"UNCLE MARIO" ROSSI

If It's Frozen, Mario Probably Knows How to Make It

At around 80, Mario Rossi has spent enough time around ice cream and frozen novelties to know that machines don't care about excuses.

His education started at Carlo's Spa, his father's combination general store, six-stool sandwich shop and frozen-lemonade operation. Mario watched his father work a single-barrel machine producing frozen lemonade for roadside stands.

Things got slightly more complicated from there.

After a lifetime in the industry, Mario has worked with sophisticated high-volume frozen-novelty equipment, consulted for major producers and even crawled into machinery when everybody else was standing around discussing why it wasn't working.

Mario doesn't mind questions.

He minds long answers to short questions.

Put him on a production floor and he'll listen, diagnose, improvise and expect everyone around him to keep up.

Now he's bringing those decades of experience to Tampa to help turn Uncle Mario's Icy Adult Pops from one more cockamamie Seniority idea into an actual business.

Fortunately, he has help from his daughter Gina, whose PhD-level understanding of freezing science makes Mario enormously proud—even when nobody understands what she's saying.

And then there's Connie Conti.

His high-school sweetheart.

Apparently Mario has decided one startup isn't enough.