The Cloud & Joy Journey (So Far…)

Why I decided to take a risk and start a better-for-you ice cream brand from scratch and what keeps me motivated

Hi this is Selina, the product creator and co-founder (along with my husband Ian) of Cloud & Joy. I wanted to thank you as an insider and part of the C&J tribe who’ve gone with us on this journey to get to a place where it stops being an idea and becomes real, and something you can enjoy while being healthy. It means a lot to us.

So I thought I’d share with you a bit about our journey.

Ian and I love travelling and exploring other cultures. A big part of that is through their food. Each place tells a part of it’s story through its spices. For example, in my country of birth Indonesia kitchens are redolent of tamarind and cinnamon. And in our travels, the local flavors and traditions for ice cream are one sweetly favorite culinary experience. From Indian Kulfi to traditional buttermilk and licorice ice cream in Scandinavia.

For us, ice cream making was a personal hobby. Over time, I’d become more conscious of cooking healthy but always made an exception for experimenting with new flavors in our favorite creamy treat. Then we went hiking in San Francisco.

Ian took a spill off a hill and was laid-up for more than 6 months! The doctors told him sugar was out during recovery. That meant no ice cream. But we love the stuff, so we started trying a variety of low-sugar, low-calorie dairy desserts. And of course, for the moment our ice cream making hobby was on ice. We didn’t find anything close to the artisanal, rich flavors and natural taste we loved.

When Ian recovered, we became interested in trying to make a better ‘healthy ice cream’ with the richness of flavor and beyond-basic ideas we’d been missing. So I set to it with Ian as my kitchen (and research) assistant. After a lot of effort and frustration-tears, we had a formula that we really liked. And I wanted to share it with the world.

Cloud & Joy was born.

There were low-calorie ice creams out there, but nothing I felt had that artisan ice cream taste of our concoction. And we agreed that another goal was to share a product that would help people live a healthier lifestyle without giving up all of life’s sweet pleasures — but to do it in a way that didn’t associate guilt, sin or other value judgements to food or encourage diets and binging.

“We are so grateful that we’ve had the opportunity to fulfill our vision. And we’ve gathered an awesome team who have been working hard to help us do so, for which we are thankful.”

Plus, it was very important to us that it be a really clean product. When we were doing our own home versions, we had rules for ourselves — like no added sugar (for our honey vanilla flavor we made an exception for raw unfiltered honey), no artificial sweeteners and no harshly processed sweeteners (even if the source was “natural”).

Cloud & Joy followed all the original rules we set for ourselves when making it in our home kitchen, and we added in new rules when we went to market — like avoiding gimmicky nutrition supplements and protein powders for the sake of a marketing sheet (and protein powders give it that ‘protein shake’ taste anyway!) and not hiding any of our ingredients with terms like “natural flavors”.

Plus we were determined to support as many of our local and small-batch artisans that share our ethos as possible when getting our flavor ingredients. People we had found over our years of food exploration in our community, artisans we met at farmers markets — and new artisan friends we made when starting this adventure. Not only is that socially responsible, but it became clear that natural, quality, fresh stuff made with love can infuse tons of flavor without having to resort to industrial-food tricks.

Another big goal for us was to make sure that when we do well, we’re doing good. We’d become supporters of Heifer International before founding Cloud & Joy and loved the concept of their mission. Heifer is dedicated to eradicating hunger, protecting the environment while doing so, and empowering women and rural communities globally to achieve economic and food security in the process. They’re named after their original signature program, which is providing dairy cows to rural communities and families in the developing world that provide a source of food and of tradeable economic goods. They have since extended that program to goats, honeybees and combs, chickens and seed stock. All while supporting small scale sustainable farming.

So we decided that a portion of each pint we sold would in perpetuity go to support Heifer International.

As a result, Cloud & Joy is our pride and Joy. Ian and I are so grateful that we’ve had the opportunity to fulfill our vision. And we’ve gathered an awesome team who have been working hard to help us do so, for which we are thankful. We hope you enjoy this ice cream as part of a healthy lifestyle as much as we had making it for you.