Athlete goes from baseball diamond to making dessert, the story of Super Witch Ice Cream Co.
By Fletcher Mackel
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METAIRIE, Louisiana (WDSU) — Adjusting his cap as we sat down to talk, Briggs Barrios still has the mannerisms of a ball player.
“Baseball is my one true sports love,” Barrios said.
That love helped him become a star player at Jesuit High School and then at Tulane University, with one goal in mind.
“I think every kids’ dream is being a professional sports player, and like baseball was my thing,” Barrios said.
Unfortunately, three major injuries as a green wave player ended his diamond dreams, but as the valedictorian at Jesuit and a graduate of Tulane’s prestigious business school, he leaned into his education and became a successful commodities trader, and for fun, he started an Instagram page doing ice cream reviews, and then:
“COVID happened, and I decided I wanted to make some at the house, and I immediately fell in love with the whole process,” Barrios said.
So much so that his side project became his full-time passion.
“Yeah, I was working a full-time job, but probably 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. every single day after my job, and 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. every single Saturday and Sunday for about a year and a half straight, I was developing recipes,” Barrios said.
Which he finally perfected, and realized, “life has a way of sending you in different directions,” Barrios said.
His new path is as a professional ice cream maker. Enchanted by what he was doing, Super Witch Ice Cream was born.
“Opened the shop on Jefferson Highway in June 2023, and it was just me making ice cream for about a year and a half, and I hired my first employee in October 2024, and now we’ve got nine combined employees between our self-serve shop and the pint shop,” Barrios said.
Enhanced by a social media cult-like following, each week their pint drops draw hundreds of customers and sell out within minutes.
Super Witch is a super success.
“I quit the job that I had. It was a great job that I could see like a long future in, but I had to scratch the itch that I was having with the ice cream. I didn’t want to regret not diving headfirst into the deep end, and it’s honestly, it’s brought all the best things that I have in my life right now, and I could not have been happier with my choice to take the dive,” Barrios said.
As for what’s next for Super Witch, could Barrios’ company follow in the footsteps of a brand like Jeni’s Ice Cream? That company started small in Columbus, Ohio, and is now sold in over 3,000 grocery stores and markets nationwide.
“It’s that same sports mentality that I’ve always had since high school, since college. It’s if we can get incrementally better every single day, and that stuff’s going to add up, and then maybe we put ourselves in a position that we can potentially take that next leap. right now, we’re not ready for that. But that’s always in the back of my mind,” Barrios said.
So while the future isn’t known, the past is, and that’s where the name super witch actually comes from.
“That’s my grandma’s nickname. It’s a term of endearment, I promise. She bore a resemblance to the main character in the show ‘Bewitched,’ and my grandpa always said that she had a knack for knowing that he was doing something wrong when he was doing it, so she got the moniker super witch. It’s always been in the family and my grandma passed away about six months before I started the business, and it just felt like the right thing to do. She was always that person that was on my side, no matter what. I could have done basically anything, and she would have been behind me, so I thought it’d be a great tribute to her,” Barrios said.
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