When Josh Butt, CEO of Cold Case Ice Cream, entered America’s crowded dessert market, his strategy was deliberately simple: let the ice cream lead. “Our hook is definitely our ice cream—full-fat, premium ingredients, and unique flavors,” he says.
As Cold Case emerges as a disruptive force in the category, the brand’s next phase is already taking shape. Among the ideas gaining momentum are globally inspired offerings, with Indian flavors think mango, cardamom, and pistachio on the company’s innovation radar.
It is not easy to reimagine the world’s most popular dessert. With his Utah-based venture — Cold Case Ice Cream, Josh Butt is set on doing just that. He wants to change the perception of ice cream as just milk, cream, flavor and sweetener. His aim — to bring superlative ingredients, and deep expertise in food manufacturing to deliver a different, indulgent and imaginative ice cream. All this, while also recalibrating the way ice cream reaches the gastronomes.
Butt launched his brand as a direct-to-consumer product but soon with Cold Case becoming the top ice cream brand on DoorDash, in every region it entered, the company is now steering the brand into retail operations.
With two decades of high impact leadership in food industry, Butt began his career at Danone, where he oversaw quality control across 45 plants globally. He then joined the largest citrus processors, Ventura Coastal. At Califia Farms as VP of Operations, he helped grow company revenue from $300,000 to nearly $100 million by playing a pivotal role in developing the technology behind company’s almond milk production.
Before conceptualizing Cold Case Ice Cream, he led global operations at Crystal Geyser. But while food may appear to be his forte, Butt also has to his credit building and successfully selling a solar and construction company for $104 million.
Butt says that through all the collaborations and market expansions, his mission remains the same: to deliver ridiculously delicious ice cream.
In an exclusive chat with The American Bazaar, Butt talks about business strategies, revenue growth, and demand generation before delving into other delicious topics like guava, pineapple mint, and cardamom mango as flavor inspirations.
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You position Cold Case as distinctly different from grocery-store ice cream. In your view, what constitutes the strongest competitive moat—formulation, experience, or brand identity?
There are actually two barriers, as we see it. The first is information. We have been eating ice cream for decades, which has slowly and intentionally gotten worse and worse. Major brands developed several methods for making ice cream cheaper, which led to higher air incorporation, less cream, and more emulsifiers, small inclusions, and boring variations of the same eight flavors. It’s sad to see the awesome brands of my childhood don’t even call their product “ice cream” anymore, but rather “frozen dairy dessert.” It is no longer ice cream by definition. Thus, many customers just don’t know that they are eating a substandard product. A major part of our message is to inform us all about what good ice cream really is.
Cold Case delivers ice cream as rich and indulgent as any that have gone before us. Our innovation team has the most fun jobs on the planet! Not only are they creating amazing and sometimes outrageous products, but naming them is literally just a non-stop laughing session. We aim to make each bite of ice cream a full emersion in decadence, with big chunks of cake, or cookie, or honeycomb, etc., surrounded by full-fat cream perfectly flavored to match those pieces. You will never see one of our ice cream pints labeled as “frozen dairy desert.”
The second barrier is that Cold Case is small and does not have the same market share or distribution capabilities as Unilever or Nestlé. Put yourself in the position of a retail buyer; it’s very difficult to take a risk of allocating your limited shelf space to a small company that is only three years old, compared to the giant brands you’ve been successfully selling for decades. I have immense respect and gratitude for the retailers who have taken us into their stores, and their gamble is paying off as more and more consumers are tasting the massive difference in our ice cream versus what they have come to accept in the competition.
You’ve spoken about limiting overrun to preserve richness and texture. How does this decision impact production costs, and why was it non-negotiable for the brand?
Non-negotiable, yes! Overrun (adding air to the product) is an essential component to making ice cream smooth and scoopable; you get a frozen block of cream. However, many brands add more and more air to reduce cost. A dirty trick from a few years ago was the concept of “Slow Churned,” where, essentially, manufacturers were just adding a crazy amount of air to their ice cream, which meant you had fewer calories per volume scoop. The marketing was “Same great flavor, but with fewer calories!” What they didn’t tell you was that there was also less ice cream.
Part of what makes Cold Case Ice Cream so incredible is the fact that we don’t cut corners or play tricks like this. And yes, it does mean that our ice cream costs more than our competitors’ in the freezer aisle. But we are delivering a full-fat, rich, flavorful, decadent experience intended to delight the customer in every aspect of our brand, from the last scoop of the ice cream to the names and pictures on the package.
Your flavors feature unexpected ingredients such as goat cheese, rosemary, and popping candy. How do you balance culinary risk with mass appeal as you scale nationally?
Cold Case was founded on the idea that ice cream had grown cheap and stale over the years. We were tired of the same variations of adding cookies, brownies, and caramel, and calling it new. We also don’t want to do something for the sake of being edgy, like a mustard and sauerkraut ice cream or something like that. When the goal is delivering a delightful experience, you have to take risks, but always know where the line is.
Goat cheese and basil in ice cream sounds awful, until you balance it with sweet cream and fresh berry jam, thus making a very savory and delicious combination — credit to our innovator Justin. Popping candy doesn’t make sense in a product that starts out as a liquid, until you coat the candy in colored fudge, which allows that fizzing sensation on your tongue to happen at just the right time. Coconut ash in ice cream? Blended with sandwich cookies and a marshmallow swirl, it transforms your boring cookies and cream into a delicious and decadent experience. This type of customer experience is the constant focus of our innovation team, and the central purpose of our company.
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Cold Case ships directly to consumers in evidence-style coolers. What logistical hurdles did you face in the early stages of building this delivery model?
The biggest hurdle by far… (is keeping it) frozen! We have to ensure that the product arrives not only intact and on time, but also frozen. We tried several variations of ice and packaging and have found the best combination to be dry ice and insulated bags. The rest was comparatively easy.
As Cold Case expands nationally, are immigrant-heavy markets influencing your flavor roadmap? Many immigrant communities gravitate toward intense, fruit-forward flavors—mango, cardamom, pistachio, rose—often tied to nostalgia and celebration. Have you explored, or do you plan to explore, globally inspired flavors that could naturally resonate with audiences such as Indian Americans?
Oh yes, it is, and we are having so much fun with it! Many of our team members have lived in countries around the world and have a deep love for the people and cultures we serve. That influences our innovation directly in many ways, and indirectly in many more. Example: We have a major retailer in Mexico for whom we developed six flavors inspired by Mexican cuisine (passion fruit guava, pineapple mint, fried ice cream, and even cardamom mango).
We even have true crime-related names in Spanish, which was a challenging and hysterical obstacle for our Spanish-speaking team members to overcome. And yes, Indian flavors are on our minds. We have a wonderful Indian restaurant next to our building and are regulars there. The chef has some delicious recipes for us to try. More to come!