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Leona’s was inspired by our spunky dog, Leona, who came into our hearts in 2012 at the spry age of 10. Despite her rough past, she was quite the classy older lady. While we were creating our company, she was a constant source of inspiration (and a darn good taste tester). Every day she brought us joy and we hope that our ice cream brings you a little bit of the happiness Leona brought to us.

After working in public relations for years, Katie decided to make a change from promoting food brands to creating food. When she and Christa received an ice cream maker as a wedding gift, the whole idea of Leona’s was set in motion. Excited by the gift, Katie was also a little sad. She’s lactose intolerant and hadn’t been able to eat ice cream for a long time. Rather than dwell, she went to work. After a solid two years of testing flavors and recipes, a stint at culinary school and the famous Ice Cream Short Course at Penn State, Leona’s Ice Cream came to market as a 100% real dairy ice cream treat that was also 100% lactose free. The couple started in the back of a coffee shop in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh and now distribute to many locations around the Pittsburgh metro area.

Yes! Our scoop shop is located at 5119 Penn Ave. in the Garfield Neighborhood of Pittsburgh's east end. We have sandwiches, scoops, treats and more! In additon to our own location we work with many small businesses, breweries and grocery stores to stock their freezers.

Sorry, we don’t have any gluten free cookies, but we can recommend a great gluten free bakery to pair with your pint of Leona’s.

We make Gluten Friendly Krispwiches, an ice cream sandwich made with rice krispy treats instead of cookies. They are Gluten Friendly because we only have one kitchen and while we try our best to eliminate cross contanmination, flour is airborn and we can't gurentee they are fully gluten free. However the ingredients are!

First, don’t panic. Ice cream likes to be stored really cold, colder than the freezing point of water. Ice cream should be stored below 0°F. That’s really cold! You might need to turn down the temperature of your freezer if you’re finding soft ice cream in there. You might also want to double check that you’re closing your freezer door all the way (it happens). Also, we know that you want your ice cream easily accessible, but you should actually store it in the coldest part of your freezer, towards the back and nestled in with other frozen things, but definitely not on the door. Please know that everyone’s freezer is different and if you put something in the freezer that is not yet frozen and it’s next to your ice cream, the item will probably melt your ice cream in the process of freezing itself. SCIENCE!

Our ice cream is super premium. It's sourced from a local dairy. It's 16% butter fat and has a low overrun, so there isn't much air whipped into it. So you get more ice cream per spoonful than other ice creams. Beyond interesting flavors and combinations, our ice cream is 100% real dairy and 100% lactose-free, so every belly can enjoy. With the help of a natural enzyme, we break down the lactose that more than 60% of the US population has trouble digesting. This process doesn’t change the taste, texture or quality of the ice cream. So it’s just as creamy and delicious as you’d expect super premium ice cream to taste.

So many. We are curious bakers and flavor fanatics. Everyone who works at Leona’s brings their unique experiences with flavor to the table and then we play. All told, we have made more than 120 different flavors of sandwiches and pints. Here is a list of the ones that made it through testing. We don't make all of them at once though! Think strawberry in early spring, hot chocolate in the winter and berries in high summer. We offer about 10-15 different flavors at once and they showcase the best of the season. Our retail locations receive an assortment of the sandwiches we make at any given moment, so go in and check them out, you might just find your new favorite!

We would love to! Check out our event form linked from the main menu bar.  Please note that we require a minimum of two weeks lead time for all events.

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We do! You can find a rotating selection of Non Dairy Plant-Based scoops at our shop. We always have two DF flavors available. You can find them only at our scoop shop in Pittsburgh.