ST. LOUIS — The owners of Sugarwitch, the popular ice cream sandwich pop-up have purchased the former Carondelet Bakery building in St. Louis' Patch neighborhood.
Sugarwitch has been operating from an Airstream on the patio of Olio at 1634 Tower Grove Ave. in the Botanical Heights neighborhood since summer 2021.
The pop-up's co-owner Sophia Mendelson said she and her partner, Martha Bass, purchased the building, located at 7726 Virginia Ave., for about $402,000 from Adelle’s Bakery, the most recent business to be open in the storefront.
The couple was approved for a loan through the Small Business Administration's 504 loan program, Mendelson said. A major benefit of obtaining an SBA 504 loan is the ability for Mendelson and Bass to include funds for renovations in it. Although they had to wait “longer than three months” for those funds to become available, the two were able to start renovating the bakery building's kitchen with help from their savings account, friends and family.
For now, Mendelson and her partner will use the “gigantic” 3,000-square-foot kitchen to support their pop-up location at Olio, starting next week.
Mendelson said the storefront will not be open to customers for "another summer or so.” The two have been in conversation with other businesses about “collaborating around the space.” She said they would “love for there to be coffee and for it to be staffed in a more significant way than we can currently do on our own.”
Sugarwitch started in 2019 as an ice cream pop-up in Columbia, Missouri, while the co-owners were in graduate school at University of Missouri. Prior to having access to a kitchen of their own, Mendelson and Bass produced their ice cream in incubator kitchens. Located in already established restaurants and food service businesses, incubator kitchens are rented out, usually by the hour, to chefs and bakers who need restaurant-grade production space.
Read the full story on the St. Louis Business Journal website.
