By: Joselin Estevez
Forty-plus years. One family. Countless cones.
On any given night, in any season, the line outside Gelotti at 2 Union Avenue in Paterson, New Jersey, tells you everything you need to know about the shop’s staying power. Even in the dead of winter, locals bundle up for milkshakes, cookie sandwiches, and sundaes. It’s not a seasonal indulgence here; it’s a ritual, one that has been passed from parent to child for two generations, and counting.
At the center of it all is Robert Sigona, who took the reins of Gelotti from his father, Sal, in 2018. Sigona didn’t inherit a business so much as a way of life, but understanding that distinction is the key to understanding why Gelotti has outlasted nearly every trend that’s swept through the ice cream industry since the 1980s.
Born Into It
Sigona’s earliest memories aren’t of birthday parties or backyard games; however, they’re of learning to write his name on a guest check at the shop counter. By second grade, he was already doing school projects on how to make an ice cream cake. By ten, he was calling the shop after school to put in his own order, a cookies and cream milkshake, non-negotiable. When his father occasionally refused the request, young Robert simply learned to go around him, charming the staff directly. “They knew exactly how I liked it, and there’s nothing my dad hates more than wasting food, so he’d be forced to bring it home to me even when he didn’t want to,” Sigona recalls with a laugh.
By twelve, he was working the shop his mother, Roxane Sigona, ran in Caldwell, sneaking into the back to scrub buckets just to be near the action. What started as a kid hanging around his parents’ business became something else entirely at fourteen, hauling boxes in the warehouse on a brutally busy day. “I just remember saying to myself, ‘I was born for this,'” he says. “My path was decided.”
It’s a familiar arc for children of family-owned businesses, whether it’s the summer job, the after-school shifts, the reluctant Saturday punishments that doubled as apprenticeships. (“I was always grounded on Saturdays,” Sigona jokes. “My punishment was to go work at Gelotti with my dad. It wasn’t much of a punishment.”) What’s rare is what came next: an owner who didn’t just keep the lights on, but reimagined the business without ever loosening his grip on what made it special in the first place.
Innovation Without Losing the Soul
Every multi-generational business faces the same quiet tension: how do you evolve without erasing what your customers fell in love with? Sigona watched that tension play out firsthand, growing up between two strong-willed parents: his mother, who was always chasing the next idea, and his father, who resisted change on principle. “My mom always wanted to come up with new things. My dad hated change,” he says. “I grew up watching that battle, but my mom eventually won when my dad saw the results.”
One of those results was the Lil Chippies, Gelotti’s now-trademarked miniature ice cream sandwiches, which remain one of the shop’s best-selling items to this day.
Since taking over, Sigona has carried that same instinct forward, but always in service of the shop’s founding values rather than in spite of them. His signature move was building out an in-house baking program from scratch: buying an oven, hiring baker Tahmina Akhter through the Paterson nonprofit Eva’s Village, and developing a from-scratch pipeline for the cookies, cakes, and mix-ins that go into Gelotti’s frozen creations. In seven years, that program has produced more than 50 original recipes.
The move wasn’t just about flavor. Baking in-house gives the shop tighter control over inventory, allows surplus ingredients to be repurposed into limited-edition mix-ins instead of thrown away, and perhaps most meaningfully, creates local jobs. Through the Eva’s Village partnership and collaborations with area high schools, Gelotti has become not just a customer of the Paterson community, but an employer within it.
Sigona also pushed the shop into new dietary territory, spearheading a line of vegan flavors built on a custom-developed creamy, dairy-free base, because, as he puts it, the vegan community in Paterson deserved more than just Italian ice.
The Gelato Difference
Ask Sigona to explain the difference between ice cream and gelato, and you’ll get a small education. Gelato is made with less cream and less air, is churned more slowly, and, done right, should never contain eggs. The result is a denser, silkier product that Sigona has spent years refining to match what he tasted on childhood trips to Sicily. “People say our gelato is just as good as in Italy,” he says. “Growing up, going to Sicily for vacation, that’s all I ever wanted to serve the same quality gelato I’d eat over there.”
Today, Gelotti’s case holds more than 30 gelato flavors alone, alongside sorbet and frozen yogurt, a rotating, seasonally driven menu where summer brings fresh blueberry and winter ushers in pumpkin pie and caramel apple. Developing each one is painstaking work, particularly with fruit. “You have to work really hard to balance the acidity, otherwise it curdles the milk,” Sigona explains. It’s the kind of technical precision that customers rarely see, but always taste.
A Business Built on Giving Back
Ask Sigona what community means to Gelotti, and his answer is immediate: “Everything.” The shop sponsors local Little League teams and works with Table to Table to help feed Paterson’s area homeless population.
It’s not a marketing checklist, but a philosophy inherited straight from the shop floor Sigona grew up on. “We aren’t doing this for attention,” he says. “We aren’t Gelotti without the community. So that’s why we do it.”
Change and Constancy
Not everything has stayed the same. The Caldwell location, once run by Sigona’s mother, has been unaffiliated with the family business since around 2011. The Paterson flagship itself has been fully renovated over the years; even the pine tree that once stood at the center of the lot exists now only in memory. But Sigona sees change and continuity as two sides of the same coin. “We’ve definitely seen a lot of changes over the years, but we’ve also seen a ton remain the same,” he says. “What made us what we are, which includes family, community, and quality, is still a guiding light. That will never change.”
What’s Next
With a stronger internal culture, longer employee tenures, and a new generation already logging hours behind the counter, Sigona’s attention is beginning to turn toward growth, carefully, and on his own terms. Whatever comes next for Gelotti, tradition and quality will remain non-negotiable.
For now, though, Sigona seems perfectly content exactly where he is, mentoring the next wave of Gelotti kids the same way he was once mentored. “I’m guiding these younger kids, but it’s funny, because I still feel like a kid myself,” he says. “How can I not? I work in an ice cream shop.”
Forty-plus years in, that’s still the whole point.
