Tony Lamb is the least likely person you’d find in line at a Kona Ice truck. The founder of the booming Florence-based mobile food business said he doesn’t really like shaved ice.
Nor is he a coffee drinker, also ruling him out as a target customer for the company’s second concept, the quietly launched Travelin' Tom's Coffee, which serves up frappes, lattes, cold brew and energy drinks on-the-go.
He is, however, a big fan of the taste tests involved in Kona’s third and newest sister concept: Beverly Ann’s, a cookie and ice cream truck whose name serves as an ode to his mother. Beverly Ann’s is close to hitting the streets, capping a year that’s already been one of the biggest for the company.
“It's just the team bringing me cookies over. Every day,” Lamb told me during a recent interview at Kona’s HQ. “Every day we’re baking.”
Lamb’s recipe for success – no pun intended – has been to keep costs low and service time fast. It’s a philosophy that recently earned Lamb a spot in the Kentucky Entrepreneur Hall of Fame. The induction in November credits his work “revolutionizing the food truck space.”
Kona Ice, founded in 2007, stands as the largest food truck company in the world with 17,000 trucks across 49 states and Canada. At the corporate level, the company maintains a team of more than 150, while its 775 franchisees employ 10,000 people nationwide.
This year, its revenue is expected to hit $85 million, Lamb said, with a projected EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization; considered a core measure of corporate profitability) of $18 million. That’s up from $10 million in 2022.
Systemwide sales, a key metric for franchises, is close to $400 million. And Kona gives back, too. The company has donated $150 million to its local communities.
“We're very philanthropic,” Lamb said.
Travelin’ Tom’s – the first of the two new concepts – launched without a public push in 2020, during the pandemic. While Beverly Ann’s is named after Lamb’s mom, Tom’s is eponymous of his dad.
The coffee truck is seen as a perfect complement to Kona Ice, he said, which drives all its traffic in warmer weather months. Travelin’ Tom’s can run year-round, but it has been crushing it as of late, he said, “with all the (recent) pumpkin patches and (tree) lighting ceremonies.”
Its rollout has been gradual, but not because of lack of demand. Kona as a company is only selling the truck to its existing franchisees. Currently Travelin' Tom's is a fleet of 150, with more than 300 reservations waiting.
Even more have made requests.
“I've got over 1,200 people who have reached out to us to buy a truck. It's the greatest problem in the world to have,” Lamb said. “It's cool because we did all of it during Covid. When the pandemic hit, I grabbed about six people on my team who now had nothing to do, because the world had shut down, and I said, ‘Let's run at this as hard as we can.’”
With Tom’s up and running, Lamb saw a similar opening for Beverly Ann’s.
The plan was to roll out three prototypes this year and 20 franchises next year before launching heavily in 2025.
The truck design was nearing completion as of this fall and features an AI-generated image of Lamb’s mom from her college days. The theme is meant to portray a simpler time. “It’s Norman Rockwellesque,” Lamb said.
The menu is intentionally small. Lamb said Kona Ice as a company borrows from fast-food chicken concept Raising Canes in that mentality: “If you keep it narrow, you can really go deep in the quality,” he said.
The truck will carry a selection of eight to 10 cookies, all served warm. There’s chocolate chip, fudge, peanut butter and the Almond Joy, with coconut, chocolate and almonds. It's Lamb’s personal favorite.
“It’s the greatest cookie God’s ever created,” he said.
For ice cream, there are similarly six to eight flavors planned. Lamb and team are still working on perfecting the right temperature for the easiest – and fastest – scoops.
The new brands come as Kona Ice invested millions to build out its operating system. The software can now facilitate “everything” for franchisees, Lamb said: events, staffing, route optimization and more.
Arguably, most importantly, it gives Kona the foundation it needs to start layering on even more concepts.
“You have to build that as the foundation,” Lamb said.
While Kona Ice “is wonderfully simple,” Tom’s proved a harder challenge: not just because it has a slower serve speed, but the power consumption required for the trucks (Kona’s fleet is all battery driven. No generators are used).
Beverly Ann’s serves as a signal that process is complete.
“Doing the battery thing has been huge, as nerdy as it sounds,” Lamb said. “I'm so proud of my guys, because it’s a freaking difficult thing to do. But (to our competitiors) good luck following us.”
With Beverly Ann’s moving out the door, Lamb said Kona Ice has a “huge line” of new ideas to follow. He won’t reveal what. He said he keeps franchisees at bay by joking there’s a broccoli truck in the works.
Maybe Kona now has the chops to even make that work.
“There were a lot of lean years. Very lean years,” he said. “But now we’ve got scale.”
