Houston's giant ice cream cones appear to have gone dark for good, ending Twistee Treat's latest attempt to make its brightly branded frozen-dessert stands a Texas fixture.
The last two known Texas locations, in northwest Houston and Cypress, appear to have closed sometime in July. Chron reports that Yelp lists both stands as closed, Twistee Treat USA has removed its Texas locations from the company website, and the chain had not responded to requests for comment.
A 40-Store Houston Plan Became Five Stands
Twistee Treat arrived in Houston with ambitions that were considerably larger than its final footprint. The Houston Business Journal reported in 2017 that the Florida chain hoped to open 40 to 50 Houston-area locations within five years, with eight expected by the end of that year.
Instead, the company opened five Houston-area stands in total. Two launched in 2016, followed by locations on Bellaire Boulevard, Jones Road and Fry Road in 2017 and 2018, before most of the earlier stores shuttered around 2019, according to Chron's account of the chain's Texas history.
Houston's Most Unmissable Ice Cream Architecture
Twistee Treat's main selling point was impossible to miss: each stand was designed around the shape of a giant soft-serve cone, with customers ordering from a compact storefront rather than sitting inside a traditional restaurant. When the Jones Road location opened, Community Impact described a menu built around cones, cups, shakes, malts, slushes, sundaes and blended candy treats.
That combination gave Twistee Treat a strong roadside identity in a region full of conventional drive-thrus and strip-center dessert shops. But the Houston rollout ultimately became a much smaller experiment than the company envisioned, leaving the two northwest-area stands as the final holdouts.
For now, the Texas chapter ends without a public explanation from Twistee Treat USA. The cones may have been designed to stand out from the road, but their departure has been considerably quieter.
