There used to be a small icecream chain in SoCal called HugLife. Best icecream I’d ever had, vegan or otherwise. Incredible, creative flavors (matcha cookies & cream, earl grey, thai tea, etc.), creamy, incredible. Whenever I visited the OC to see friends and family, I would go at least 2 or 3 times, even getting noticed once hitting 2 locations in one day. I finally moved to the area, tried the icecream again, completely awful, but I figured it was a bad batch. Come back a couple weeks later, and they tell me it was this location’s last day, icecream is once again bad. Figure they were downscaling, so I went to their last remaining location in Long Beach, and it was still bad. They just put up their closure notice. My fiancée and I think that they started losing money after expanding so quickly (they went from 1 to 3 locations in like 5 years) and had to change their recipe to cut costs, but changing the recipe made the icecream suck, so they went into a spiral of cutting quality to compensate for low traffic, then traffic reduces because of poor quality. My heart aches over the fact that the best icecream I have ever tasted went down the drain the moment I lived within driving distance.
There used to be a small icecream chain in SoCal called HugLife. Best icecream I’d ever had, vegan or otherwise. Incredible, creative flavors (matcha cookies & cream, earl grey, thai tea, etc.), creamy, incredible. Whenever I visited the OC to see friends and family, I would go at least 2 or 3 times, even getting noticed once hitting 2 locations in one day. I finally moved to the area, tried the icecream again, completely awful, but I figured it was a bad batch. Come back a couple weeks later, and they tell me it was this location’s last day, icecream is once again bad. Figure they were downscaling, so I went to their last remaining location in Long Beach, and it was still bad. They just put up their closure notice. My fiancée and I think that they started losing money after expanding so quickly (they went from 1 to 3 locations in like 5 years) and had to change their recipe to cut costs, but changing the recipe made the icecream suck, so they went into a spiral of cutting quality to compensate for low traffic, then traffic reduces because of poor quality. My heart aches over the fact that the best icecream I have ever tasted went down the drain the moment I lived within driving distance.