As the weather gets warmer, nothing sounds better than the sweet, cold taste of an ice cream sandwich. As co-founder and operations director of Sugarwitch Ice Cream Sandwiches, Sophie Mendelson ’15 is there to sate that summertime craving. Her St. Louis shop offers a range of frozen delicacies, all named after famous witches of literature. Whether you’re in the mood for an Ursula (vanilla ice cream, rainbow sprinkles, and a salty brownie) or a Zeniba (sencha tea ice cream with a nori rice crispy treat), Sugarwitch has something to offer. Sophie sat down with Communications Manager Sadie Bograd ’25 to share the story behind the scoops.
This conversation is part of a Voices series about the exciting work YSFP alumni are doing in the worlds of food and agriculture. The transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
Sophie (right) told Voices: “If kid me could see that I get to be making ice cream and recommending my favorite fantasy books to people, I would just be so overjoyed.”
Tell me about Sugarwitch! How did it get started?
My wife Martha started making ice cream sandwiches and bringing them into work as a distraction in the wake of the 2016 election, and they were a hit. So I started making them and feeding them to my classmates, and they were also a hit there. We had daydreamed casually about trying to make it a business. When we found ourselves in Columbia, Missouri, as grad students, we were like, “Okay, let's give it a go.” We naively thought that we'd have a lot of free time in the summer as grad students, which wasn't true, but we took about a year researching all the regulations and getting set up, and then we started production in 2019. We just did it over the summer for the first couple of summers, selling at the farmers market. But it became something we didn't want to let go of, even when it wasn't necessarily practical. When Martha got a full time job in St. Louis at the end of 2019, we decided not to stop. That's when we really started looking for a more permanent space. We ended up in what is St. Louis's longest continually-operating bakery. Since then, we've been growing our team and just really enjoying St. Louis as our home.
Why ice cream? And why ice cream sandwiches?
Both Martha and I made a lot of ice cream growing up. My mom says that I used to talk about starting an ice cream shop when I was little. So if we were going to do something, it was going to be ice cream. The sandwiches came about because it was the best way that Martha could think of to make the ice cream more shareable. Bringing a tub of ice cream into an office is one thing: you need a scoop and bowls and spoons, and people have to feel like they can go into the freezer and scoop themselves some ice cream from the communal bucket. But with ice cream sandwiches, you have these little packets that everybody can grab. And then we were intrigued by the constraints of the ice cream sandwich and the creativity that it demanded, because of the structural considerations that aren't so much of a thing when you're just making a pint of ice cream.
What do you mean by structural limitations?
We make a very high density ice cream. There's less air in our ice cream than you would often find even in a super-premium ice cream, because we need it to stand up as a structural element. We pour our ice cream into a sheet pan with a cookie on the bottom, put another giant cookie on top, and then we slice it all into squares. So it has to be able to withstand that process and be firm enough and strong enough to be sliced and moved around.
The other thing is with the cookies themselves: how they slice, how they freeze. Is it something that you can bite into, or is it something that’s going to be a rock? We have three main categories of cookies that we riff on. One is a very fudgy thin brownie cookie. That fudginess — the moisture there, and the high butterfat — makes them freeze in a nicely biteable way. We do a lot of nut-based shortbreads because they have a wonderful frozen texture. And then we do a fair amount with Rice Krispie treats that we press really thin, that being an easy gluten free option.
Where does your flavor inspiration come from?
A lot of it comes from nostalgia. We have a very collaborative flavor development process with our team, with nostalgic impulses drawing from a lot of different food backgrounds. Additionally, we rely on seasonally available produce in this area. We work with the farmers market and a farm delivery program out of Illinois. My master's degree was with the Agroforestry Center at the University of Missouri, so we do a fair amount with agroforestry crops that do well in Missouri and Illinois, like pawpaws and hazelnuts and pecans. And we of course draw flavor inspiration from what we see happening around us. St. Louis has a really wonderful food scene, so we do a lot of collaborations with other businesses and restaurants. It's fun to look at somebody's menu and think about what would complement what they're already doing.
I also noticed your website highlights sustainability and ethical labor practices. You talked about sourcing local and seasonal ingredients, but could you elaborate on the ethical labor practices? How do you think about using business as a mechanism for food systems change and sustainability?
Both Martha and I, as grad students and as undergrads, were academically looking at food systems. We both were drawn to the labor side of things and were seeing this real lack of sustainability within labor practices all along the food chain. That is obviously a massive and very complicated problem, but in starting Sugarwitch, our core question really was, “Can we make a company where sustaining livelihoods is the driving force of all of the choices that we're making?” Not to say that we have an answer to that question, but that’s the touchstone of any strategic choices that we make about growth, about hiring, about how we set up the schedule and what kinds of tasks we ask people to do and how much creativity people get. We try to pay a living wage, we offer PTO and sick time, we just started salarying people, and we are working on developing healthcare benefits — we just don't have enough full-time employees yet to qualify. Those are some of those structural things that we are thinking about. A lot of what we've done, I don't think anybody would advise us to make these choices from a strict business perspective, because they go against the conventional logic of how you prioritize and where you want your margins to be. But what is the point of the company if we can't make it create these livelihoods for folks? The more that we prioritize the team and everybody's wellbeing, the stronger the company is.
We are also in the process of converting to a worker-owned cooperative structure. We’re working with WashU’s legal entrepreneurship clinic, so this awesome group of law students is helping us draft an operating agreement and bylaws. It's slow going because there aren't a ton of resources in Missouri, specifically on the financial side of things. We have a lot of questions about the tax implications for staff who then become members of the coop. Finding a CPA who can actually explain that has been really difficult. That, to me, is another critical part: not only saying, “You have wonderful ideas, and I want your help with flavor development and your vision for the cafe,” but also, “You have actual ownership in this entity, and because we are all contributing to its ability to thrive, we will ideally all benefit from that as well.”
What else have been some of the biggest challenges of running a business?
Having zero business background has been quite challenging. We're self-teaching and we're figuring everything out from scratch. But we've also had tremendous mentorship from other businesses and people we can ask questions of, so it is possible to do it. It’s helpful to know the conventions before you break them. I am somebody who really likes to plan, and diving into this unknown territory has really challenged me to loosen my grip on the idea that I will know ahead of time exactly where I'm heading. I think that goes hand in hand with the desire for this to be a collaborative effort. Having a team of people working on it, and not just being one lone individual trying to make a go of things, is absolutely critical.
I noticed that your menu is all witch-themed. Where did that idea come from?
It came from the sandwich pun. We’re both really big readers, and I have always loved fantasy and science fiction. And it was a way to keep it fun and lighthearted. It's been an awesome way to connect with both kids and adults. The partner of one of our staff members works for a bookstore in town, so we do a lot of collaborative events. I think we're going to be able to stock some of the books that we named the ice cream sandwiches after. If kid me could see that I get to be making ice cream and recommending my favorite fantasy books to people, I would just be so overjoyed.
Given what you're saying about being able to appeal to children, who is your target audience?
We've done our best to not settle too hard into a specific target audience. But the other side of that is that we are very vocal about our politics. We have developed a following that is very on board with the fact that we talk on our social media about funding abortion and trans kids’ rights. So in that sense, our target audience are people who are down for that type of messaging, and we have really cultivated a wonderful and very queer customer base.
In terms of the types of flavors we do, we kind of span the range from very classic Americana flavors, like vanilla sprinkle brownie, to flavors that are derived from the cultural backgrounds of our staff, as well as some of the more out-there ideas that we have, more culinary flavors that we're seeing and wanting to play with. We have people who come in and are like, “I want the Ursula every time, I want the vanilla sprinkle brownie, and I never need to try anything else,” and that is great. And then we have folks who are like, “Give me everything with tea in it. Give me all of your herbal flavors.” We have fun spanning that range.
Could you tell me about your involvement with the YSFP?
When I was a student, I started out as a pizza intern my freshman year. I did that for two years and had a phenomenal time learning to work the pizza oven. But I was also super interested in the production side of things, and I transitioned over to the farm manager team for my junior and senior year. The summer following graduation, I helped run the internship program.
The Farm really felt like it was my home at Yale. There were a lot of things that I was figuring out about myself in college. I had a lot of anxiety, though I wouldn't realize until later that I could put that name to it. But the YSFP was a place where I felt at ease and got to do tangible things. I had spent the year before college working on farms and working in kitchens, and it was kind of an odd transition back into the classroom. To have that continued opportunity through the YSFP really eased the transition and helped me maintain some of the confidence that I had developed in that year, and gave me a space where some of the pressures and expectations of the rest of the university got to fall away a little bit.