeting 50 stores in five years. The cost to open a location ranges from $462,000 to $679,000. Watching an order come to life is quite a spectacle for customers, but Leonardo insists, “People are not going to come back for the show,” adding, “They’re going to come back for the value.”