Takeaways

• Jupiter Moon is completely nut-free — no tree nuts, no peanuts — and David Boyer made that call partly because he has a tree nut allergy himself. The decision he didn't fully anticipate was how many families it would free up: people who couldn't walk into a Twins game, couldn't walk into most ice cream shops, now have somewhere they can go without fear.
• Jupiter Moon started in a rented kitchen in Sauk Rapids, selling hand-packed cups from an ice cream bicycle at art fairs. David chose the bicycle not because he needed a bike, but because it was cute as all get out and fit the "rolling bubble of joy" experience he was trying to create. Today the shop makes around 15,000 gallons a month in the summer.
• A second Jupiter Moon location is coming to St. Anthony Park in St. Paul — a small space that used to be a tearoom, with a kitchen already in place and a neighborhood that fits the community-first model David has always built around.

In the third and final installment of this conversation on The Ice Cream Social, host David Boyer and Liz Fiedler Mergen of Sunny Mary Meadow dig into the side of Jupiter Moon that most customers never see — and a few pieces of news that listeners might want to pay attention to.

The episode opens with a look at what's coming next in the Jupiter Moon scoop case: a raspberry with chocolate flakes, a potential return of the white chocolate beta from last year, a banana cream pie that would actually work beautifully in oat milk (oat milk already has a graham-like flavor going for it, which Liz may or may not react to on camera), and the ongoing development of the Rainbow Nerds Space Rox flavor from the last episode. There are also early conversations happening about a flower ice cream made with freeze-dried edible petals from Sunny Mary Meadow. Nothing is confirmed, but the rose flavoring is in the building.

From there, David explains what makes Jupiter Moon genuinely rare in the ice cream world: it is completely nut-free. No tree nuts, no peanut butter, no peanut ice cream. The decision started with David's own tree nut allergy — he wasn't going to make ice cream he couldn't eat — and a choice not to do peanuts either so customers wouldn't have to keep track of which category applied to them. What he didn't expect was the size of the community that decision would create. Liz shares a story about a physician friend whose college-age son has a tree nut allergy; Jupiter Moon is one of the only places the whole family can just go. People who couldn't walk into a Twins game without anxiety have a shop now.

The origin story of Jupiter Moon comes up for the first time: the name came from friends at NASA who worked on a probe that has been circling Jupiter since 2016, discovering somewhere around 100 moons. David's crew has been assured that one of those moons is made of ice cream. That settled it. From there, he rented a kitchen by the hour from a gluten-free bakery in Sauk Rapids, made ice cream in the evenings, hand-packed the cups, and sold them out of an ice cream bicycle at Summertime by George and local art fairs. He chose the bicycle purely because it was, in his words, cute as all get out — and because the form factor fit the "rolling bubble of joy" experience he was already trying to design. His background is in UX: user experience design and front-end development. The psychology of how people interact with spaces has always shaped how he thinks about the shop.

https://www.jupitermoonicecream.com/