Overtown entrepreneur Aamir Taylor grew up in Philadelphia eating water ice — a frozen, fruit-flavored treat with a consistency similar to sorbet. But before he started his business in 2020, Taylor says there was almost nowhere to find it in Miami.
For the past four years, Taylor’s business, Italian Vice, has offered Miamians a taste of the popular Philadelphia dessert in 10 flavors, serving customers at first via a mobile food cart and now at a fixed stand at Hard Rock Stadium. This weekend, he’s prepared to make 2,000 servings of water ice for fans during Taylor Swift’s three-day stop at Hard Rock on her Eras tour.
“Sometimes I look back at my business plan, where I told myself that I would be in Hard Rock Stadium,” he told the Miami Herald. “I knew I needed an amazing product.”
Before starting Italian Vice, Taylor, 41, worked in nightlife in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 2012, he moved to Miami, where he worked as a doorman at the Miami Beach nightclub LIV.
During a trip to Philadelphia to see family in 2018, he ordered a mango water ice, his favorite flavor, and was struck with inspiration. He began to think about building his own water ice business in Miami.
As he started the business development process, Taylor spent time in Japan, China and Thailand, countries with a large presence of street vendors. During his trip in 2018, he visited multiple manufacturers to see mobile carts. Before he left China, he ordered a custom electric bike with a cart in the front that he planned to drive around Miami.
With his goal of starting a water ice business, Taylor spent 2019 researching what tools would be necessary to create his own frozen treats. He spent six months putting together a business plan and was working on the initial iterations of his water ice flavors when he ran into his first challenge. A special batch freezer he’d need to make water ice cost approximately $30,000.
Without the money needed to purchase the freezer, Taylor had to quickly pivot. He found a cheaper alternative by developing his recipe at a commissary kitchen and worked to source his product from a distributor that used his recipe.
Making his water ice in small amounts, he focused on using all natural ingredients that would allow the water ice to be higher quality and taste more like actual fruit. He began using cane sugar instead of white sugar and filtered water instead of tap.
“A lot of people have said that my water ice tastes better than Rita’s,” he said, referring to the nationally known water ice chain.
When Taylor officially started the business in 2020, his first goal was to raise awareness locally of the concept of “water ice.” He sold it at birthday parties and school events, taking his cart from location to location. By giving out free samples to Miami Dade College students on Biscayne Boulevard, word spread fast.
Eventually, employees at Miami Dade College learned about Italian Vice, and Taylor secured his first major client, selling water ice at a back-to-school event.
Still, when Taylor began selling water ice on corners and sidewalks in Overtown as he had seen in Philadelphia, perplexed police officers sometimes stopped him with questions.
“Where I’m from in Philly, you’ll [often] see a hot dog truck or ice cream truck,” he said. “I had the police come up to me and ask what I was doing. I had permits, but they had never seen people doing that.”
After starting to establish Italian Vice in the local food scene, Taylor experienced the same challenge that many entrepreneurs of color do: accessing capital. He realized that the money Italian Vice made would only allow him to tread water and that he needed more capital to scale his business.
“That’s where people drop the ball by just working hard,” he said. “Your money won’t typically fund growth.”
Approximately $30,000 in grant funding from local organizations like the Overtown Community Redevelopment Agency and the Miami Foundation provided Taylor with the opportunity to expand and optimize his small business. He used the funding to support his business’ expansion with new equipment, and Italian Vice now operates three tent set-ups for private events and three electric bikes for mobile sales.
In the same way entrepreneurs search for new clients, he believes they have to ardently look for grants. “That $5,000 or $20,000 grant will come in handy when you least expect it,” he said.
Taylor has come a long way from selling water ice on a street corner in Overtown. With his team of six employees, he’s preparing to open a brick and mortar Italian Vice location in Overtown by March and plans on continuing to support nonprofits like the Overtown Youth Center by providing water ice. He hopes to expand beyond Hard Rock Stadium into permanent locations at the Kaseya Center and the University of Miami.
“One thing about Miami is that when something is doing welllolliplay, you’ll have a lot of people come behind you and copy you,” he said. “Competition breeds strong people. We feel good about setting that trend for the Italian ice business and standing on it.”