“One of the things I value most about being a business owner is the many opportunities I get to engage with various aspects of society.”

When Liz Mok talks about ice cream, you understand that she’s talking about more than just dessert: it’s a passion, a curiosity, a delicate blend of science and design.

“I love ice cream because it pulls apart complex flavours into perceivable stages,” she says. “Really well-made ice cream is an emulsion of air, water and fat. Different flavours get trapped in those different spaces, and because everything has a different melting point, you actually pull apart those flavours as your ice cream melts… You can really savour all the things that are going on.”

What’s going on is that, with Moo Shu Ice Cream & Kitchen, Liz elevates ice cream—and being human—into an artform.

She launched the Ottawa, Ontario-based business at the Ottawa Farmers’ Market in summer 2015, when she introduced her delectable ice cream truffles—two-bite-sized treats, inventively flavoured, enrobed in dark chocolate—before expanding the following year into a brick-and-mortar location at 477 Bank Street. There, she offers scoops, scratch-made waffle and bubble waffle cones, and more. Her flavours draw on her Hong Kong heritage—for example, White Rabbit, which mimics the popular Chinese candy it’s named after (per Moo Shu’s website, “a bite of this condensed milk, butter and vanilla ice cream will remind you of these chewy milk candies!”), and Hong Kong Milk Tea, “a secret blend of Chinese and British-style teas steeped strongly to impart citrus aromas, caramel notes and distinctly bold tannins…” Moo Shu’s varied selection also includes London Fog, Local Strawberry and, my favourite, Calico Chocolate—white, milk and black chocolate ice cream marbled together in a multi-toned swirl that honours the lucky calico cats found “in every Chinatown.”

Vegan Biscoffee Fudge Swirl and Vegan Yuzu & Raspberry

Whatever the flavour, whether dairy-based or vegan, Liz sources pure, local-as-possible ingredients to create an exquisite taste experience. She proudly uses unique recipes for each flavour instead of relying on a standard white base—a move that’s nearly unheard of in her industry, even among other artisanal ice cream makers. She says it “effectively doubles Moo Shu’s labour costs,” but it’s worth it to her to ensure a product that goes well beyond standard, into exceptional. With a custom base, Liz and her team can “tailor and finesse each flavour as needed for the flavour expression to come through.”

That includes ensuring they don’t over-rely on sugar. “In East Asian culture, ‘Not too sweet’ is the ultimate compliment of any dessert,” she says. “I don’t just want to taste sugar; I want to taste everything.”

Her zest for experiencing that fullness extends to all aspects of her business. She sees every challenge as an opportunity to learn: about law, municipal operations, economics, the wide variety of human experiences. And she does great things with that knowledge. Each business decision reflects a deep commitment to her values—values rooted in compassion, equality and respect.

“Moo Shu is just a way that I move through the world,” says Liz. “It’s my vehicle of curiosity. One of the things I value most about being a business owner is the many opportunities I get to engage with various aspects of society.” Learning about human resources, for example, widened her perspective on different people’s circumstances. Overseeing finances for a small, resource-tight business “helps me empathize a lot when other people—whether on a personal level or an operational level—have to make decisions with very few resources.” And, she says, “I now understand the difference between legal vs. fair. I thought the law upholds what we think is fair, but that’s not true: the law just upholds what’s written.”

Sourcing fresh goods for Moo Shu’s Local Strawberry ice cream

Liz’s efforts to rebalance the scale are wide-reaching. In February 2022, she became a living wage certified employer, choosing to pay her staff more than minimum wage. That decision necessitated a modest price raise. So, to offset the risk of pricing out some customers, in March 2022 she launched the Suspended Scoop program: anyone can claim a free scoop or pay a scoop forward, no questions asked. As of September 2024, Moo Shu has given out more than 3,800 scoops (and bubble waffles), “donated by generous customers.” They also offer classic cones—alongside their housemade waffle cones—at no extra charge, in an effort to maintain inclusive prices.

When Moo Shu celebrates its birthday every July, they sell cat cones—ice cream decorated to look like cats—for an additional $1, which they match and donate to various Indigenous organizations.

Ever committed to environmental sustainability, Moo Shu converts their food scraps to fertilizer, selling worm castings via their online store.

And that’s just a sampling of what Liz scoops out to make Moo Shu, its community and our world better. As she rounds out her ninth year in business and her eighth on Bank Street, she’s preparing for another move that will bring even more goodness: in late 2024, Moo Shu Ice Cream & Kitchen will relocate to 1130-1 Wellington Street West in Ottawa’s Hintonburg neighbourhood. It’s Liz’s way of ensuring year-round employment for her staff; with a bigger space, she can complement the seasonality of her product by expanding into café offerings—coffee, specialty beverages and light food fare, as well as her extraordinary ice cream.

Remarkable as all this is, it’s also unsurprising, coming from Liz. I’ve waited years to feature her as a Kickass Canadian—waiting for things to line up, for her business demands to allow time for an interview. I had the good fortune of meeting her when she first landed at the farmers’ market, and from the start, her energy and enthusiasm shone from behind Moo Shu’s stand. She told me how her design background informed her foray into small-batch, high-craft ice cream (she even designed the logo). Her knowledge about the process was deeply impressive, as was her attention to detail (customers could carry home their boxes of truffles on a cloud of dry ice). And the tastes were sensational. She was so bright, so keen, so obviously going places.

I took her card, and circled back that Thanksgiving to share truffles with my family. When I picked them up, Liz filled me in on her plans to open a store, to get her ice cream on more menus at select local restaurants, to introduce savoury foods (her kitchen has been making delightful vegan dumplings for years). Since then, she’s delivered on every one of her goals, only to set new ones to meet again.

After following her career for nearly a decade, it’s a joy to share a taste of her story here, on the eve of her next big move.

Moo Shu debut at the Lansdowne Farmers’ Market

A taste for life

Born in Hong Kong, Liz was “on the cusp of turning five” when her family emigrated to Richmond, B.C., where she became a Canadian citizen. Her father eventually returned to Hong Kong for work—he specialized in end-to-end manufacturing for knitwear—to better support his family from afar. So, Liz, her elder sister and their mother spent summers visiting their father, going back to Canada each September for the schoolyear. Says Liz, “I consider myself having grown up in both places.”

And in both places, food was a unifying force. “We all love to eat, and that’s one of the ways we would spend time together,” she says. “We would eat something, discuss whether we liked it or not, whether we liked the texture; it was an interest we shared even though everybody was all over the place.”

From the beginning, Liz was drawn to a wide assortment of foods, tasting “everything the adults ate” as soon as she was old enough for solids. As a young girl in Richmond, her favourite birthday treat was sea urchin, so each year, the family celebrated at a local Japanese restaurant. “B.C. is very famous for their sea urchin; that was a perfect place for me to live.”

Summers in Hong Kong brought even more opportunities to try different foods. The dense network of storefronts, street food and snack bars served up all sorts of cuisines at a relatively low cost. “Growing up there, I almost took it for granted that you can get any food, any time. It just felt so natural.”

Because they were on school break, Liz and her sister often waved off bedtime to go out for late-night ice cream with their parents. “Ice cream was everywhere, and there were lots of different options—that was always so fun,” says Liz. “Any flavour was possible, and you could taste it all; you could combine anything to see how (the flavours) interact with each other.”

With that wealth of international food as her norm, she was hit by culture shock when she moved to Ottawa in 2007, where the offerings were more limited. It made her homesick; it also helped line the path to Moo Shu…

Success by design

Liz moved to Ottawa to study industrial design at Carleton University, where her sister was already studying architecture. Liz had been struggling to narrow her interests to one career: she wanted to be creative and loved aesthetics; she also excelled in math and science. She says her curiosity attracted her to science—the idea of experimenting with various properties and studying different outcomes. “I feel like that spirit still lives on in my work with food as well: What if we did this, what would happen?” At one point, she wanted to be a chef; then a fashion designer or an aerospace engineer. “There were so many things pulling me apart.”

Before her last year of high school, she visited her sister at Carleton and, on her advice, toured its industrial design facilities. Liz was convinced; the program hit all the vocational flavour notes she was seeking, combining “creativity with practical, real-life solutions.”

Once classes got rolling, though, she found that while industrial design fed both her artistic and analytical appetites, it left her craving a “zero-critique creative outlet,” one that wasn’t about grades, one “for which only my opinion mattered.”

That’s when things started churning. Liz had worked in the food industry for a while by then, earning money for university at several restaurants and bars. She was familiar with food-making. More than that, she liked making food. And the medium was crystal clear: “Ice cream is such a great palette, a great blank canvas for playing with flavour,” she says. “I can taste a lot of different notes—I’m very sensitive to that. So, I would have friends come over, we’d make weird ice cream and eat it together (to see what worked).”

Crafting ice cream was also Liz’s antidote to being separated from the rich international flavours she’d grown up with. She felt the need to hold onto her culture and she missed the tastes of home. “I wouldn’t have opened my own place if I wasn’t just desperately craving these flavours all the time.”

Younger Liz working at Suisha Gardens

In between making ice cream, waiting tables and working on her degree, Liz completed a one-year internship at an experiential design company in Hong Kong, developing interactive exhibits for museums in Asia Pacific, such as the Ningbo Science Exploration Centre. She was the first industrial designer they hired to work on museum exhibits—they’d previously worked only with architects.

That experience helped her land a UX and instructional design subcontractor job with the Ontario Ministry of Education when she graduated from Carleton in 2012. But it wasn’t meant to be. “I was just really sad at my job,” she says, something she attributes to the “red tape” that often comes with government work. “It’s necessary when you have to appeal to people throughout the province, but it was not the type of work I thought I would be doing as a young, fresh grad. I was bold and creative—I’m a risktaker.” Fed up with “crying at work even though I was doing well,” she went to a drop-in therapy clinic, where a counsellor suggested, “You might just hate your job and you don’t know it yet.”

That was all the encouragement Liz needed to quit. “I just had so much creative energy,” she says. “I was bursting and I had no outlet.”

In fact, the outlet was already there; she just needed more of it. She drew on her savings to spend one year focusing full-time on her ice cream hobby. “I’m very full-assed about everything; I couldn’t do this part-time.” Still, she assumed it would be temporary. Having seen firsthand “all the follies of the food industry” (the inconsistent hours, for one), she continued online learning throughout that year, thinking she’d go on to find “a real job” in digital education.

But 2015 had other things in store for Liz. With help from her boyfriend, Chris, a software engineer she’s been with since 2012, she brought Moo Shu Ice Cream to Ottawa Farmers’ Markets, selling her gorgeous, flavour-forward ice creams as snack-sized truffles, coated in dark chocolate to protect them from melting. Delighted customers discovered her authentic take on Ginger Vanilla Bean, Black Sesame and Red Bean, among others—and they were hungry for more.

Liz had gone into the ice cream truffle business “just for fun,” assuming she would lose money; that’s what everyone told her to expect as a first-time entrepreneur. Instead, Moo Shu broke even, putting her at a crossroads. “There was lots of positive feedback, but not enough of a sign to go full-blast ahead,” she says. “It was just kind of ambiguously good.”

What she did know was that if she didn’t try it, she would regret it. She was in her 20s, unmarried without children or assets. As she saw it, “if I fail, I fail—it’s just me.”

The following summer, Moo Shu Ice Cream & Kitchen opened the doors to its inaugural brick-and-mortar store. Customers have been lining up ever since.

Black Sesame ice cream truffles

The Moo Shu ethos

Over Moo Shu’s lifetime, Liz has found her own real-world application for her industrial design degree. “It’s shaped how I view the world as systematic vs. individual. I take that lens to sustainability, to social justice, to employment—to everything. That is actually a design issue: How do we get people in society engaged with building a better society vs. rejecting it and doing their own thing? By designing systems that are intuitive and barrier-free.”

That way of thinking, of pulling things apart to see how they’ll best work together, goes far beyond her methods for testing new ice cream flavours. She sees Moo Shu as an extension of herself and is determined that her business adopt as many of her core values as possible. Sustainability and fair pay top the list.

“(Businesses) actually make more impactful decisions than individuals do,” she says. “If I offer you a plastic cup, you’re using plastic; if I offer you compostable fibre cups, you’re using fibre. The volumes at which we purchase make huge differences in terms of sustainability and fair trade. (In that way, Moo Shu) can have major impact on our society and our community.”

Gathering ingredients from a local blueberry farm

As for being a leading employer, the benefits are multifold: Liz is able to treat her staff the way she knows they deserve, while attracting and retaining top talent to better her business, and freeing herself to think about her own viability.

“I’ve gone through several rounds of being extremely burned out,” she says, reflecting on Moo Shu’s earliest years, when she ran on a midday nap and a couple hours’ sleep at night, squeezed in between feverishly making and selling ice cream. “I’m in my 30s now, and it’s always in the back of my head that I need to be able to do less for this to be sustainable.”

These days, Moo Shu has the people and systems in place to allow Liz that space (“I can take a week off when I need to, which is super-cool and was not the case before. I also get to sleep, which is fun!”). She says it’s “half by luck, half by design,” but her smart approach makes a strong case for the design part of her equation.

Liz relies on her team to provide exceptional customer service while she’s away or busy tending to other sides of the business. It’s her staff who builds a rapport with each customer, and the key to their doing so, she says, is “having a good job. What gives them capacity to offer the best customer experience is being fairly compensated, having sick days, having stable employment, a safe work environment, opportunities for agency and creativity, upward mobility—all of that… I’m here to support them with that.”

With her boyfriend, Chris

Flavours of the future

Being a year-round employer is the main driver behind taking Moo Shu Ice Cream & Kitchen to a larger venue; by expanding the menu to include hot drinks and savoury selections, Liz aims to keep revenue coming in throughout the colder months, when fewer people flock for ice cream. But she also loves the idea of Moo Shu becoming “a community hub” where staff members who have barista backgrounds can share their insight and excitement with customers.

Beyond the move, her focus is on continuing to better the balance of how Moo Shu fits into her life—to think on personal goals and find more time for family while maintaining a healthy level of “energy and passion and engagement in the business.”

The bigger picture has yet to be designed, but Liz has no illusions that bigger will always be the way forward. “I don’t think that infinite growth is sustainable or necessary,” she says. “The market will tell me what’s needed. There are so many little seeds that we’ve planted and I don’t really know where it’s going to go. I feel very dynamic.”

In her words: “I want to taste everything.”

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Moo Shu Ice Cream & Kitchen moves to 1130-1 Wellington Street West in late 2024. Until October 31, 2024, you can taste their wares at 477 Bank Street.

Moo Shu’s vegan ice cream is also available wholesale at Equator Coffee Roasters, Morning Owl Parkdale and Plant & Curio.

For the latest, follow @mooshuicecream on Facebook and Instagram. You can reach Liz at [email protected].