Pretty Cool Ice Cream Triples Output With New Chicago Facility

Pretty Cool Ice Cream is abandoning its cramped Logan Square production setup and moving into a 5,000-square-foot Irving Park warehouse that the company’s founders say will triple their output and push the brand into homes across the country.

The new facility sits at 3929 N. Central Park Ave., inside a converted car wash. Founders Dana Cree and Michael Ciapciak spent the better part of a year wiring the place up with walk-in coolers, an automatic packaging machine, and storage that dwarfs what they’ve been working with. The timing isn’t accidental. Pretty Cool hits its eighth anniversary in August, and the company is making its first serious run at national shipping.

The problem was always space. Every pop Pretty Cool ever made came out of the retail shop at 2353 N. California Ave. in Logan Square, and that building’s electrical panel had hit its ceiling long before the orders did.

“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.”

The Irving Park location doesn’t just solve storage. Tripling production capacity means Pretty Cool can pursue wholesale accounts, take on bigger catering contracts, and stop rationing freezer space heading into Chicago’s summer rush. Cree singled out the large-scale dishwashing and baking station as her favorite piece of the new setup.

Since opening, the company has moved 1.5 million pops across more than 300 flavors. That’s not a small-batch curiosity anymore. The Logan Square store has been the site of wedding photo shoots, birthday parties, and a rotating lineup of artist-designed packaging that built Pretty Cool into something closer to a neighborhood institution than a simple ice cream shop. Demand outran the space.

The bigger play now is reaching Chicagoans who’ve left the city. Pretty Cool will ship bars nationwide through Lou Malnati’s Taste of Chicago platform, as Block Club Chicago reported, with the rollout slated for early summer 2026. Lou Malnati’s already runs a well-established frozen-food shipping operation, so it’s a practical match for a company that’s spent years fielding messages from former residents who moved away and want the product back.

Chicago has been exporting people to other cities for decades. Food nostalgia tends to follow them. The Chicago Food Policy Action Council has long tracked how local food businesses anchor neighborhood identity, and Pretty Cool fits that pattern precisely: a small-batch operation that earned fierce loyalty before the original space could no longer contain the demand.

Cree and Ciapciak both come out of fine dining, but they didn’t build Pretty Cool on a fine-dining model. The whole idea was to make something that belonged to everyone.

“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 accessibility has been Pretty Cool’s sharpest competitive edge. It’s not trying to be precious or exclusive. It sells at the Logan Square shop, at events, through wholesale partners, and now, soon enough, directly to the doorsteps of former Chicagoans in cities that don’t have anything like it.

For context on the business environment, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Chicago District Office tracks expansion patterns among local food producers, and few segments have grown more aggressively than artisan frozen goods with existing direct-to-consumer infrastructure.

The Irving Park warehouse gives Pretty Cool the room it’s needed for a while. Whether national shipping transforms the company or simply extends its reach into a nostalgic niche, the production constraints that capped growth at 04 years of retail volume are gone. Cree isn’t rationing freezer space anymore. The pops can move.