Popular ice cream shop Handel’s planning second location

Handel’s Homemade Ice Cream opened its first Midlands shop last month in Forest Acres, and the location immediately proved popular, with long lines of folks popping up to get the shop’s cool, creamy treats.

Now the company has already set sights on a second location.

Franchisees Kandi Bubonic and Cody Sheriff recently told The State the next Midlands Handel’s will be in the Harbison Court shopping center along bustling Harbison Boulevard. That shopping center is anchored by a Hobby Lobby store.

The Harbison Handel’s will be located at 252-M Harbison Blvd., right beside an Outback Steakhouse. The ice cream parlor will be going into a storefront that formerly was home to a Freshe

Poke restaurant.

Construction on the Harbison Handel’s was set to begin last week. Bubonic said she was expecting a 10-to-12-week build-out on the location, if all goes to plan, meaning that a late-summer or early-fall opening could be possible.

Handel’s started in 1945 in Youngstown, Ohio, where founder Alice Handel used fruit grown from the garden in her backyard to add to her own ice cream recipes. The company now has franchise locations in Alabama, Arizona, California, Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

The business partnership between Bubonic and Sheriff was forged several years ago in the bakery world. Bubonic owns several Nothing Bundt Cake locations, including in Forest Acres, on Harbison Boulevard in Columbia, and in Greenville. She also has owned a Nothing Bundt Cakes in the Arlington, Texas, area for a number of years, and Sheriff was the general manager for that shop. The pair was looking for an additional business venture, and Handel’s caught their eye.

Handel’s is known for having dozens of flavors, and their ice cream is made fresh in-house each day.

Harbison Boulevard has remained one of the Columbia area’s top retail districts. The Columbiana Centre mall is there, and the area features a plethora of restaurants, bars, big-box stores, clothing shops, theaters and more just west of Interstate 26. About 31,000 cars per day travel down Harbison Boulevard, according to state Department of Transportation statistics.