Mad Maggie's -- On the Move!

Greetings, and welcome to a very special edition of our email newsletter from your friends at Mad Maggie's Ice Cream!

Most of you who have followed our progress in this business know that my original plan was to open an ice cream parlor in downtown Andover. Our location in North Reading has always been viewed as a temporary location until we could find a spot with better visibility -- it's very hard to turn a profit at a low-traffic location like this.

Well, I'm excited as can be to announce that we just got back from signing the lease on a location that's everything we could have hoped for! The site is 1025 Osgood Street -- the location of the old Treadwell's stand in North Andover. This is an exceptional location for us, as it's a newly constructed building, with indoor seating, plenty of walkup windows, a full basement for storage, and a great ice cream history.

I've been extremely busy this winter working to make this happen, and I'm ecstatic that all this work has finally come to fruition!

We have a lot of work to do to get open, but at this point we're hoping that we'll be ready sometime in mid-April. We'll open with our great ice cream, using the same recipes we used in North Reading, but we'll also have expanded menu items. The biggest of these is gelato -- the Italian style of ice cream that's both lower in fat and higher in flavor. This has long been a dream of mine, and I'm eager to get started making gelato (I'm in North Carolina taking a gelato course from the renown Luciano Ferrari on Tuesday and Wednesday this week!)

We have big shoes to fill in replacing Treadwell's, which has been a well known ice cream destination for decades. Hopefully we live up to people's expectations -- I'm confident that the quality of our ice cream will win people over, even those who are disappointed to see an icon replaced.

We're not positive what we'll do with the North Reading stand at this point. In the long term, I think it makes a great satellite location for us, and we love the town of North Reading and have made a lot of friends there. Realistically though, I'm not sure that I can both open the new store and run the North Reading location this spring. I haven't talked to our landlord there yet, so it's possible that we can work something out to open on a more limited basis, but we'll have to wait a few weeks to find that out.

I have a hundred things to do at this point, but wanted to share this great news with our loyal newsletter readers. Hopefully, we're not moving so far away that we lose any of our friends, and again, we sure hope to be back open in North Reading once we get our feet under us at the new shop.

I'll try to send out at least one update before we open at our new spot. Thank you all so much for your support over the years, and we sure hope to see a lot of familiar faces at our new home as spring arrives.