Skinny people can’t be trusted. That’s the motto of Sinplicity Ice Cream, the brainchild of Fort Hunt resident Leland Atkinson, a chef and entrepreneur who makes ice cream that is  “as close to homemade ice cream as the law will allow.”

What’s so sinful about eating ice cream?

“Absolutely nothing, it’s life’s truest, greatest reward,” Atkinson says. “If I come home without a pint of Belgian Chocolate Truffle my kids pounce on me.”

If you’re looking for the nutrition information on a carton of Sinplicity Ice Cream, well, you shouldn’t be.  Instead, you’ll find this message:

“Believe me, you don’t want to know. This is self-indulgence territory. Special occasion stuff.  Even if the special occasion is that you’re home alone.”

But if you simply must know, one scoop of this decadent ice cream, which sells for $7 a pint at Balducci’s locations, the Whole Foods on Duke Street, and at farmer’s markets in Reston and Falls Church, has 290 calories, 150 from fat, along with 24 grams of sugar.

Atkinson is a trained chef, and the author of the award-winning cookbook, Cocina! A Hands-On Guide to the Techniques of Southwestern Cooking, who grew up in Atlanta, and worked as a chef in a number of luxury hotels and as a part time chef for the White House during the Clinton Administration.

After co-founding a catering company, also called Sinplicity, that was located in a former ice-cream parlor in Falls Church, Atkinson inherited a massive, immovable, antique soft serve yogurt machine, and decided to begin experimenting with it, creating unforgettably unique flavors of ice cream and sorbet, like Cappucino Crunch, with chocolate covered almonds and amaretto and “Bourboned” Butter Pecan with sea salt.

 The company was originally called Frozen Sin, because many of the flavors are tinged with just a bit of alcohol, enough to enhance the taste, but not enough to get someone drunk.

Atkinson opened a scoop shop in Crystal City in 2003, but closed after just a year.

“Ice cream is an impulse purchase, they drive by and if they don’t find a parking space, they just keep on going, and in that area, there was nowhere to park, so it didn’t work,” Atkinston says.

With that failure in mind, Atkinson recently decided to expand the company’s scope beyond retail and farmer’s markets by selling Sinplicity Ice Cream & Sorbet from a food truck.

“We realized the location in Crystal City was wrong after we’d already signed a lease and committed a lot of money,” he says.  “With a food truck, you park, and then if the location doesn’t work, you just move on down the road, that’s the best part. If we ever do get back to opening a location, the truck will help us battle test locations so we’ll know what works.”

Food trucks, once the sole provenance of hot dogs, burgers and pizza, are now an increasingly viable business model for some of the region’s most innovative and talented chefs.

“When the economy got bad a lot of chefs who wanted to open restaurants took a long hard look and thought, I can spend millions of dollars to open a restaurant, or open a food truck, where you can get started for maybe an average of $40,000-$80,000,” Atkinson says.

The Sinplicity ice cream truck, emblazoned with images of flying cows, made its debut in Arlington last week, and may soon be cruising the streets of Alexandria and the District. The truck will offer 10 flavors of ice creams and sorbets, available in two sizes: flirtation ($4), and obsession ($6), along with whoopee pies, ice cream “sindwiches,” lemonade, and iced coffee. Devotees can find out where the truck will be parched by following Sinplicity on twitter, or checking them out on Facebook.

With the temperature soaring towards 100 degrees this month, how often is Atkinson indulging in his own products?

“I don’t eat that much myself, our motto is ‘skinny people can’t be trusted’ but you can’t get too out of hand, so I’ve had to reel in my ice cream appetite a bit.”