Van Leeuwen

Van Leeuwen Ice Cream has grown from a single ice cream truck in Brooklyn to over 100 scoop shops across the United States, known for using the finest ingredients to create premium artisanal ice cream. As the company expanded rapidly, maintaining operational consistency across locations with different formats, varying hours, and diverse teams became increasingly challenging. With approximately 2,000 floor staff across the network and growing, Van Leeuwen needed a scalable solution that could standardize procedures while accommodating location-specific requirements like patio seating, equipment variations, and regional schedules.

Van Leeuwen looked for a platform that could digitize their opening, closing, deep cleaning, and inventory workflows while handling complex scheduling needs across stores with different operating hours. They needed a solution that supported conditional visibility for store-specific equipment, enabled self-service template building by their operations team, and provided unlimited user access without per-seat pricing constraints. The system also needed to integrate seamlessly with their existing analytics platform and HRIS to avoid duplicate data entry while giving general managers and area managers real-time visibility into multi-location performance.

Van Leeuwen's Digital Operations Transformation

Xenia transformed Van Leeuwen's operations by enabling their team to digitize all critical workflows while maintaining flexibility for location-specific differences. The platform's conditional visibility features allowed Van Leeuwen to use a single template with question logic tied to location groups, automatically showing only relevant tasks based on each store's unique characteristics like patio presence or equipment setup. General managers gained a unified home screen combining Location Pulse and My Work views, surfacing daily, weekly, and monthly tasks alongside real-time photos and completion data. This eliminated excessive navigation and ensured nothing slips through the cracks across their 100+ locations.

Enhanced Visibility and Automated Reporting

Area managers received automated weekly PDF reports showing seven-day completion percentages across their stores, organized with stores as rows and projects as columns, replacing hours of manual reporting. The platform's searchable, filterable reporting allowed managers to quickly identify completion patterns by custom fields like scooper name or shift. Module-level notification controls prevented alert fatigue from recurring daily tasks while ensuring critical issues received immediate attention. Reference materials were embedded directly within checklist steps through in-app PDF viewing, giving staff instant access to SOPs for complex procedures.

Scalable Foundation for Growth

The operations team achieved complete workflow independence, building and modifying templates without vendor support for rapid rollout of new procedures like seasonal menu changes. Van Leeuwen's phased pilot approach started with 10 geographically diverse stores during their off-peak fall season, validating the platform's impact before scaling to their full network. This strategic timing allowed them to refine workflows and train managers without disrupting their busiest season, positioning Van Leeuwen for continued expansion with a proven operational foundation.