Meet the Duo Behind Milk Jawn’s Expanding Ice Cream Empire

Milk Jawn owners Amy Wilson and Ryan Miller in front of their new shop in Northern Liberties. / Photograph by Mike Prince

Behind the Line is Foobooz’s interview series with the people who make up Philly’s dynamic bar and restaurant scene. For the complete archives, go here.

If you go to Milk Jawn’s East Passyunk scoop shop on a hot summer night, chances are there’ll be a line out the door. You’ll find families, groups of friends, and couples (including the occasional first date that’s going well enough for dessert) ordering scoops piled high on a house-made waffle cone. With inventive flavors like lemon curd with blueberry-basil swirl and Earl Grey with honeycomb, and crowd-pleasers like chocolate peanut butter and malted-milk toffee crunch, the 2021 Best of Philly winner is always worth the wait.

Milk Jawn’s focus has been on original flavors made with fresh, seasonal ingredients since its inception in 2020, when Amy Wilson and Ryan Miller teamed up to turn the ice cream Wilson had been whipping up in her home kitchen into a business. Miller brought his 20 years of culinary experience working in Philly restaurants to the table, and together he and Wilson developed the flavors customers have come to know and love. They started out delivering ice cream to people’s homes and selling at farmers markets — Milk Jawn continues to do both today — before opening their Passyunk scoop shop in August 2022 with a production facility around the corner.

As the shop approaches its two-year anniversary, Milk Jawn is on the cusp of another milestone: its second brick-and-mortar location in Northern Liberties at 942 North Second Street, the former home of Just Cravings. Wilson and Miller are opening their new Milk Jawn location this Friday, July 26th at 6 p.m. To celebrate, they’ll be offering free ice cream to the first 100 customers.

Here, they share the secret to their success, their go-to flavors, and what Milk Jawn’s future could look like.

How did Milk Jawn come to be?

Amy: I just started making ice cream as a hobby in my home kitchen. I don’t have a culinary background beyond having a huge sweet tooth, but I’ve been baking and making candy since I was pretty small because I just love it.

I stayed home with my kids to raise them while my husband worked, and then I did a bunch of smaller jobs here and there, like working as a freelance writer — and then I felt like I needed a career. Milk Jawn just sort of naturally grew from that. Since I don’t have any culinary experience, I pulled in Ryan, and we were able to put our heads together. It feels like a really great partnership.

Ryan: Amy and I met through her husband, and we’ve been friends for over 20 years. One day, Amy’s husband said, “Hey man, you’ve got to try Amy’s ice cream. She makes the best ice cream.” I tried it, and it was amazing, so we decided to start a business together.

I’ve been a chef my whole career. Because I had another job, I would work on recipes with Amy in her house, and then I’d have to run off and go to my paying job. Then, COVID happened and I lost my job. Everything shut down, so Amy and I were able to really ramp things up and work on recipes.

Amy: A lot of people think that we started Milk Jawn because of COVID, but we actually started planning the business in 2019. We used the time during the pandemic to work on our recipes and deliver ice cream to people in their houses.

When we started, we had no expectations. We just wanted to test things out and see what was going to happen and if this whole ice cream adventure was going to work. But once we started, it became really apparent that we needed a storefront because it’s so much work to run around town and sell ice cream here and there. Having a permanent place pretty quickly became the goal.

Pints of Milk Jawn ice cream. / Photograph by Mike Prince

What made you choose Northern Liberties for your second location?

Ryan: We just wanted to offer good ice cream on the other side of the city, and there aren’t many ice cream shops over in Northern Liberties.

Amy: We also wanted a space that’s similar to the Passyunk location in a very walkable neighborhood full of families, and where there wasn’t enough ice cream to fill that need. It worked out perfectly that we came upon that space in Northern Liberties just as Just Cravings was closing.

From the beginning, we’ve heard from people telling us, “Come to my neighborhood! Come to my neighborhood!” We have a lot of customers who travel from Northern Liberties to Passyunk for Milk Jawn, so people have been very excited. It’s just a way for more people to get their hands on our ice cream.

What’s been your biggest takeaway from running the business?

Amy: I learned early on to start building a network of people. We were lucky because there were all these pop-ups that started happening in the pandemic and so many people doing these grassroots culinary experiences, so we just talked to each other and our networks grew. And then I figured out how to find the people you need to talk to who can give you information.

Ryan: A lot of the business owners in the area are very open to helping somebody else get what they need.

Amy: Yeah, this city is awesome. I don’t know how it is in other cities, but when we first started, people reached out to us, and they were like, “How can we help? What do you need? Do you want to trade food?” And then the business improvement districts [organizations in and around Philly that endeavor to support local businesses and communities] are super helpful, too. It’s just been really amazing.

What does Milk Jawn’s future look like? Do you see more locations in Philly or beyond?

Amy: We’re taking things one shop at a time and seeing where we want to go from there. I think, eventually, we want to add catering too, because we get a lot of inquiries for weddings and parties. I think it would be really fun. Maybe the next step would be adding a truck or something like that.

Photograph by Mike Prince

What would you say is the secret to Milk Jawn’s success?

Amy: We’re kind of fanatics about flavor. We workshop flavors for a long time before we introduce them because we want to put out the best product we can.

Ryan: We don’t want to just throw things at our ice cream. We try stuff, and if it doesn’t work, we won’t do it. The main objective is not to have too many ingredients in our flavors that would make them confusing. Also, we wanted to create flavors that would make people want to sit down and eat a whole pint. There’s some crazy ice cream out there, and it’s cool to taste, but, you know, you’re going to have one spoon and say, “Oh, that was wild.” You’re not going to eat a whole pint of macaroni-cheese ice cream.

Speaking of flavors, which ones are you most proud of developing at Milk Jawn?

Amy: Probably the Earl Grey with honeycomb. It’s both kind of unusual and very universally liked. We won an award for it at the North American Ice Cream Association convention in 2021. It was first in the Northeast and second in the country for Best New Flavor, which was pretty awesome because we didn’t even have a storefront at that time — we were just this little pop-up ice cream shop, going around scooping ice cream at Herman’s Coffee and stuff.

Also, flavors like our lemon curd with blueberry-basil swirl that are different than what you might find somewhere else and that are so flavorful — they end up really blowing people’s minds.

On the topic of blowing people’s minds, I have to ask about the chocolate taco. It’s become such a popular item with Milk Jawn customers (myself included). How did it come about?

Ryan: We started making it in October 2023 after Choco Tacos were discontinued in 2022, although we call our version “chocolate tacos,” to be clear. We just saw a void for that need. It was such a nostalgic dessert.

Amy: The funny thing is that we had the idea even before that. Our production facility is in a former Mexican restaurant, and on one of the awnings it still says, “Taqueria.” So as soon as we moved in, we were like, “Oh, we should do an ice-cream taco. That would be amazing.”

When you just want a scoop of ice cream, what do you each go for?

Ryan: I’m personally a coffee nut, so I love the cold brew and caramelized cacao nibs, and the white coffee. I just think they’re phenomenal flavors.

Amy: Chocolate peanut butter. I’m a huge chocolate peanut butter fan.

Ryan: Yeah, Amy’s always telling me, “Add more peanut butter! It’s not enough!”