Luis Abundis built his business from a cart to a truck to a store. Two stores, in fact. “My business actually grew vertically,” he said while sitting next to his ice cream shop, Nieves Cinco de Mayo in the Fruitvale Public Market. Abundis got his start selling homemade ice cream out of a paleta cart. He then bought a real truck, and eventually his shop/store. Today he owns a second shop in San Francisco’s Mission district - both locations have a full menu of tropical ice cream, sorbets, and other refreshing treats inspired by his native Mexico.

Abundis grew up in a small town near Guadalajara, where at eight years old his uncle taught him to make ice cream by hand. This particular style of ice cream is called nieves de garrafa and involves a laborious process done by adding ingredients into an open wood bucket set over ice, and shaken and mixed until creamy. When he was 24, Abundis moved to the U.S. but he put his ice cream-making skills aside while he took different jobs to piece together a life in his new country.

Abundis decided to start making ice cream again several years later, beginning with two flavors and selling them via a cart. His first day selling was at a Cinco de Mayo festival. As he gained confidence in the process he added more flavors, expanding beyond lime and vanilla.

Now he makes flavors like prickly pear cactus fruit, corn, rice, and over 30 others, many of them seasonal or unique to Mexican cuisine. For example, the chocolate is subtle with hints of cinnamon and milk, reminiscent of Mexican hot chocolate. “We experimented with the recipe and little by little got it right,” said Abundis’s mother, Maria Gudalupe Lozano. Abundis is always playing around with new flavor combos, but each one is approved by his mother before it goes to market. His wife and two daughters also help out with the business.

Seven years ago, nearly 15 years after he started pushing around a cart, Abundis made a bid for the space in the Fruitvale Public Market. Since opening a shop he’s earned a steady following and added a few new menu items. In addition to snow cones, one of his more popular items is the mangonada, a mixture of mango sorbet, chamoy, lime, a blend of chiles and salt, and fresh pieces of mango. He said it came together when a family from Richmond that frequented the business repeatedly asked him to keep adding each ingredient to their mango sorbet. “It’s really our customers that have helped us to get to this point,” he said. “They’re like a family that keeps growing.”