What Kind of Insurance Does an Ice Cream Shop Need?

Owning an ice cream shop comes with exciting opportunities – happy customers, seasonal flavors, and being a favorite neighborhood destination – but it also comes with unique risks. The right insurance coverage can help protect your equipment, employees, customers, and income when unexpected situations happen.

Here’s a breakdown of insurance protections recommended for an ice cream shop:

General Liability Insurance

General liability insurance helps protect your business if a customer is injured or if your operations accidentally cause damage to someone else’s property.

Merchants’ general liability insurance may include coverages such as:

• Medical Expenses, which covers costs of medical treatments if a customer gets injured at your ice cream shop.
• Employment Practices Liability*, which protects you against claims of discrimination, sexual harassment, and wrongful termination.
• Employee Benefits Liability, which provides coverage for damages resulting from negligent acts, errors, or omissions relating to administration of your employee benefits program.
• Cyber Liability Coverage*, which offers comprehensive data security and privacy coverage that addresses both first party losses and third party liability claims. This coverage is becoming increasingly important for shops that process online orders, store customer payment information, or use loyalty apps and digital ordering systems.

*These coverages are not available in Vermont.

Commercial Property Insurance

Commercial property insurance helps protect your building, furniture, signage, inventory, and equipment from covered losses such as fire, storms, vandalism, or theft. This type of coverage is especially valuable for ice cream businesses because refrigeration systems and freezers are critical to daily operations.

Some coverages Merchants offers include:

• Business Income Insurance, which can provide reimbursement of net lost business income and continuing normal operating expenses due to the suspension of your business operations from a covered loss. For seasonal ice cream businesses, even a short closure during peak summer months could significantly impact annual revenue.
• Equipment Breakdown Coverage, which can help pay to repair or replace mechanical or electrical systems that fail.
• Spoilage Coverage, which helps protect your business if a power outage or refrigeration failure causes your products to spoil.
• Food Contamination Coverage, which can help cover costs related to loss due to discovery or suspicion of food contamination.

Local Agents. Local Commitment. Real Protection.

The right insurance coverage can help ice cream shop owners stay prepared for the unexpected and keep serving customers with confidence.

At Merchants Insurance Group, we understand the unique risks ice cream shops face and offer coverage solutions designed to help protect what you’ve built. Talk to your independent insurance agent about Merchants coverage options for ice cream shops – or use our Find an Agent tool to locate an independent insurance agent near you!

Independent agents: Looking to grow your food service book of business? Partner with Merchants to help deliver tailored coverage solutions for ice cream shops and other specialty businesses.