Teen's Floating Ice Cream Business Breaks $25,000 in Gross Sales

Troupe's Treats, an ice cream business run from a boat by Maryland teenager Brian Troupe, broke $25,000 in gross sales during the 2026 summer season — up from nearly $6,000 the year before.

Troupe, now 16, launched the business in July 2025 at the end of a pier on the Bohemia River. He was 15, had bought a freezer with money earned from chores, and priced his ice cream at $2 apiece. The location flopped. He made $0 on his first attempt.

"I sat there hoping for the best, and it was the worst," Troupe tells Entrepreneur. "Nobody came by. Absolutely nobody would pull up anchor and stop. So I learned from that."

The idea for the business came earlier, during a boat ride with a neighbor who mentioned that someone once sold food to boaters — cooking it in one location and delivering it to another. Troupe saw a gap in the market: boaters commonly carry sandwiches and chips, but frozen treats are rare because most boats lack freezers.

"I thought quite a bit about how I can kind of sneak past some food certifications and not have to have a sink on a boat and all of this extra equipment," Troupes says. "And still having something that a lot of boaters don't have on their boat."

How did a $700 jon boat turn the business around?

Troupe stopped waiting for customers and brought the product to them. He spent about $700 from his savings on a small jon boat and roughly $120 more on bumpers and extra equipment. The first weekend of sales from the water brought in about $400. Over that first summer, he averaged $800 per weekend, peaked at more than $1,200 on his best weekend, and closed the 2025 season with nearly $6,000 in gross sales.

For summer 2026, Troupe upgraded again. He switched from store-brand products to premium items like Magnum and Klondike bars at $3 each, invested in a larger freezer, and bought a bigger boat — the Sea-Doo Switch. The new vessel extended his range from one location to four across multiple rivers.

What operational problems did he solve on the water?

Handing over ice cream between two boats is harder than it sounds. "Imagine trying to give somebody an ice cream with waves crashing, and you're sitting here trying to balance on a boat, and you've got another person trying to balance on a boat while not dropping money or credit cards into the water," Troupe says. "It becomes a comical scene."

His fixes:

• Fishing nets for deliveries. A net about a foot and a half wide with a long handle carries six items at a time; customers place payment back in the net.
• $2 bills for change. After moving to $3 pricing, Troupe stocked $2 bills so customers got exact change — and left with a memorable keepsake. "Later down the line, if they go to look into their wallet and see that there's a $2 bill, it makes somebody think back to the interaction they had with me, [serving as] a memorable marketing tactic," he says.
• Humor for sold-out items. "I'm in a pickle" stickers mark unavailable treats, and Troupe carries an actual jar of pickles — sold at the same price as ice cream for anyone serious about the swap. Free pup cups serve boaters' dogs.

What comes next for Troupe's Treats?

The upgrades paid off. In 2026, Troupe's Treats averaged about $1,800 per weekend and surpassed $2,100 at its peak, pushing season gross sales past $25,000.

Troupe plans to operate again next summer and says he can "100%" see himself remaining an entrepreneur. But he has a parallel ambition: roller coaster engineering. He has attended the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) expo every year since he was seven, attends a trade high school focused on engineering, and plans to forgo college in favor of leveraging his industry network.

"I can even see myself, once I'm a lot older, passing [Troupe's Treats] down to somebody to give another teenager the same opportunity that I had," Troupe says. "Because this opportunity has really provided me with a lot of education, experience — and a lot more than I could have ever thought."

One mentor connection even reached the artist Kii Arens, who has created work for Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney and Dolly Parton. "It wasn't a pitch or a request for artwork," Troupe explains. "He just thought Kii might get a kick out of the idea of a 16-year-old selling ice cream from a boat." The conversation produced an original piece inspired by Troupe and his business.

His core lesson for other young founders: leave room to fail. "It went the worst it could have," Troupe says of the pier flop. "Luckily for me, I didn't let that stop me. I looked at it as, This is a problem. Where is a solution? Once that solution was found, it was smooth sailing, no pun intended, from there."