My first job as a 10-year-old was picking berries at my local berry farm in my home town of Nelson, New Zealand. With my first paycheck, I sat with my father at the berry farm parking lot and bought my favourite kind of ice cream for dad and I—a real fruit ice cream.
As a 21-year-old, who’d never left his home continent of Australasia, I boldly set myself the goal “to live and work in every continent of the world before the age of 30.”
I left my cottoned wool safety of the rural orchards of Nelson, New Zealand to teach English in a bustling city of 12-lane highways and high-rise buildings: Seoul, South Korea.
Over the next 9 years, I worked 32 jobs on the world’s 7 continents: from oil rigs in Canada, to volunteering at a Mexican orphanage, to cycling unsupported through Africa, to being a 6-star waiter on an Antarctic cruise ship. Halfway through my travels, I met my American wife Mandy who came from Denver, Colorado.
At the end of my world travels, still, the best ice cream I had had was the one from my first job at the berry orchard—a mixed berry New Zealand style ice cream cone.
When I arrived to settle down in Denver with my wife Mandy, I saw that real fruit ice cream wasn’t here, and I knew that I was going to be the person to bring New Zealand style ice cream to America. I rang my long time family friend whose orchard I had worked on back in NZ and told him I needed one of his New Zealand ice cream machines, the first of its kind brought into the USA.
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