Francisco “Paco” Magsaysay, founder of premium ice cream brand Carmen’s Best, told the 2026 graduating class of the University of Batangas that resilience will matter more than anything else as they enter an uncertain job market. He drew on his own experience of building the business through rejection, failure and mistakes.
Magsaysay is the third member of his family to deliver the university’s commencement address. His grandfather, Ramon Magsaysay Sr., was the seventh President of the Philippines, and his father, Ramon Jr., is a former senator. Carmen’s Best began as a way to use fresh milk from a model dairy farm his father set up in Bay, Laguna, with help from the University of the Philippines Los Baños’ Dairy Training and Research Institute. The brand now sits alongside imported labels on supermarket shelves, competing directly with foreign names for the same shoppers.
Rather than hire outside expertise, Magsaysay chose to learn the craft himself, taking the Penn State Ice Cream Short Course and attending Scoop School. He told graduates there were nights when he questioned whether he was doing the right thing. He concluded that the most important ingredient was not in the ice cream at all but was resilience, and he urged the class not to fear challenges, since they often teach the best lessons. “Success is about refusing to quit,” he said.
His story is now in print. Beyond the Scoop, which took almost three years to write, tells how the brand, named after his daughter Carmen, was built. It will soon be sold at Fully Booked branches nationwide and later on Amazon, Lazada and Shopee. The foreword is by Manuel V. Pangilinan, whose Metro Pacific Investments Corp. and its agri-food arm, Metro Pacific Agro Ventures, invested in Carmen’s Best. Pangilinan wrote that the book’s strength lies in Magsaysay’s steady return to values.
The business has also found its way into the classroom. Professor Andy Ferreira of Ateneo de Manila University said Carmen’s Best and Magsaysay’s achievements are now part of the university’s entrepreneurship study programme. For the Batangas graduates, the message was that a family name and a good product were not enough on their own, and that the founder’s willingness to keep going through failure did most of the work. He offered his own setbacks as proof that a stumble early in a career need not decide its outcome.
