Three Valley businesses team up for Snoqualmie venture

Snoqualmie Ice Cream, Chickadee Bakeshop and Heirloom Cookshop will soon be opening in Snoqualmie.

By Aaron Kunkler • June 11, 2021 1:30 am
Katie Podschwit, Dorie Ross, Kristen Schumacher, Heather Dean and Julie Chung, owners of Chickadee Bakeshop, Heirloom Cookshop and Snoqualmie Ice Cream are opening a new location in Snoqualmie this summer. Contributed photo
Katie Podschwit, Dorie Ross, Kristen Schumacher, Heather Dean and Julie Chung, owners of Chickadee Bakeshop, Heirloom Cookshop and Snoqualmie Ice Cream are opening a new location in Snoqualmie this summer. Contributed photo

Three Snoqualmie Valley businesses owned by women are set to open a new storefront in Snoqualmie this summer.

Snoqualmie Ice Cream, Chickadee Bakeshop and Heirloom Cookshop will be running their operations out of a storefront at 8102 Railroad Ave. SE in Snoqualmie, and hope to open this summer. Chickadee Bakeshop is a subscription-based baking company that will be using the commercial kitchen in the space, and Heirloom Cookshop will also be using the location for their wholesale endeavors. Snoqualmie Ice Cream will be operating a storefront scoop shop.

“We hope that this will bring joy to people in our community, along with the bakeshop and the cookshop,” said Julie Chung, co-owner of Snoqualmie Ice Cream, along with Heather Dean.

The current tenants’ lease ends at the end of June, and Chung said they’re hoping to move quickly after that to open up shop. The ice cream outfit currently has one location in Maltby. Over the past year, Chung said it was good for the community to have a place to come for some sort of normalcy, and she’s excited to open the second shop in her hometown.

After closing down a previous shop in Snoqualmie only weeks before pandemic hit in 2020, Kristen Schumacher of Heirloom Cookshop was hoping to move to a farm and start a co-op space with like-minded businesses. She said now, both of those goals are coming to fruition.

While Schumacher said she likely won’t have a storefront in the new business, she’s tossing around the idea of doing a grab-and-go model and potential wholesaling.

Katie Podschwit, co-owner of Chickadee Bakeshop, said that after she and her husband’s donut shop, Steve’s Donuts, closed in Snoqualmie at the end of 2019, she’s been doing some soul searching about what to do next. As she was brainstorming what to do next with Chickadee Bakeshop, the idea came up of partnering with Heirloom and they’ve been a roaming duo of businesses ever since.

After more than a year in varying degrees of lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic, Schumacher said there’s an almost celebratory mood and a sense of relief in the community. People are looking forward to seeing each other again.

“I’m definitely humbled and every day I wake up with gratitude that this is where I call home,” Podschwit said.