Earlier this month, the Tampa Bay Business Journal reported that Orlando-based Kelly’s Homemade Ice Cream has an ambitious plan to launch 200 locations by 2025 – most in collaboration with Foxtail Coffee – as well as another five standalone “scoop shops,” with a particular interest near the University of South Florida in Tampa.
“We’re pretty concentrated in this general Orlando area, and we’d like to spread our wings out more,” owner and founder Kelly Seidl told the Business Journal.
In addition to the five scoop shops the brand currently operates, it also has eight storefronts known as “counters,” however, only one of those is in the greater Tampa region, St. Petersburg.
Kelly’s Homemade Ice Cream was founded in 2013 as a small in-house – quite literally – operation, when Siedl and her husband Scott began making fresh ice cream at home. The following year they were bringing small ice cream carts to local events, and quickly garnering a devoted following. As such, in 2015 they turned their small ice cream cart into a full-fledged ice cream truck, only to open their first brick-and-mortar later that year, with a second shop coming in 2017, and a third in 2020.
Reminiscing on her days scooping ice cream while attending nursing school and the inspiration behind her blossoming business, Siedl writes on Kelly’s official website, “Have you ever noticed that most people are happy when you are handing them an ice cream? Well, I never forgot. And little did I know what a lasting impression that made on me.”
