fresh protein ice cream, and everything under it

A single-serve cup, made fresh rather than shipped frozen from a co-packer. The spec is the product: 30g of protein and 200 calories, in a format someone eats in one sitting without deciding how much of it to eat.

I develop the recipes and I make the batches. Kova has a detectable protein character and I am not fighting my base — the flavours are built around it rather than trying to cover it.

recipe development · production · packaging

kovakream.com is a Shopify theme I write in Liquid, section by section, in a git repo that deploys on a push to main. Subscriptions, delivery zones, discount logic and the email capture are all mine to break.

The parts of it I got tired of doing by hand are automated, and that layer is its own body of work: safety hooks that stop a deploy reaching a live storefront by accident, routing, and 73 tests that pass.

shopify / liquid · git · python · automation

The automation layer

I sell at gyms and studios across LA, in person, with a freezer and a table. I book the venues, I staff them, I run the payments, and I pack the cooler the night before. One wholesale account came out of cold outreach.

Deliveries run twice a week on a route I build from the live orders, against a hard cutoff and a cooler that holds a known number of cups. Those two constraints decide everything else about the day.

events · direct sales · wholesale · logistics

• 1,030units sold
• ~100pop-ups
• 30gprotein / 200 cal

Every one of those units was sold by me, either across a table or through a storefront I wrote. There is no marketing spend behind that number worth mentioning.

What it taught me: a stranger gives you ten seconds and a reason to say no. Selling face to face is the fastest product feedback loop there is, and it is unsentimental. I changed the product because of things people said standing at a table, not because of anything I concluded on my own.