Zsa’s, beloved homemade ice cream shop in Mount Airy, to close end of next year

Danielle Jowdy started making ice cream as a hobby after being laid off in 2009, and kept going for more than 14 years. 

She had a hand-cranked ice cream maker as a wedding gift, and first tried making pumpkin ice cream to bring to a Friendsgiving. That’s how she began to learn how to work with ingredients in ice cream. For instance, she realized that churning a mixture of canned pumpkin, milk, and cream would result in ice cream with big ice crystals inside. Her shop, Zsa’s, still sells pumpkin ice cream, but with refinements from both Jowdy and the people she has employed in her kitchen over the past 14 years.

“I don’t have any formal food training. I don’t have any formal business training. And that’s really where our catchphrase — seriously from scratch — came from,” she said. “I enjoyed sharing it with people and watching them form these connections amongst each other because it’s the simplest thing to make a friend with, right? Like everybody has a favorite flavor of ice cream.”

She kept making ice cream — selling at farmer’s markets, local grocery stores and an ice cream truck — until opening a shop in Mount Airy in 2018. Recently, she announced that the shop will close in December 2025. 

Along the way, Zsa’s found a devoted local following. Most recently, both the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Magazine included it on their lists of the best ice cream in Philadelphia. 

Weavers Way Co-op was the first grocery store to sell Zsa’s ice cream wholesale, according to general manager Jon Roesser. Jowdy stopped selling to grocery stores during the pandemic to focus on producing enough for their ice cream shop while social distancing, and did not go back. In 2020, Weavers Way put up a blog post to explain to their customers why Zsa’s ice cream was not available, and shoppers have not stopped asking for it, said Roesser.

“I approached Danielle over the course of … 2021 and 2022, maybe even as recently as 2023, just to say, ‘Hey, any possibility that you might consider wholesaling again?’  

“Losing Zsa’s created a big hole in our ice cream lineup.” 

He said that after years of working with hundreds of local food businesses at Weavers Way, he can see how Zsa’s, a business with a huge following, might decide to stop. 

“As a consumer of many, many pints of Zsa’s ice cream, I am super-bummed. I’m sure that it’s got to be back-breaking work for Danielle. And so I certainly understand,” he said. “So much of the burden falls on … the person who founded the business and eventually … it’s exhausting.”

Jowdy explains that despite its popularity, Zsa’s is closing because the cost of running the business has gone up so much that she would have to expand and scale up to keep it going. She said the cost of local dairy products, chocolate, and insurance have all gone up. She said she spent more than a year thinking about different options: take out loans to open more ice cream shops; become a seasonal business that only opens during the summer; and/or sell to grocery stores again. 

In the end, she decided to close after next year because she was afraid that growing the business would take away from the attention she likes to give her business and staff. 

“The hardest thing was seeing the look of disbelief on everybody’s faces,” she said. “And one of my staffers said that this is so hard to believe because … we just had a mural painted last summer. We’re so busy during the summer. How could this be that we’re making this decision to close?” 

Zsa’s is exactly the kind of local business making hand-crafted products that Mount Airy likes to see, said Philip Dawson, executive director of the Mount Airy Community Development Corporation, which supports local businesses and also owns the property housing Zsa’s. 

“Danielle has found great success in Mount Airy and the community, I think, has been the beneficiary of that,” he said, “I happen to be an ice cream lover myself. So there’s nothing better than having a place like that a block from your office.” 

He said that local businesses continue to do well in their neighborhood, pointing to Downtime Bakery, a new bakery that just opened weeks ago. 

Jowdy said she decided the best thing for Zsa’s would be to give their customers one more year and “ride it out as high as we possibly can. It’s super unconventional, but we’ve never done anything in a traditional way here.” 

“I had this little image of 28-year-old Danielle working alongside 42-year-old Danielle, the same kind of effort and focus, but with the 42-year-old having more wisdom, confidence and self-assuredness.”

“If somebody had said to me, even five years ago, ‘What’s your exit plan for this? How do you think this may end someday?’ I probably would have thought that an exit plan meant that you had failed,” she said. “But now, I feel very confident that we’ve run this business to the best of our ability and that the exit plan that we do have … is a really strong one and one that we can be proud of.”

She said many people ask her what she plans to do next, and she’s thinking about something that is still related to food and small businesses, possibly helping other people who are also starting businesses for the first time. She said she also looks forward to taking a day off, because she cannot remember the last time that happened.

FYI

Zsa’s Ice Cream

Hours: Wed-Fri: 3-9 p.m.

Sat-Sun: 12-9 p.m.

Closed: Dec. 30-Jan. 7 for winter break.

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