Summer is a wild ride for ice cream shop owners

It's the dead of winter and you have a hankering for a treat from your favorite local ice cream spot.

Then it hits you.

That popular ice cream shop closed for the season around Halloween. As those dreams of a two-scoop brownie sundae melt away, you ask yourself, how do those ice cream shops do it?

They open in early spring and are closed by late fall. How is that possible?

“I work 12 hours a day the entire time we're open,” Audrey Alice Hanson, owner of Alice's Place, a popular walk-up ice cream spot and restaurant in Elburn. “Some days we don't even get a chance to sit down.”

A few key ingredients also come into play.

“Happy customers, happy staff and the weather helps,” said Justin Synnestvedt, who owns Dairy Dream, a walk-up shop in Libertyville.

A nice sunny day can bring in “several hundred” customers, Synnestvedt said. Add in a summer festival, fireworks or an afternoon of Little League games and the customers multiply.

“This time of year, it's just like riding a wild bull through the busy season,” he said.

But when the weather turns cold, the lines dry up and staying open is just not profitable.

“Me, I'll eat ice cream when it's 10 below,” Synnestvedt said. “But there just aren't enough (like me) out there to make it a go.”

But the customers he draws the eight months of the year he is open are enough to cover the time he is closed, he said.

In Mount Prospect, Capannari Ice Cream closes its shop at the end of October, but other aspects of the business keep the owners busy year-round.

The shop opened in 2001 — the only year it served ice cream year-round. Realizing the winter months weren't profitable for ice cream shops, it became a seasonal operation the following year and its owners focused on finding other ways to boost business in the off-season.

Today, customers can enjoy Capannari ice cream year-round through catering orders, online sales through Goldbelly or dropping by one of the locations, like Eiffel Waffle in Downers Grove or University of Chicago, that carries Capannari ice cream.

“We had to get creative and figure out how we can stay in business year-round and build this company,” said Meg Capannari, who owns the popular Mount Prospect shop with her husband, sister and brother-in-law.

Though the Mount Prospect shop closes for the winter, ice cream production continues and is shipped across the country to individual customers, restaurants or specialty grocery stores.

They also stay connected with local customers, offering pint specials around the winter holidays. Customers place their orders online and pick up at the ice cream shop on designated days.

The sale helps the shop stay connected with customers and builds momentum for opening day in the spring, Capannari said.

While the winter offers a much-needed break from the hustle and bustle of the ice cream summer season, shop owners also use the winter months to get caught up, tweak their plans for the summer, make repairs at their shops or take care of other business-related concerns.

“There's a long honey-do list,” Synnestvedt said, saying the busy summer months leave little time for anything beyond day-to-day operations. “There's always some maintenance projects to do.”

By the time spring openings roll around, shop owners are happy to see their customers.

“I've made so many friends,” Hanson said, adding that she now has second- and third-generation customers. “That's really special to me ... that they keep coming here.”

Before you know it, winter will be here and many ice cream shops will be closed for the season. Here's a few places to check out this summer:

Dairy Dream, 1229 W. Park Ave., Libertyville.

Alice's Place, 208 S. Main St., Elburn

Capannari Ice Cream, 10 S. Pine St., Mt. Prospect.