The Man Who Has Made 110 Flavors of Ice Cream Says Opening an Ice Cream Shop Is No Easy Thing Now | 100 People With Ideas

Making ice cream isn't the hard part, Li Yu says — you just have to break it down. Running the shop is the hard part.

By the time Li Yu, a Tainan native, brought his ice cream shop, Quanweijia, to Shanghai, summer here was already over.

"I didn't know it rained this many days in Shanghai." The difference in climate was the first thing Li Yu's team had to review once they got back to Taiwan. On October 15, the month-long ice cream pop-up closed. That same day, the Xujiahui weather station announced that Shanghai's average daily temperature had stayed below 22 degrees Celsius for five days running: autumn had begun. In fact it had been raining on and off in the city for a month.

The pop-up, all of 3 square meters, was the last market test before Quanweijia's plan to open a permanent Shanghai store next year. The weather was poor, but the National Day holiday still pushed sales to more than 1,200 cones a day at the peak, at 36 yuan each.

The pop-up sat on Wukang Road in Shanghai, borrowing the window and kitchen of an Italian restaurant, PISTACCHIO. Before coming, Li Yu had wanted a spot on a street that was "comfortable to walk down," and Wukang Road fit. In the former French Concession, the roughly one-kilometer road is shaded by plane trees and lined with 37 protected historic buildings, a textbook stretch of Shanghai's garden-villa districts. More to the point, a street known a decade ago only for its fallen leaves and old houses now draws a steadier flow of customers, thanks to the many "influencer shops" clustered along it.

"Dessert you can eat while you walk" was the banner Quanweijia raised in Tainan, and the idea goes back to a scorching day in 2011. Li Yu was passing a babao bing shop — eight-treasure shaved ice — on Zhengxing Street in Tainan. "A guy sitting across from me ordered a bowl of ice, got up to grab a napkin before he'd finished, and someone else took his seat." That scene, Li Yu says, was what made him think there might be an opening in ice cream people could eat on the move. "At a lot of snack shops in Tainan there's a crowd outside watching you, so you hurry up and finish. If the shop doesn't manage the line, people stand right behind you. It's a lot of pressure."

Li Yu was 28 and in the middle of his own "life crisis." After graduating with a physical education degree, he had spent two years in Taipei chasing a career in film, until a typhoon back home gave his father a reason to call him back to Tainan. Once home, he took a sales job at a high-end outdoor furniture company. "Honestly, I'm interested in beautiful things in general. I could have sold cars just as easily…"

But he couldn't sit still, and wanted something of his own. A friend happened to be looking to hand off an oden shop on Zhengxing Street, so Li Yu talked his father into putting up the family's savings — money set aside for his wedding — and brought in his older sister Li Wenxin, another physical education graduate, then studying for the civil service exam, and his friend Zhu Xinyi, who worked at a coffee shop. The three of them put in 360,000 Taiwan dollars each (about 80,000 yuan) and opened in February 2012.

Zhengxing Street is another small road, crossing Hai'an Road Art Street, now a well-known tourist area in Tainan. The neighborhood declined after a municipal construction scandal in the 1990s; since the Hai'an Road street-art project launched in 2004, creative and commercial spaces have come back and tourists now pack the block. But even two or three years after the ice cream shop opened, with a line outside every day, Li Yu's father, a police officer, still liked to ask him: "Who on earth taught you to sell ice cream?"

In Taiwan at the time, wanting ice cream meant KFC, McDonald's or IKEA, or else eight-treasure shaved ice and cheap soft-serve cones at the night market. Ice cream at 70 to 180 Taiwan dollars (about 15 to 39 yuan), the way Quanweijia priced it, was rare, and the flavors were odd: alongside matcha, cocoa and peach there was sweet potato leaf and pineapple, soy milk and fried dough stick, Taichung lemon cake, Yujing white sugarcane. These flavors, rooted in local Taiwanese ingredients, became the foundation of Quanweijia's later popularity.

Li Yu has now made more than 110 flavors of ice cream.

"At the start we only made four: matcha, soy milk, brown sugar syrup and sesame. Almost nobody else was selling anything like it then." He had spent six months working it out at home first. "At least four nights out of seven, every week, I'd come home from work and make ice cream." He didn't quit his day job until two months after the shop opened.

The big leap in his technique, Li Yu recalls, came three or four years ago with a pudding flavor. "Blend ready-made pudding into the base and it comes out too sticky. It doesn't work. So I broke down how you make pudding in the first place… For pudding you need eggs, milk and sugar; cook them together and you have pudding. Raise the proportion of egg yolk and it's less sticky." Once he'd cracked it, even the ice cream machine makers came to ask how.

Pudding ice cream sounds simple, and it became the basis for many of Li Yu's later flavors. Miancha, a savory flour porridge; chocolate cake; even rice tossed with lard and soy sauce — break the elements down, adjust them, and any of them can become a frozen dessert.

"Lard rice has rice, lard and soy sauce. Rice can be made into ice cream — steam it, and the rice aroma joins the milk aroma. The rice matters, starting with which variety you pick. Strictly speaking the standard is 'rice that still smells like rice after it meets milk.' Then you swap butter for the lard, add sugar to the soy sauce to make a sweet soy sauce, and there's your lard-rice ice cream."

"My whole trick is breaking things down," he says.

Another unusual flavor is Yujing white sugarcane. "Ice cream needs sugar. But sugar is also why a lot of people dislike ice cream. So I thought: how do you make sugar? From sugarcane. Except the sugarcane taste gets refined out of white sugar. So I went and found the white sugarcane they use to make white granulated sugar. Eat that ice cream and you get a very strong sugarcane flavor… I decided I'd just serve people the taste of sugar itself."

Many of Li Yu's ideas come from desserts and new drinks on the market, sometimes from Japan. Over a year Quanweijia sold more than 50 flavors. By then Li Yu had become the partner devoted to product development, while his sister and his friend handled more of the daily operations. "She sets the prices too. Or I'll make something and say, I want to sell this flavor, you two figure out how. I don't deal with the money."

Every new idea in Li Yu's head comes with a steep bill.

Apple ice cream is rare, and for a while Li Yu kept turning over how to make it work. At one point Guo Taicheng, who ran the Taicheng fruit shop across from Quanweijia, shared what he'd learned about blending milk with fruit juice. Guo — later Quanweijia's top fruit supplier — told him that "five-claw apples" have soft, mealy flesh that goes well with milk. The variety is grown mainly in Washington State; on the mainland it's better known as shaguo, "snake fruit," or Red Delicious (the original name was Red Delicious Apple, which Hong Kong translators transliterated as hongdili shaguo, later shortened to shaguo). So Li Yu found an importer and brought in 48 boxes from the US at once. "Peeling that many apples nearly killed us," but in the end, "we sold every one."

A single flavor takes a week at the fastest, longer when he hits a wall. Even now the ice cream Quanweijia sells holds a margin of 20 to 30 percent, while ingredients alone can eat up nearly 40 percent.

The owner's own appetite for learning, dating back to the beginning, is what keeps the little shop putting out a new flavor nearly every day — though it usually can't say the night before what tomorrow's will be. Some curiosities that passed Li Yu's own palate, miso soup among them, got dropped because the market wouldn't take them. Five years in, the shop has accumulated 110 flavors, but close to half of them can't be sold regularly.

To keep revenue steady, Li Yu says, whenever the shop is selling a truffle flavor it has to pair it with something like soy milk.

In December 2012, Nissei, the Japanese ice cream machine maker that also supplies FamilyMart, invited him to Tokyo to look around — his first trip to Japan. That trip was the turning point in his ice cream career. On the manufacturer's recommendation he tried the pistachio gelato at Grom, a famous ice cream shop in Shinjuku. "One taste and I thought, damn, this is on another level. It was like the gelato I'd been eating in Taiwan had been sold to me by a con artist."

Until then Quanweijia sold soft ice cream, also called "fresh ice cream": a core temperature of about -5°C, made and sold on the spot, lower in solids than hard ice cream and simpler to produce. Hard ice cream runs at around 18°C, puts no limit on ingredients, and can carry nuts and chunks of fruit. American-style ice cream, of which Häagen-Dazs is the model, and gelato are both hard ice creams; the American kind holds more air, which lets it stay soft at -18°C and suits industrial mass production, while in Italy, where modern ice cream began, gelato is generally taken as a synonym for handmade ice cream.

The pistachio flavor he'd eaten at Grom later turned up on the Shanghai pop-up's menu in its first week. Li Yu says he used 5 kilograms of pistachios from Sicily, bought at 2,000 yuan a kilogram.

Japan opened Li Yu's eyes. The following January he decided to fly to Bologna and enroll at Gelato University to learn proper Italian gelato. Run by Carpigiani, Italy's largest ice cream machine manufacturer, the month-long program covers everything from making a basic base to the add-on products meant to "improve a shop's profitability." And only someone who can make gelato is eligible for the biggest event in the ice cream world, the Gelato World Tour — a competition Li Yu first heard about in Japan, and which became his next goal.

Entering the Gelato World Tour means competing in the name of a shop, and Quanweijia was missing a complete story. In Lin Rong's words, the Li Yu of that period was "a model with wonderful natural gifts who didn't know how to do his makeup or dress himself."

Lin Rong is the founder of Foodie Amber, a Taiwanese food-and-beverage marketing firm, and studied in Italy. In 2015 Li Yu took silver at the Tokyo leg of the Gelato World Tour with an ice cream flavored with puffed rice, lychee honey and black tea, and Lin Rong was arguably the person most responsible.

Foodie Amber's pitch: "as long as you have a product or a skill, we can handle everything from picking the site to packaging the brand." Its clients include bakeries, restaurants and hot pot chains. For the competition, Lin Rong laid out a whole brand history for Quanweijia — the story each ingredient should carry, the loftier matter of brand philosophy and vision, and, most important, which flavors to compete with.

"At first Li Yu had no idea how to make people outside Taiwan understand his product in a more international way. Ice cream stands for where a chef comes from. Every part of it has to make logical sense. We settled the story first, then the ingredients. Then Li Yu went out and found them one by one — the best tea, the best honey, the best rice."

It was only once he started competing that Li Yu grasped the logic of "the more local, the more international": the black tea had to be honey-scented high-mountain black tea, the puffed rice came from Hualien, and the lychee honey is a Taiwanese specialty too.

After placing, Quanweijia began courting media coverage as "the first ethnic-Chinese winner" and "the ice king," turning up at events constantly and doing collaborations across categories — pop-up shops, limited-edition flavors. So far it has worked with GQ, Wu Pao-chun Bakery, Lexus and the W Hotel, and, according to Lin Rong, is in talks with LV.

For the new Shanghai store, Lin Rong moves from collaborator to formal partner, responsible for getting the store open, choosing the site and planning the marketing.

"Opening overseas was always the plan." On October 14, the second-to-last day of the pop-up, Quanweijia was invited by the marketing account Shanghai Petit-Bourgeois Food to an unplanned food market. Scooping ice cream on site, Li Yu talked it through: "Shanghai actually wasn't the city I suggested first. I wanted Tokyo and New York. But Amber [Lin Rong] would break down the reasons for coming to Shanghai instead, thinking about it commercially… Shanghai is an easier place to start, and the ice cream market here is livelier than in other cities."

A report from the market research firm Mintel found that China had passed the US as the world's largest ice cream market as early as 2014, with consumption expected to reach 4.3 billion liters in 2016. While consumption in Europe and the US falls year after year under an anti-sugar health trend, ice cream is winning over more Chinese consumers and moving toward variety and higher prices. According to Dianping figures compiled by the New First-Tier Cities Research Institute in December 2016, among the 17 cities with an ice cream category, Shanghai ranked first with 997 ice cream shops.

If he went to Tokyo, Li Yu says, selling ice cream alone would probably "not be enough." Tokyo's dessert market is fiercely competitive, and selling other products alongside is not something Quanweijia is good at. "Language is a problem too. Plenty of people tell me to go to Indonesia. The climate's hotter and there are more tourists. I especially hear that ice cream is booming in Bali; the Italian machine makers are over there all the time." But last September, when Li Yu began looking at cities, he made up his mind quickly after visiting Shanghai and skipped the planned trip to London — because he realized Quanweijia's product stories needed to be told in Chinese.

"We're not boring flavors. We have to explain why we made this flavor in the first place."

That is also why, at the press briefing on the pop-up's opening day, Li Yu had to recite lines he'd read in the prefaces of foreign ice cream books: that salt and ice was a Chinese invention, that emperors once ate ice mixed with honey.

The pop-up sold 12 flavors in all, rotating weekly. According to Lin Rong the lineup leaned on "popular signature classics," and the best sellers were the award-winning puffed rice, lychee honey and black tea, and a flavor Li Yu made specially for the pop-up: Old Wang's Herbal Tea.

He had settled on Old Wang's Herbal Tea back in August, when he came to scout Shanghai; as the name says, it uses Wong Lo Kat herbal tea. The other candidates then were Shen Dacheng's osmanthus-honey rice balls and taosu shortbread, and Yanzhong-brand salty soda.

With half a year to go before next summer, too many questions about Li Yu's new store are still open. The most urgent is finding the right address, which will take luck.

"Honestly, coming to Shanghai will cost more than Taiwan. Rent and equipment are both more expensive. And if we bring equipment over from Taiwan, the distributor here will be furious." Li Yu has already decided to separate the Shanghai store's kitchen from its shopfront — renting a place in the suburbs just for making ice cream, and keeping the downtown shop to about 20 square meters. He has never done it that way before.

"There's an ice cream shop doing great business in front of a church in Florence that looks like 5 square meters from outside. I went in and got a shock — the kitchen at the back was 150 square meters. Where in Shanghai am I going to get that much space?" He isn't against shopping malls either, he says; nothing is settled. For an ice cream shop, a mall may cost you some of the romance of dessert you eat while walking, but its heating at least helps the shop through the slow winter.

Besides development, Li Yu handles purchasing, so once he's back in Taiwan he has to move fast to meet Taiwanese people with fruit businesses on the mainland and settle the new store's ingredient supply.

That may be extremely hard. Beyond the Taicheng fruit shop, Li Yu has more than ten suppliers in Taiwan, hardly a convenient number. His habit of working only with "people who are really good at this one thing" turns into a liability when opening a new store.

What gives Lin Rong the worst headache is policy. She has heard that Shanghai's street-front shops often "vanish suddenly" for all sorts of reasons; having realized that "Moments marketing matters enormously," she then found that as a Taiwanese national she cannot open an official account and has to partner with another team instead. "So we're still hoping to find a really good local partner — someone who knows sites, policy and marketing."

Meanwhile Lin Rong keeps pressing Li Yu to get every flavor down on paper and standardized. Progress is slow.

"I think ice cream is special. You can't put it on paper." Li Yu uses tea as his example. "Matcha and green tea are unoxidized; overheat them and they turn astringent and taste bad. Oolong and black tea are the opposite — the hotter, the better they taste. Tea alone has two completely different methods. It gets into cooking technique, chemical reactions."

Apart from Lin Rong and Foodie Amber, Quanweijia's team is ten people. Of those, only the original three partners can truly hold a station on their own; of the one apprentice who has stayed four years, Li Yu's verdict is: "Still can't do it!" He says: "Ice cream is my life's work now. For my employees, it isn't necessarily that."

Most independent gelato shops in Shanghai are in a similar position. Scarce talent, limited capital and the difficulty of landing a key location all slow any move to scale — and that's before you count how many ice cream shop owners have side businesses of their own.

Lu Xiaoxun, who owns the much-talked-about ice cream shop BonuS, has opened six food-and-beverage businesses of different kinds — noodle shops, a dumpling shop, a bar; his partner Tang Yiying also says the ice cream shop is only a spare-time thing and would rather not say what her main job is. The owner of Shanhe Bingfang, which opened this summer, "has his own business too," according to a member of staff. As for WIYF, which went viral online last summer and has since closed, its ice cream maker now runs a coffee shop called Rac Coffee and sells popsicles on the side.

"Ice cream makers are hard to find." September 24 was Li Yu's "day out" on this Shanghai trip, and he spent it visiting four independent ice cream shops nearby. "At a lot of ice cream shops the maker is the owner himself. In Taiwanese we say he's the principal who also rings the school bell — has to do everything."

In 2013 the Shanghai subsidiary of an Italian ice cream machine maker began opening its training courses to the public, the only such branch school in China. Chen Bozhi is its only teacher; she started in the company's administrative office before being sent to Italy to learn how to make ice cream. The courses are short: three days for the basic one, four for the advanced, at 3,800 and 6,800 yuan respectively.

According to Chen Bozhi, the first course four years ago had just 18 students, most of them employees sent for training by Carpigiani's own clients — McDonald's, Cold Stone, IKEA, Godiva, iSicily. The one returnee who said at the time that he'd go home and open his own shop ended up making ice cream for the Korean coffee chain Caffebene. This year close to 90 people have taken the course, but "in four years, no more than 30 have really matured to where they can write a dozen recipes of their own." When friends ask Chen Bozhi to recommend an ice cream maker, her usual answer is: "Anyone who can open his own shop won't work for someone else, and the ones companies send won't either."

Among the students who mean to go home and open a shop, many end up buying Chinese-made machines under budget pressure. "The cheapest we sell is 120,000 yuan; domestic equipment is about two-thirds cheaper." Even so, the equipment bill for an ice cream shop is far higher than for a coffee shop: a single-group espresso machine at around 50,000 yuan is plenty for a café, but for handmade gelato that's entry level.

In the end only a few ice cream entrepreneurs get past five stores the way Shanghai's Prée and its sub-brand Petit Prée have. Prée's founder, Shanyu, has told the media that they plan to open up franchising to bring in capital, and have already set up a central kitchen.

When these subjects come up, Li Yu sometimes makes a complicated face — because the second shop he opened, NINAO Gelato, in 2013, fell into nearly every hole there is.

Back in Tainan after training in Italy, Li Yu talked his two partners into a bank loan of 15 million Taiwan dollars (about 3.29 million yuan), still not repaid, to open this gelato specialist in Anping, Tainan. Equipment alone cost NINAO Gelato 7 million Taiwan dollars (about 1.5 million yuan), including two upright ice cream machines identical to those at the famous Italian shop La Sorbetteria Castiglione. "The Italians told the Taiwanese importer, we haven't sold into Asia in 20 years, why would anyone want to buy this machine?"

"The first shop was in a tourist district. The second one was… a place by the sea, a beautiful building. There's a meadow in front where a lot of people come to shoot wedding photos. My friends all said I was crazy." The shop has three floors and 500 square meters, all high-ceilinged exposed concrete, with another 5 million Taiwan dollars sunk into the interior.

By Facebook following, the second shop's "12,144 followers" after four years is less than a fifth of the original's. NINAO Gelato's business is plainly not good. But Li Yu has hung a lot of the art he collects as a hobby around the shop, because what he actually has in mind is becoming the first ice cream shop in the world to win a Michelin star. "That could happen at my second shop. It would never happen at my first."

Even now Li Yu hasn't shaken his habit of spending. Recently he spent another 60,000 yuan online on a small centrifuge.

"Now it gets fun. I can make my own butter instead of buying a whole tub of Président. I can make clear banana juice. You'll think, whoa, that's impossible, how am I eating a white strawberry ice cream? And I haven't used a single chemical trick. That's the cool part. That's what floors people."

Cover image courtesy of Quanweijia and mars