The team
Two sisters who grew up two streets up the hill and opened in 2014 in the shop their grandmother ran for forty years, with one machine and eight flavours. Five more on the counter in summer, two in winter, and a cart. The certificates are below because a food business should be asked for them.
Co-owner. The ice cream, the thirty-two, the back room, the school
A pastry chef in London and Bologna for eight years, including two at a gelateria she will tell you about at length, Ffion came home to Mumbles in 2014 with a batch freezer bought second-hand from a hotel in Tenby. She makes every flavour, starts at seven, runs the Saturday school and decides the rotation, and is the reason there is an Earl Grey ice cream that nobody but her orders.
Co-owner. The parlour, the cart, the bookings, the queue
Twelve years in event management in Cardiff before her sister talked her into ice cream, Mali runs the parlour, the staff, the tubs and the cart, which she found in a barn in Liguria and rode badly round a car park in Genoa before shipping it home. She does every cart booking herself, built the flavours page so the phone would stop ringing to ask what was in, and manages the summer queue with a clipboard and a smile.
The rest of us, and the paperwork
Five in summer, mostly students from Swansea University and the sixth form at Bishop Gore, each one trained on the scoop weight, the allergens and the tastes-on-a-spoon rule before their first shift. Two in winter, both of them since 2016.
Ffion and Osian, who came for a summer in 2020 and stayed, making the bases in the afternoon and churning from seven. Two batch freezers, a pasteuriser and a blast freezer; the glass wall was Ffion's idea.
A food hygiene rating of five on the door; an allergen matrix for all thirty-two flavours on the counter and on request; a HACCP plan for the pasteuriser; £5 million public liability that covers the cart; the cart's own street trading consent for events.
The summer pays for the winter; the tubs paid for the second machine; the cart paid for the blast freezer; and the Gower dairy is paid on the tenth of the month, every month, because a small farm should not wait.
The building
Nain sold wool, buttons and knitting patterns from 626 Mumbles Road from 1974 until her knees went in 2013, and left the shop to the two of them with the instruction that it should "sell something people are pleased to buy". The shelves along the left wall are hers, painted pink; the bay window is where she sat; the back room was her stockroom and is now where the ice cream is made. "If people cannot see it being made, they will not believe it was."
Finding the pink buildingThe flavours page shows today's sixteen from the thirty-two with the vegan, gluten-free and nut-free ones marked. Order a tub to collect without queuing, book the striped cart for a wedding, or a place at the Saturday school, on one form.