If you had met Hadar Cohen and Noa Ram three years ago, you would probably have seen two young women following an almost too-perfect version of the conventional Israeli path: outstanding high school grades, including perfect scores in advanced mathematics, meaningful military service and acceptance into prestigious university programs.
Cohen, a former combat medic in the reserves who now works as a model, had already enrolled in a bachelor's degree program in nutrition in Rehovot. Ram, a former military welfare officer and reserve operations room officer, was preparing to study biotechnology engineering at Ben-Gurion University.
They grew up in Omer, a town in southern Israel, attended elementary school and then high school together, and completed fitness instructor courses around the same time. They describe themselves as good girls, "nerds," who planned everything and followed the rules. The traditional post-army backpacking trip was not even on the agenda. Both wanted to begin their studies early and get on with adult life. But just before they were due to set foot on campus, an ice cream changed everything.
Today, at just 23, the two are the owners and driving force behind Pro Cream, a protein ice cream brand that has secured shelf space in more than 1,000 retail locations across Israel in just two years, including major chains such as am:pm and Noy Hasadeh. With revenue of approximately 1 million shekels over the past year and a lean operation with no employees, they personally oversee the marketing, management, distribution and branding of the business they built from scratch.
But their journey was anything but smooth. It involved failed experiments in a home kitchen, printing mistakes that cost tens of thousands of shekels and frustrating encounters with the realities of entrepreneurship in Israel.
The idea for Pro Cream was born out of personal necessity. "I joined a modeling agency and they asked me to lose weight," Cohen says. "Modeling had been a childhood dream, so I decided to go for it. Modeling isn't a politically correct profession. The model's body is the product, and I knew that. The ball was in my court. I could lose weight and be part of that world, or refuse to lose weight and stay out of it.
"I went to a dietitian and was given a meal plan that included high-protein products. I went through an extreme weight-loss and toning process, and I lost weight, but I suffered terribly. The food wasn't tasty, and the process wasn't healthy. I realized I wasn't willing to pay that price. I decided to stop, and that I didn't care anymore. If the agency didn't want me the way I looked, then so be it. I left the agency and started looking for alternatives. I've since returned to modeling, but from a much healthier, more balanced place."
Ram offers a different but complementary perspective. She had always maintained a healthy, active lifestyle but felt a similar frustration. "I never had issues with dieting, but I was very careful about what I ate," she says. "In the army, I saw everyone rushing to the vending machines during breaks, while people who ate healthy food were seen as extreme. As someone who paid attention to healthy eating, I didn't like protein powders or protein bars. I felt that, as consumers, we'd been taught to settle for an artificial, plastic-like taste and an endless list of ingredients."
'We said we'd give the business a year. We wanted to prove to everyone that we hadn't made a mistake'
(Photo: Tal Shahar)
Putting university on hold
One summer day, while sitting in Cohen's family kitchen in Omer during yet another endless conversation between friends, they felt like having a snack. That was when the question came up: How could it be that Israel didn't have a high-quality protein ice cream that was both delicious and healthy?
"We were three months away from starting university, and we said, 'Let's experiment, start a small business at home, sell to friends, then shut it down and go study,'" Ram recalls. "Our expectations of ourselves were practically zero."
"We thought about it for a month," Cohen says. "We had this excitement in our stomachs, spending hours imagining flavors and toppings. We told ourselves that if something made us this excited, we had to do it. We each put in 2,000 shekels to buy an ice cream machine. That was a huge amount of money for us at the time. We said we'd treat it as tuition money. We'd learn how to open a business bank account, what VAT was and how to deal with the tax authorities."
"We weren't thinking far ahead," she adds. "When my partner, who was our first accountant, said we needed to calculate depreciation on the machine over four years, I told him, 'What four years? In two months, the business will be closed and I'll be selling the machine secondhand.'"
Their first steps were hardly Instagram-worthy. The two bought the ice cream machine and began mixing ingredients. "We looked at the recipe that came with the machine, added protein powder, and it was awful," Ram says. "We experimented for weeks. We reduced the cream, added water and played around with the nutritional values. Some flavors were so disgusting that we wouldn't even let our friends taste them."
"At that point, we understood why there wasn't any real protein ice cream on the market. Protein powder makes ice cream extremely thick," Cohen explains. "There used to be popsicles made by a major company with 12 grams of protein, and they wouldn't melt even after an hour. One day, after we'd already started selling our products, I was stocking shelves at a supermarket and met that company's CEO. When he saw our ice cream had 17 grams of protein, he was surprised and asked, 'How did you manage to develop that?'"
Noa Ram: We were three months away from starting university, and we said, 'Let's experiment, start a small business at home, sell to friends, then shut it down and go study.' Our expectations of ourselves were practically zero.
Eventually, they developed an initial recipe that tasted good and offered strong nutritional values, and posted a video on social media. "We didn't have a digital strategy," Ram says. "I actually hated social media. I didn't have Instagram and never posted stories. We opened an account for the ice cream and uploaded a video saying we'd made protein ice cream at home. It got hundreds of thousands of views. People started coming to our house from Haifa, Jerusalem and the Dead Sea area to buy it. One customer bought 40 units from us every week."
Naivety, it turns out, can be a tremendous entrepreneurial asset. "If we'd known in advance what it meant in terms of Health Ministry approvals, kosher certification, factories and regulations, we would never have taken the plunge," Cohen admits. "Our naivety was what gave us the courage. When you learn too much and think too much, it can become overwhelming."
Then October arrived. Just one week before the academic year was due to begin, with the opening dates at Ben-Gurion University and in Rehovot already marked on their calendars, the two faced a crossroads. "It was incredibly difficult," Ram says. "We'd joked a few times, 'Maybe we won't do a degree,' but neither of us dared say it seriously. For us, going to university was just like serving in the army. It wasn't something you simply gave up."
"In the end, we felt this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Cohen says. "We told ourselves, 'If we don't try, if we're sitting in university lectures and hear that someone else has launched protein ice cream, we'll never forgive ourselves.' We decided to postpone our studies for a year and give the business everything we had during that time. Now, two years later, we've canceled our university plans altogether."
Losses and lessons
In the beginning, they and their families spent entire days sitting around the kitchen table, sticking paper labels designed on Canva onto ice cream cups. The labels got wet in the freezer, and the result looked amateurish. They realized they needed professional help and turned to a printing company that could print directly onto the cups.
"We printed 50,000 cups for each flavor. We paid 100,000 shekels, and then it turned out there was a printing defect," Cohen says. "The printing was pixelated and blurry, and it looked terrible. We decided to throw them away. We didn't want to compromise. We printed them again, and it was a completely different story. We saw sales jump with the new cups. So we lost a lot of money, but we learned a lesson along the way."
"The business decisions are ours," Ram says. "Some people might say certain decisions were crazy, but ultimately we want to do things we feel good about. There hasn't been a single decision we've regretted. There was a flavor we launched that didn't sell well enough. We released it too quickly, and sales were too slow. So even though we'd invested tens of thousands of shekels in tens of thousands of cups, we threw everything away. We learned that you shouldn't rush to launch a flavor and that you need to be patient. That was part of our journey. Now, when we launched a halva-flavored ice cream in collaboration with Achva, we carried out many tests and experiments until we reached a flavor we were completely happy with."
The months passed, the one-year deadline they had set for themselves was approaching, and both were also serving in the military. Cohen was called up on October 8, 2023, and served as a combat medic at Sde Teiman for a year, while Ram was still serving as an operations room officer. "On top of that, we devoted 100% of whatever time we had left to the business. We worked around the clock, mostly at night," Cohen says. "We said we'd give the business one year, and we wanted to prove to everyone that we hadn't made a mistake. We each invested 100,000 shekels from our savings and didn't take a salary."
Hadar: Over these two years, we've developed and grown up. I was an outsider as a child, extremely shy, and I didn't have many friends. Suddenly, I'm stepping out of my comfort zone, and we're going to the promenade to film videos with people.
How do you live without a salary?
Cohen: "We've been working since we were 16. We have a strong work ethic and a real awareness of money. We wouldn't have been able to start the business if we hadn't saved, if we'd bought a new phone every year or gone on the big post-army trip. Even now, we don't travel abroad, we don't take vacations and we don't go to restaurants very often. Every shekel we earn goes straight back into the business."
Ram: "We could have taken 30,000 shekels each, but we didn't want to. We preferred to invest in the business. Ultimately, we believe in ourselves. We saw how every shekel spent on marketing brought back twice as much."
Moving from a home kitchen that produced seven ice creams in 90 minutes to industrial production seemed like the natural next step, but it required knowledge they simply didn't have. "We thought about buying a factory. That's how naive we were," Ram laughs. "We went to see a factory that was for sale, and when we heard the price, five million shekels, we realized we were nowhere near that level."
Clearly nowhere near it. So what did you do?
Cohen: "We thought about using an ice cream shop in Beersheba to produce our ice cream after business hours. We considered getting a food truck and producing it there. We made inquiries, and every inquiry took time. Eventually, we realized that to get onto supermarket shelves, we'd have to manufacture in a factory with a production license. We asked the chatbot which ice cream factories in Israel had manufacturing licenses, and that's how we discovered there were only eight such factories in the country."
They approached their first factory in central Israel, where they spent two months running tests and developing recipes. "The ice cream that came out of there was awful," Ram admits. "But we lied to ourselves because we wanted it to happen so badly. The profit margins were terrible, the product was full of calories and had very little protein, and yet we signed with a distributor, started designing the packaging and felt that we'd finally made it. Then suddenly, the factory owner announced he was renovating and was canceling our agreement. It completely crushed me. I couldn't believe this was happening to us. We chased after him and begged him. I was convinced it had been our only opportunity and that the whole business was finished. I went through a crisis that lasted several months."
"We called the factory manager, presented our idea, and when he heard how enthusiastic we were, he said, 'I've been waiting for this call for 20 years.'"
Did you consider giving up? Closing the business?
Cohen: "No. The year wasn't over yet. We still had time. We took a few steps back and kept looking. Every factory fell through for a different reason, until we reached Italek in Alfei Menashe. From the first moment, there was an incredible connection. We called the factory manager, presented our idea, and when he heard how enthusiastic we were, he said, 'I've been waiting for this call for 20 years.' That's where we managed to develop the perfect product: ice cream with a light, airy texture and 17 grams of protein."
Even now, two years after setting out on their journey, the two still run everything themselves, apart from manufacturing and transportation. "The business is starting to run on its own," Cohen says, "but we have no intention of giving up this model."
Why?
Ram: "When we first started, we realized it wouldn't be right to hire employees to do everything for us without understanding how the work was actually done on the ground. We wanted to learn how to do everything ourselves. We still do everything on our own, and all the decisions are ours. The business is our entire life."
Cohen: "We've just imported 50 branded freezers from abroad to place at retail locations. We established the relationship with Achva ourselves, and we organize influencer campaigns. I drive around with a freezer in my car, personally delivering packages to influencers."
How do you divide responsibilities between you?
Cohen: "At first, we did absolutely everything together. We even issued invoices together because everything was new and frightening. Now I lead marketing, and Noa is responsible for sales. We make decisions together, we enjoy working together, and the advantage is that we're good friends who lift each other up."
Ram: "This might sound naive, but we didn't start the business to make money. At first, it was about learning how to build a business and gaining experience. When we started working with Italek, what drove us was the incredible demand. Now we want to develop further, work on new flavors, grow and succeed abroad as well."
Noa: We thought about buying an ice cream factory. That's how naive we were. We went to see a factory that was for sale, and when we heard the price, five million shekels, we realized we were nowhere near that level.
Cohen: "Starting a business is the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me. Over these two years, we've developed and grown up. I was an outsider as a child, extremely shy, and I didn't have many friends. Suddenly, I'm stepping out of my comfort zone, and we're going to the promenade to film videos with people."
Ram: "These have been the two most amazing years of my life. I've learned to overcome embarrassment. I've seen how many opportunities social media has brought us."
Their personal lives have also changed completely. Cohen has moved to Tel Aviv with her fiancé, while Ram has moved to Beersheba with her partner. The geographical distance has not stopped them from running the business remotely and working together seamlessly. Most importantly, this year, for the first time since founding the company, both are beginning to draw regular salaries.
What if someone offered to buy your company?
Ram: "We've already received offers, but we turned them down. Give us a chance to grow. We see how quickly the business is expanding, and we understand that selling now wouldn't be a smart move."