Business Tips

Most gelato shop owners set their prices the same way: they walk into two or three competitors, note what a medium cup costs, land somewhere in the middle, and never think about it again until the business is in trouble. It's an understandable approach and it's a genuinely expensive mistake. Pricing is the only lever in your business that goes straight to the bottom line without costing you anything to pull. Sell more product and you spend more on ingredients, labor, and pack

Ask a struggling gelato shop owner what they need and most will say the same thing: more people through the door. Ask a thriving one and you'll usually hear something different. They'll tell you about the family that comes every Sunday after soccer. The couple who've been ordering the same two flavors for three years. The office manager down the block who buys catering for every team event. Those aren't customers. They're the business. Foot traffic is a number that goes up an

There's a particular moment that pushes gelato entrepreneurs toward a storefront. You're at a farmers market, it's ninety degrees, you've sold out by one o'clock, and a line of people who wanted to give you money walks away. You go home exhausted and do the math on what you left on the table. That math is seductive, and it's also incomplete. The gap between a cart that sells out and a shop that stays open is not a matter of scale — it's a change in the kind of business you're

Most gelato shop owners approach social media the way they approach a leaky faucet: they know they should deal with it, they mean to get to it, and it stays on the list for months. Meanwhile the shop down the street with worse pistachio has 14,000 followers and a line out the door on a Tuesday. Here's what makes that frustrating — and fixable. You are sitting on one of the most photogenic products in the entire food industry. A gelato case is a wall of color. A ribbon of choc

Every gelato operator knows the feeling. The last warm weekend of the year comes and goes, the patio furniture gets stacked, and the daily register totals start sliding fast. By January you're staring at the same fixed costs, rent, insurance, equipment, your best staff, against a fraction of the revenue that covered them in July. The winter slump is real, but it isn't a law of nature. It's what happens when you run a summer business twelve months a year. The shops that stay p