Pretty Cool Ice Cream Triples Output With New Chicago Facility

Pretty Cool Ice Cream is moving its production out of Logan Square and into a 5,000-square-foot Irving Park warehouse, a shift the company says will triple its output and put its ice cream bars on doorsteps across the country by early summer.

The new facility at 3929 N. Central Park Ave., a converted car wash, is set to start baking and freezing treats next week. Founders Dana Cree and Michael Ciapciak have spent nearly a year outfitting the space with walk-in coolers, an automatic packaging machine, and expanded storage. The move comes as the company approaches its eighth anniversary in August and pushes into national shipping for the first time.

Capacity was the wall. All production had been squeezed into Pretty Cool’s retail shop at 2353 N. California Ave. in Logan Square, and the electrical panel couldn’t handle another walk-in cooler. The Irving Park space fixes that and then some.

“We are busting at the seams at Logan Square,” Cree said. “It’s never been an issue of how many pops we can make; it’s how many pops we can store. Not only are we maxed out on space, but our electrical panel cannot possibly hold another walk-in cooler.”

Pretty Cool has sold 1.5 million pops across more than 300 flavors since opening. The Logan Square store has hosted wedding photo shoots and birthday parties and built a local identity around artist-designed packaging. That community footprint drove demand the original space simply couldn’t meet, especially heading into Chicago’s summer rush.

The Irving Park facility changes the math entirely. Tripling production capacity means the company can take on more wholesale and catering partnerships, hire additional seasonal staff, and keep up with retail volume without rationing freezer space. Cree said the large-scale dishwashing and baking station is her personal favorite addition.

The bigger opportunity, though, is national reach. Pretty Cool will ship its bars nationwide through Lou Malnati’s Taste of Chicago platform, as Block Club Chicago reported, with the rollout targeting early summer. Lou Malnati’s already runs an established frozen-food shipping operation, making it a practical fit for a company that has long fielded requests from former Chicagoans who moved away and missed the product.

That customer base is real. Chicago has exported residents to cities across the country for decades, and food nostalgia travels with them. The Chicago Food Policy Action Council has tracked the city’s food economy as a driver of neighborhood identity, and Pretty Cool represents exactly the kind of small-batch operation that earns loyal followings before outgrowing its original footprint.

Cree and Ciapciak come from fine dining and hospitality backgrounds, but they’ve built Pretty Cool on a different premise. Accessibility is the point.

“Ice cream is egalitarian. Everybody loves it; it’s an affordable luxury,” Cree said. “To be integrated into people’s lives in that way was something I could never do with fine dining.”

That framing matters for how they measure the business. The question isn’t revenue per unit or market share. It’s whether customers remember Pretty Cool as a good experience. That’s an unusual benchmark for a company scaling nationally, but Cree has said it’s the one she keeps.

The Irving Park location won’t be open to the public, at least not at the start. It’s a production facility, not a storefront. The Logan Square shop at 2353 N. California Ave. stays open and remains the company’s retail anchor. Separating production from the customer-facing space is standard for food businesses growing past the boutique stage, and it gives the team room to run both operations without the bottlenecks that have plagued the Logan Square kitchen.

With summer approaching, the timing is deliberate. Ice cream companies live and die by the warm months, and Pretty Cool has arrived at this expansion point just before its highest-volume season. The U.S. Small Business Administration’s Chicago District Office has long pointed to seasonal food businesses as among the most capital-sensitive operations in the city, where a lost weekend in July can offset weeks of margin.

Pretty Cool won’t have that problem this summer. The Irving Park warehouse goes live next week, national shipping begins through Lou Malnati’s in early summer, and the company’s eighth year starts with more capacity than it’s ever had. Cree and Ciapciak built a neighborhood ice cream shop into something the whole country is about to find out about.