Every Wednesday evening, something insane happens in New Orleans. At promptly 7 p.m., Super Witch drops its weekly lineup online. This isn’t your standard scoop shop where you wait behind a glass counter. Super Witch operates entirely on a pre-order “drop” model. It feels less like dessert and more like securing front-row concert tickets. You either check out with your selection from the curated menu of hand-packed ice cream flavors or you wait until next week. And if you’re lucky enough to snag a pint during this digital sprint, the reward is a pilgrimage down Jefferson Highway to claim your pint during one of the designated pick up times.
In a city built on snowball stands, Super Witch’s gourmet ice cream and soft serve have become an undeniable obsession around Tulane University. Even though the shop is a trek from campus, students happily splurge on an Uber or barter rides to get there. Coordinating the drops, piling into a friend’s car, and tasting that first spoonful is all part of the shared experience. The hype extends far beyond uptown, drawing fans who make two hour drives from Baton Rouge and Lafayette to get a taste.
“We literally have four alarms set and assign a different flavor to each roommate to make sure we don’t miss out,” Ben, a Tulane senior, told Spoon University while waiting in line at a recent pick up. “It can be a bloodbath on the website, but it’s so worth it.”
The mastermind behind this chaos is Briggs Barrios, a New Orleans native and self-proclaimed ice cream obsessive. Just a few years ago, he was a commodities trader selling pints out of his house. Today, he runs one of the most thrilling ice cream empires in the South.
The Guy Who Ate 1,000 Pints Of Ice Cream
The obsession started in Tampa in 2015. Encouraged by his cousins, Barrios started an Instagram page to document the alarming amount of ice cream he was consuming: four to five pints a week, every week. He immersed himself in the review community, working his way through over 1,000 different pints, and soon, he was getting ice cream shipped to his doorstep from national brands like Ample Hills and Salt & Straw.
At the time, he was content just being a consumer. “I had no desire to make it myself,” Barrios told Spoon University. “I just wanted to eat it, talk about it, and share it with people.” But when the pandemic hit, closing gyms and forcing him to stay inside, Barrios had to quit his five-pint-a-week habit cold turkey.
It wasn’t until a post-lockdown family vacation that the spark returned. He found a tiny shop making its own ice cream. One bite of a blueberry biscoff flavor, and it came rushing back ten fold. He instantly went online and when he arrived back home to New Orleans, he had ice cream cookbooks waiting at his doorstep.
The Underground Years
While still working full-time in commodities trading, Barrios began making ice cream at home using a small batch freezer. It was a grueling process, hand-packing pints alone, but he was hooked.
“Every morning I would wake up like it was Christmas making ice cream,” Barrios said.“It was the most fun I’d ever had doing anything.”
He rebranded his old Instagram review page and started posting his creations. The demand was quick. For six months, he ran the side hustle out of his house before finding a commercial space on Jefferson Highway and handing in his two weeks notice. He was all in.
Super Witch Expanding
In his first official week, Super Witch sold 180 pints. Barrios packed every single one himself, running the operation entirely alone for over a year besides his mother who helped out.
Nearly three years in, Barrios said the business has grown into so much more than he ever thought possible. He brought on his first employee in October 2024 and eventually one employee turned to several.
Barrios has also opened a meticulously designed soft serve shop in Old Metairie. It offers a hyper-focused duo of soft serve and a chocolate chip cookie.
The business has not just brought him a new career— but a family. He ended up meeting his wife after she became a regular customer picking up pints, a habit she did not break until they were engaged. She no longer logs on for the 7 p.m. Wednesday drops or waits in line for her pint, but they do still enjoy lots of ice cream together. “Starting this has brought me all the best things in my life right now,” Barrios said.
The Secret To The Perfect Pint
This is not your average scoop. Every batch of ice cream is a meticulous two-day process. The base is made and aged overnight so the flavor has time to fully develop. The inclusions — the swirls, chunks, and crumbles — are all mixed in, by hand, one pint at a time, and then hand-packed.
“Pint 400 of the day has to be the same as the first,” Barrios explained. His team puts in the physical work to make that happen, batch after batch.
This labor-intensive process is a love letter to his city. “In New Orleans, every event and celebration revolves around food,” he said. “It’s celebratory, but it is also what you reach for in your deepest, darkest moments. It is the ultimate comfort food.”
The True Measure Of Success
When asked how he defines success, Barrios did not mention profit margins or grocery store distribution.
“It’s easy to look at a business and define success from cash flows and the bottom line, but there are things more important,” Barrios said. Success, to him, means employing people who are genuinely fulfilled, who create a positive ripple effect through the community, and to be able to support organizations doing meaningful work around the city.
“If you go to sleep every night and think ‘shit, that was fun’ that’s success,” Barrios said. “That’s exactly what it’s all about.”