Submitted by and abridged from Randy Essex, Omaha World-Herald
21-year-old Coleman Warren of Fayetteville, Arkansas, runs Simple + Sweet, an ice-cream business that has provided money for 15,000 meals for the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank in just a year.
Warren was an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer in Omaha, Nebraska in the summer of 2019. He worked with Food Bank of the Heartland’s Kids Cruisin’ Kitchen summer lunch program “doing things that make it fun for the kids, like playing tag.”
One outing led the group to Ted & Wally’s in the Old Market and discovering the shop’s “unbelievably good” ice cream. “There was nothing like it in Fayetteville,” he said. “I raved about it to everyone.”
Warren, an industrial engineering and political science major, aims high. He talked with people about creating a nonprofit, but was reminded that he plans to leave Arkansas for graduate school, and such an effort likely would wither without his vision and energy.
He kept thinking and talking to friends about how to create the nonprofit. They also would periodically hear him say, “Man, I miss that ice cream from Omaha.” Sitting in class one day, the two obsessions connected, and he saw ice cream as a way “to create a lasting engine for my nonprofit,” which soon had a $20,000 seed fund.
He first opened up shop in a recently-vacated elementary school. After a special zoning approval, he started selling pints in October 2020, delivering them around the Fayetteville area and giving most of any profit to the food bank.
On September 22nd, Warren set up a trailer in the parking lot of a motorcycle shop.
Six days later, in Fayetteville as my wife and I work on visiting every U.S. state, I Googled “ice cream near me,” as I am wont to do when visiting a new town. Warren’s website was up to date with the trailer’s location, and had an “Our Story” blurb that tipped me to the Omaha connection.
Warren was delighted to hear my assessment that his ice cream is as good as Ted & Wally’s — I know too well, because I live just two blocks away. “We try to emulate anything they do,” he said.
Warren plans to study rural policy and child hunger in graduate school. He hopes Simple + Sweet enables him to start a nonprofit mobile feeding program.
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