Tampa's Chill Bros. Scoop Shop is a family venture
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Jul 22, 2022

Chill Bros. Scoop Shop has created a business venture out of what began as a family joke.

Growing up in Tampa, Chill Bros. founder Maximilian Chillura said his family would always joke about the lack of neighborhood ice cream spots here — a “huge, huge hole in the market,” as he tells it.

“We kind of romanticized it and joked around about it a bit,” he said.

But after graduating from the University of Florida in 2017 and working in real estate for about a year, Chillura seriously considered the family’s long-running inside joke as a career path: Craft coffee and beer movements were underway in Tampa. Why not ice cream, too?

“There’s not a lot of seasoned ice cream makers running around town,” Chillura said. “I’m personally a believer that you’re either all in, or it’s not going to be something special.”

So he went all in — all the way to Bologna, Italy, for a course in ice cream making in 2018. He returned to Tampa with a vision of producing all-natural ice cream with a base of cream, egg yolks and cane sugar. In 2019, the first scoop shop opened in Ybor City; in early July, the fourth opened in Water Street Tampa.

“People bulk up their ice creams with gums and stabilizers and emulsifying agents to make it creamier,” he said, “but ours is cleaner and, in my opinion, better textured, richer and in some ways more of an indulgence.”

All of the shops — there’s also a scoop shop and commissary kitchen in the Epicurean Hotel on South Howard Avenue and one on Bay to Bay Boulevard — have been family funded. As Chill Bros. grows, that will likely change, but Chillura said he’s not gearing up for an aggressive expansion. He’s looking at St. Petersburg, Carrollwood and the University of South Florida area.

Chillura said the ideal Chill Bros. location is 900 to 1,100 square feet.

“[Ice cream] is an impulse buy, so proximity to neighborhoods is key,” he said.