hello, my beautiful people.

“Hello, My Beautiful People,” was how George Jones, longtime Blue Marble employee, would greet us daily as he entered the office. You remember George: he was one of our wholesale employees who jumped in (alongside Connor, Lora, Jennie, David, Hannah & Chelsea) to keep the coffee and ice cream flowing during the pandemic. We channel George when we say,

Hello, My Beautiful People.

With tremendous gratitude and a bittersweet ache in our hearts, we announce that our last day open at 186 Underhill Avenue will be Sunday, December 24th, 2023. After sixteen wonderful years in the balance between magical kismet and immeasurable hard work, Blue Marble will close its last remaining brick-and-mortar. We will continue to offer our ice cream on shelves at your favorite retailers and on menus at very special restaurants – so don’t worry, you’ll still have Blue Marble in your lives! 

We are incredibly proud that throughout our journey, we have not diverged from our mission To Make the World A Sweeter Place, and we cannot wait to continue on our path with equal vigor. Our commitment to the innovative vision of source-conscious, Earth-friendly, community-supportive ice cream is our proudest accomplishment thus far. We have employed 550+ young people, served tens of millions of scoops, contributed millions to Fair Trade and organic small businesses across the globe, built a shop in Africa and one in Haiti, raised over $25,000 for Harlem-based Brotherhood Sister Sol, pioneered what many now take for granted as New York’s artisan ice cream scene, and survived sixteen years during arguably the hardest modern era in the toughest market in the world.

“Underhill,” our internal shorthand for this location, has been our bedrock. First opening in May, 2008, seven months after the launch of our first location at 420 Atlantic Ave., Underhill was “the little engine that could.” Some may recall that we shared our first six years with a separately owned play space in the back of the shop. With a budget of $15,000, we opened our tiny quadrant, using materials from the set of a theater production Jennie was in. With so little cash, we snagged high interest equipment leases and paid our faithful contractors when summer came. Friends and customers from Atlantic Avenue helped us paint. Alexis and Jennie often worked long hours behind the counter, especially the first few winters when we couldn’t afford staff. By our first anniversary, we had won Time Out New York’s “Best New Ice Cream” (beating out both Momofuku Milk Bar and Van Leeuwen), become the official ice cream of the newly opened Brooklyn Flea (then Smorgasburg), a mainstay on Governor’s Island, and launched our non-profit, Blue Marble Dreams, to open a locally-owned ice cream shop in Rwanda.

Soon, we started our wholesale business, delivering tubs to restaurants and pints to retailers in the trunk of Alexis’s mini-cooper before we graduated to a Transit Connect and eventually a large box truck. We set up an office on Dean Street for a year before the wholesale business ballooned and we realized we needed more space. We were the first business in the Industry City Food Hall in Sunset Park, anchoring an ecosystem that would draw fellow small food businesses: Colson Patisserie, One Girl Cookie, and many more. We continued to grow, eventually with pints in 12+ states, repeat private event clients such as Tiffany & Co, Etsy, Saturday Night Live, and Google, and wholesale partners including The Barclays Center, The US Open, jetBlue, Bareburger, Starbucks Roastery, Facebook/Meta, Harlem Shake, Joe’s Pub, Fornino – the list goes on… All, without overleveraging ourselves, sticking with a commitment to sustainable growth – even though this meant remaining “small” while many around us went “big.” We paid our staff on time, we paid our rents on time, we paid our vendors. We recognized that relationships behind the scenes, more important than those in front of the cameras, are what make us who, and what, we are.  

As a woman-owned business, we juggled the tenuous work/life balance, with Jennie taking her infant Jasper to all manner of location launches and corporate meetings before she finally accepted that childcare would be required. Alexis transitioned out of operations in 2015 to Executive Direct Blue Marble Dreams full-time, developing another locally-owned location in Haiti with non-profit partner Haiti 155 and generous sponsorships from jetBlue, NRG, Clinton Global Initiative, and more.

All the while, cones and coffees in hand, our devoted Underhill customers cheered us on. Despite the growing saturation of local competition, in 2014, we took over the entire space, and in 2017, we renovated, looking forward to another 10-12 years on this very special block. 2019 was our strongest year ever, for scoop shops, private events, and wholesale, and there was every reason to be optimistic about the years to come.

The pandemic changed so much, for so many. Determined to keep the momentum in the business moving forward, Jennie and her husband David planted themselves here during the 2020 Spring/Summer to ensure the shop wouldn’t miss a beat and that we’d have a place for our wholesale staff to continue to work. We set up a small desk for Jasper, then ten years old, in the back of the shop for remote school, and he helped receive deliveries. Thanks to you, we flourished. We made it through 2020, and 2021 was a great year. 

In 2022, inflation and increased labor costs hit every part of our business, impacting operations. Simultaneous to these challenges, we experienced another increase in competition in our delicate little neighborhood, naturally cutting into sales. Raising prices during a time when our customers were equally strained was tough, but necessary. 

In 2023, we reflect on a new reality. We see many colleagues, from retailers to producers, in dire positions. Supermarkets have gone bankrupt, re-launched, and closed again. Ice cream brands across the country have gone belly-up or been swallowed at unfavorable terms by bigger beasts – some right here in New York. While we have made the decision to transition out of our brick-and-mortars, we remain strong. Reaffirming the mission that first inspired us, we have taken on the pivots required of us, continuing to bring you the east coast’s premier organic ice creams with our B-Corp certified company.

It has been our honor to serve you all these years. We could have achieved nothing without you. Please visit our website at www.bluemarbleicecream.com to read this as a blog post and share your comments. We would cherish your own stories, any moments you’d care to share about how Blue Marble has impacted your life, and, hopefully, made it sweeter.

Please continue to follow us on Instagram @bluemarblebk, choose us at your local retailers, and request us at your favorite restaurants. With so much love and the same adventurous spirit with which we started, we say: “I think I can… I think I can… I THINK I can!” 

Thank you!!!
Jennie & Alexis & The Blue Marble Team