Churn Urban Creamery
“My experience with SBDC has been nothing but positive. The services they provided gave me skills to plan for my business in a way that made me immensely more knowledgeable and far more confident to make the right decisions for years to come.”
Churn Urban Creamery is a San Francisco premium ice cream manufacturer. Started in 2016 by Rica Sunga-Kwan, it sells homemade ice cream through a mobile pop-up storefront at local public events as well as private business events.
Challenges
By August of 2017, the business was growing and Rica realized, not only was her business idea sustainable but it also needed a larger facility. It was at that time that Rica began working with the San Francisco Small Business Development Center.
Gameplan
SBDC assists her with growth plans that include everything from human capital (employees) to financial capital (investment funds) to social capital (a network of supporters and educators).
Results
Since that time Rica has made tremendous progress in preparing her business for growth, by securing a permanent location for her business, by raising more than $350K in debt and equity capital, by preparing for hiring, training, motivating and managing employees.
On July 27th, 2019, Churn Urban Creamery opened its first brick and mortar location in San Francisco’s Portola District in the Old Avenue Theatre Building. This first location includes both a sit-down retail storefront as well as ice cream production facilities. With this permanent location, Churn Urban Creamery is positioned to better realize the founder’s vision of creating an eco-friendly ice creamery that manufactures unique ice cream flavors from scratch and will market and distribute them through both the retail storefront as catering.