♪ ♪ MELANIE KABIA: New Orleans-style snowballs in Baltimore was born through Ice Queens.

♪ ♪ The machine that we use was developed in 1941 in New Orleans and it produces a very fine shaved ice, kind of like Colorado snow.

We've got a great blend of classic Baltimore flavors such as egg custard which is so many people's favorite, we cannot keep enough egg custard in stock.

And in New Orleans it's very popular to put condensed cream on your snowball, so we do that here, and that's how we got a New Orleans style twist on a Baltimore classic.

The Ice Queen is my daughter Dasia, who after a few years of working at a snowball stand, herself, in her youth, and a lot of sweet memories that she had with her grandmother when she was young, she thought, "I can do this, and I really want to create a space with my business that's inclusive, and diverse, and happy," and that's really where the original idea for Ice Queens came about.

The business opened a year ago in the middle of the pandemic, and then the world shut down.

So, we kind of pivoted very quickly and thought, "Well we have to do something, we can't just sit here."

We decided to open up a kind of shop-stand feel.

We turned a window into an ordering window, a pickup window, and we conducted the entire business outside, and so it was great, we were able to give people in a time of a lot of stress a little simple sweet treat that also didn't cost a lot of money.

♪ ♪ It was really great right away to have regular customers, right from day one, that are still coming to us today, that live in this Locust Point Community.

The sad part which turned into a good part you know for us also is that there were people that did not want to see a Black-owned business open up in this neighborhood.

But what it did was it drove people to support us even more, and people came out in droves to support Ice Queens, to support my daughter, to support any minority-owned business that they could and to say, "No more"!

We are looking into expanding, this summer, we'll have an Ice Queens bus that's being worked on right now, and that will help us to host smaller parties and events, as well as we're hoping to expand in terms of opening up another one or two Ice Queens, and later on...we may have some traditional kind of snowball stands.

We want to do more than just sell snowballs, we already are big about giving back to the community.

My daughter is full of ideas, she is a big dreamer, so I'm sure there'll be lots to look forward to from Ice Queens in the future, including what we'll continue to do for our community and the youth in our community that's really important to us.

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