The Berkeley founder turned a made-to-order cookie ice cream sandwich into a Northern California favorite, then spent his career helping other businesses stand back up.
In 2010, Jamal Shamieh opened a small shop in Berkeley, California, with one promise: a cookie ice cream sandwich, pressed to order and handed over fresh. He called the business CREAM, short for Cookies Rule Everything Around Me. The idea was easy to say out loud and hard to get right. Shamieh got it right anyway, one customer at a time.
More than a decade later, CREAM has grown from that single storefront into a multi-location chain across Northern California. The dessert stayed simple. Two cookies, a scoop in the middle, built the way you want it. What kept people coming back was the combination behind the counter: quality ingredients, prices a student could afford, and a room that felt glad to have you in it.
Shamieh’s story carries more than a food brand. He belongs to the Bay Area’s community of Palestinian-American food entrepreneurs, a group The Guardian profiled for the lasting mark it has left on one of the country’s most celebrated food regions. His success sits where three things people tend to root for meet: a feel-good product, a family-built business, and a contribution to the local food scene that few people hear about.
Any founder who scales a single shop knows the hard part is not the first location. It is the fifth. Holding flavor, service, and atmosphere steady while a business grows tests every system a founder has. Shamieh handled it the way he handles every business problem: financial discipline, leadership teams that own their results, and a refusal to let the customer experience slip.
“Justice and freedom are the tenets to peace.”
That instinct runs through the rest of his career. Beyond CREAM, Shamieh works as a business turnaround specialist, the person companies call when operations wobble and the way forward turns murky. His work centers on steadying a business under pressure, repositioning the brand, tightening the finances, and rebuilding the team so the recovery holds. The job rarely makes headlines. It also decides whether a company lives.
Ask him what he has learned and the answer is plain. Build for the long term, not the quick win. Treat people fairly. Stay accountable. Never lose sight of the customer. He keeps one guiding principle close, a belief that reaches past business into how he reads the world: that justice and freedom are the tenets to peace, and that fairness and social responsibility belong at the center of good work.
These days Shamieh spends more of his time as a mentor and board-level advisor, handing hard-won lessons in turnaround and brand-building to the next group of founders. He wants to help others build companies that last and hold their values, and to support his community and the younger entrepreneurs coming up behind him. You can learn more about Jamal Shamieh and his work.
