The Ice Cream / Dessert Shop

How these numbers were built: owner earnings, sale prices, and resale multiples come from BizBuySell’s 2021-2025 ice cream and frozen yogurt shop benchmarks, which also set the SDE margin band (counted over a whole year, slow months included); category context and seasonality from IDFA reporting and the Census Bureau (NAICS 722515, which also covers coffee and juice bars); survival rates from BLS Business Employment Dynamics; SBA loan outcomes from PeerSense’s analysis of SBA loan records for snack and nonalcoholic beverage bars; and the cost to open from the opening kit, priced item by item from equipment dealer pages (dipping cabinets, soft serve machines, freezers), an ice cream equipment supplier’s cost guide, and the Marble Slab Creamery Item 7 table. Customers per day is an average across the whole year (summer days run well above it, winter days below), so the defaults describe an average month and land on the median shop’s yearly sales. Cost of goods, labor, and rent shares remain planning estimates from typical counter-service food benchmarks. Where credible sources disagree, we show the conservative range. These are starting assumptions; the moment you enter a real location’s rent, season length, and ticket, your numbers should replace ours. Figures are current as of 2025-2026.

The SDE margin band and median tier come from BizBuySell’s 2021-2025 ice cream and frozen yogurt shop sales (median owner earnings 21.4% of revenue, 19.1% to 24.2% by year), on the owner cash flow basis the app shows; it replaces an earlier unsourced net margin band. Seasonality and category context are anchored to IDFA industry reporting and the Census Bureau NAICS 722515 classification. No single published source reports cost ratios for independent ice cream shops, so the cost-of-goods, labor, rent, and operational-metric ranges are planning estimates from typical counter-service food benchmarks.