Danielle Jowdy, the owner of Zsa’s Ice Cream in Mount Airy, announced that the shop will be closing its doors in December 2025, writes Alan Yu for Billy Penn at WHYY.
Jowdy began making ice cream as a hobby after getting laid off in 2009. Already in possession of a hand-cranked ice cream maker as a wedding gift, she then started learning how to work with ingredients in ice cream.
She kept making ice cream for several years, selling at farmer’s markets, local grocery stores, and an ice cream truck, before opening Zsa’s in 2018.
“I don’t have any formal food training. I don’t have any formal business training. And that’s really where our catchphrase — seriously from scratch — came from,” Jowdy said.
Over the years, Zsa’s has developed a devoted local following, finding its way on several lists of Philadelphia’s best ice cream shops.
Jowdy explained that she is closing the shop because the cost of running the business has gone up so much that expanding and scaling up would be the only way to keep it going.
Due to a fear that growing the business would take away from the attention she likes to give her business and staff, she has decided to close instead.
Read more about Zsa’s as it enters its final year in business in Billy Penn at WHYY.
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