Handel’s Homemade Ice Cream has signed a lease for a new location at 2545 Fair Oaks Blvd, inside Lowerman’s Plaza, according to owner Melissa Carlile, who co-owns the business with her husband, Blake Carlile, and confirmed the news to What Now Sacramento. Melissa said construction hasn’t started yet since the lease was just finalized, putting the opening at roughly next year.
This will mark Handel’s seventh location across the Sacramento area. Carlile said the idea for bringing the brand to the region came from missing homemade ice cream after she and her husband moved to Sacramento about 15 years ago. Every Handel’s location makes its ice cream fresh daily on-site, with trained ice cream makers weighing out ingredients by hand following a specific in-house recipe rather than shipping product in from elsewhere.
Neither Carlile nor her husband came from a restaurant background before opening their first shop. She works as an economics teacher, and her husband is a firefighter. They simply took a risk on their shared love of ice cream, and it paid off. The couple has built a large catering program alongside their retail shops, putting them at the center of countless weddings, first birthdays, first dates, anniversaries and even funerals over the years.
“You have a bad day, you go get ice cream for someone, and all of a sudden you have a good day,” Carlile told What Now.
