Ice Cream and Dessert Franchises: Costs and Seasonality

Ice cream franchises look like one of the friendlier corners of food franchising. The product has near-universal appeal, the equipment list is shorter than a full kitchen, and the customer transaction takes ninety seconds. It’s the shop people imagine when they picture a business their whole family could be proud of, which is exactly why first-time buyers gravitate here. What the glossy franchise development page usually leaves out is the calendar. A scoop shop in most of the country makes the bulk of its year in about five months, then spends the other seven covering rent, equipment leases, and a smaller staff on a fraction of the revenue.

That doesn’t make ice cream and dessert franchising a bad idea. It makes it a business where the Item 7 investment number is only half the picture. The other half is whether you, or the franchisor’s site selection, can smooth out the winter enough that the summer profit actually survives to the following spring. This piece walks through what six major dessert brands actually cost to open, based on their own FDD filings, and then walks through the seasonality math in plain terms so you’re not surprised by your first January statement.

We don’t sell franchises and we have no referral arrangement with any brand named here. Every dollar figure below traces to a named source and a filing or publication date, and where sources disagreed with each other, we say so instead of picking the number that sounds cleaner.

What six dessert franchises actually cost

Here’s the Item 7 range for six brands that cover most of the category: scoop shops, soft serve, frozen yogurt, Italian ice, and mobile shaved ice.

Brand	Total investment	Franchise fee	Royalty + ad fee	Source
Cold Stone Creamery	$322,675-$627,775	$15,000-$27,000 (traditional); $10,000-$20,000 (non-traditional)	6% + 3%	Franchise Chatter, 2024 FDD
Rita’s Italian Ice	$315,233-$770,542	$10,000-$35,000	6.5% + 3%	Franchise Chatter, 2025 FDD
Baskin-Robbins	$307,440-$657,860	$25,000	5.9% + 5%	Franchise Chatter, 2024 FDD
Yogurtland	$298,700-$693,300	$35,000	6% + 2%	Sharpsheets, 2025-2026 FDD
Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt	$143,000-$471,000	Not separately isolated in source	6% + 2%	Sharpsheets, 2025 FDD
Kona Ice (mobile)	$102,365-$226,841	$15,000	Flat annual fee, $3,000-$5,000 by year	Own a Kona Ice, official numbers page
Dairy Queen (Grill & Chill)	$1,516,200-$2,543,050	$45,000	4% + 5%-6%	FranchiseIQ, 2025 FDD

A few things stand out in that table. First, the four classic scoop-shop and frozen yogurt brands, Cold Stone, Rita’s, Baskin-Robbins, and Yogurtland, land within about $100,000 of each other at both ends of their ranges. That’s not a coincidence. Storefront ice cream and frozen yogurt shops in similar strip-mall and end-cap real estate carry similar build-out costs regardless of brand, because the walk-in freezer, the dipping cabinets, and the ADA-compliant restroom cost roughly the same no matter whose logo is on the door.

Second, Menchie’s total investment range is noticeably wider and starts lower than its frozen yogurt peer Yogurtland. That’s worth asking the franchisor about directly if you’re comparing the two, since a wide range like $143,000 to $471,000 usually means the low end represents a small non-traditional footprint and the high end represents a full standalone store, without the FDD breaking those apart the way some brands do.

Third, Dairy Queen is in a different category entirely. Its Grill & Chill format is a full quick-service restaurant that happens to serve Blizzards, not a dessert-only shop, so its $1.5 million-plus investment isn’t a fair comparison to the scoop-shop brands above it. We include it here because “Dairy Queen” shows up on every dessert franchise search, and leaving it out without explanation would be more confusing than including it with the caveat attached.

The seasonality problem, stated plainly

This is the part most franchise marketing pages skip, and it’s the reason we’re covering it in its own section instead of a footnote.

Ice cream and frozen dessert sales are not evenly distributed across the year. Industry data compiled by BusinessDojo puts the three peak months, June, July, and August, at 25% to 35% of a scoop shop’s total annual revenue. That same data marks January and March as the weakest points in the calendar, driven by the post-holiday slowdown, cold weather, and fewer local events that would otherwise bring in foot traffic.

The swing inside that pattern is steep. BusinessDojo’s numbers show June and July sales exceeding a shop’s own annual average by 30% to 40%. To show what that seasonality does to cash flow, here is a hypothetical illustration only, not an actual reported result for any brand or location: if you picture a shop that happens to do $40,000 in a strong July, that same 30% to 40% swing implies something closer to $12,000 to $15,000 in a slow January. The round numbers are ours, chosen to make the seasonality visible; they are not a projection of what any franchise earns. Rent doesn’t drop by that much. Neither does insurance, a base staffing level, or the royalty and ad fee percentages that apply to whatever revenue does come in.

This is why some independent ice cream shops close entirely for a few winter months rather than staff through a season that barely covers overhead. As a franchisee, you may not have that option. Most franchise agreements specify minimum operating hours and seasons, since the franchisor’s brand standards usually assume a year-round presence, particularly in a strip mall or shopping center lease that a landlord expects to see occupied. Read your specific franchise agreement’s operating-hours clause before you assume you can scale down for winter the way an independent shop might.

The practical takeaway: when you’re running the numbers on any of the six brands above, don’t divide the total investment by an average monthly revenue figure and call it done. Model a real July and a real January separately, then check whether the gap between them still leaves you solvent across a full twelve months. If a franchisor’s Item 19 financial performance representation exists, it usually reports an annual average. Ask, in writing, whether they’ll also share a monthly or quarterly breakdown, since that’s the number that actually tells you how bad the trough gets.

Formats: scoop shop, soft serve, frozen yogurt, mobile

The six brands above break into a few real operating formats, and the format matters more than the brand name for predicting your actual cost and daily routine.

Scoop shops (Cold Stone, Baskin-Robbins) are the format most people picture: a walk-in freezer, a dipping cabinet, hand-scooped product, and a seating area. These carry the highest equipment and buildout costs in the group because commercial ice cream freezing and holding equipment isn’t cheap, and a proper walk-in adds tens of thousands of dollars on its own.

Italian ice and water ice (Rita’s) uses a batch-freezer process rather than a walk-in dipping cabinet for its core product, which is part of why Rita’s franchise fee has a lower floor ($10,000) than the scoop-shop brands, even though its total investment range overlaps them closely once real estate and equipment are added back in.

Frozen yogurt (Menchie’s, Yogurtland) typically runs a self-serve model: customers pull their own yogurt from wall-mounted machines and pay by weight at a scale. That shifts labor cost down (fewer people scooping) but shifts equipment cost toward the yogurt machines themselves, which need regular maintenance contracts that aren’t always obvious in a franchisor’s headline investment number.

Mobile and drive-thru (Kona Ice, and to an extent Dairy Queen’s newer smaller formats) sidesteps the real estate cost entirely. Kona Ice’s model is built around a single vehicle, the “Kona Entertainment Vehicle,” that the franchisee drives to events, neighborhoods, and scheduled stops rather than waiting for walk-in traffic at a fixed address. That’s the biggest single reason its total investment sits at roughly a third of the fixed-location brands. It also means the seasonality problem shows up differently: a mobile unit can chase warm-weather events across a wider territory or even a different region, where a fixed scoop shop is stuck with whatever weather shows up at its one address.

If you’re weighing a mobile concept generally, not just in desserts, mobile food franchise covers the cost drivers that are specific to trucks and carts rather than storefronts. And if the appeal of a dessert franchise is really about a lower entry price rather than the product category itself, food franchises under $100K lays out which concepts, across all of food franchising, actually clear that bar once you read the full Item 7 range rather than the lowest number on a marketing page.

Reading the numbers before you commit

A few habits will save you from the most common mistakes in this category specifically.

Ask for the FDD’s Item 7 table broken out by format, not just a single blended range. Cold Stone and Rita’s both disclose separate fee structures for traditional versus non-traditional locations; if a franchisor won’t or can’t tell you which end of their range applies to the specific site they’re proposing for you, that’s a real gap in the pitch, not a formality.

Ask how the royalty is calculated during a slow month, not just what the percentage is. A 6% royalty on a strong July is a very different dollar amount than a 6% royalty on a weak February, and if the franchise agreement has any minimum royalty floor regardless of sales, that number needs to survive your worst month, not your best one. Kona Ice’s flat annual royalty structure is worth studying for this exact reason: a fixed dollar amount, paid the same in December as in July, behaves completely differently from a percentage-of-sales fee once you model a real season.

And ask existing franchisees, ideally more than one, what their location actually does in January and February versus June and July. That’s the single number most franchise development conversations don’t volunteer, and it’s the number the whole seasonality section above is telling you to go get. For the general mechanics of reading an Item 7 table and the rest of the disclosure document, how to read an FDD walks through all 23 items, and our full sourcing standard, including how we handle disagreements between sources, is at /editorial-methodology/.

None of this makes ice cream and dessert franchising a worse bet than any other food category. It makes it a category where the calendar is doing as much work as the balance sheet, and where the franchisors who are upfront about that tend to be the ones worth a longer conversation.