Museum of Ice Cream – San Francisco

After posting pictures from my visit to the Museum of Ice Cream on social media, some people had no idea what it was or why I was laying in a pool of sprinkles.  I highly recommend visiting the Museum of Ice Cream (MOIC) because it was a lot of fun!  Here’s how my experience at MOIC went as well as a few tips for your visit!

I think it is important to first note that this is not the type of normal museum you’d expect; I consider it to be more of an art installation…but a lot more fun!

The Museum of Ice Cream is located in a few large cities like San Francisco, Miami and Los Angeles.  I went to the San Francisco one with one of my high school friends, Danielle!  It is located on 1 Grant Avenue in San Francisco, which is a short walk from BART.  The building the museum is located in was originally a bank built in 1910 so it was cool to see how they incorporated bright, fun colors with such an old, ornate building.

To be honest, I was definitely skeptical going and had the bar set low.  Danielle was extremely excited but some of the reviews online said it wasn’t fun!  Let me stop there and just say that it. was. AMAZING.  It was a ton of fun to just goof around and feel like a kid again!  And with ice cream around almost every corner, how could you not enjoy yourself?!

The Beginning

The ticket was $38 ($45 after tax), but it is important to note that you can stay as long as you’d like.  The only rule is that you cannot walk back into a room you’ve already been in…you must continue forward!  With about 10 rooms to explore within the Museum of Ice Cream, you’ll have plenty to see and do.  We spent about 2 hours at the museum, and when we were at the end we noticed that we were with different people than when we started because everyone goes at their own pace.

Not only are there a lot of rooms, but there are a lot of snacks too!  We were given snacks in about every other room, including soft serve, a fruit bar, mochi, pop rocks and cotton candy!

Rooms Within the Exhibit

Some of the rooms were interactive, like tossing rings onto a table full of whipped cream cans, and the room with countless magnet letters on the walls!

Other rooms weren’t as interactive due to the fragility of the items, like the cherry room and the gummy bear room.  But that didn’t take any fun away from the experience!  Every room was bright, unique and fun in its own way.

Not only does each Museum of Ice Cream have some rooms that are unique to their specific location, but some of the rooms change from time to time!  A week prior to us visiting the Museum of Ice Cream, they made the Circus Animal Cookie Room!  There were two extremely large circus animal cookies that were like a merry-go-round, which we were able to sit on and move at the push of a button!

Sprinkle Pool

Last, but certainly not least, is the all-popular SPRINKLE POOL!  This is the only room in the museum that has a time limit due to its popularity.  The sprinkle pool is a small “pool” that is 4-feet deep and filled with plastic sprinkles.  They allow a group of about 10 people in at a time for 5 minutes.  You are able to skip the sprinkle pool’s long line if you want to just complete your visit the Museum of Ice Cream, but I recommend you wait!  It is a ton of fun.  Though, you will likely take some of these sprinkles home with you in your shoes, pants, and many other places you didn’t think the sprinkles could manage to get to in 5 minutes.

With over a handful of rooms we saw that were not even mentioned in this post, you can see how we were able to easily spend two hours running around, taking selfies, and laughing as much as we were eating snacks.  It sure felt great to be a kid again!

Sign up for the MOIC Newsletter

Please keep in mind that this is a pop-up exhibit so each museum is open is for a short amount of time and tickets are limited.  My biggest piece of advice is to go to https://www.museumoficecream.com/ and sign up for their newsletter.  That is how we found out they were adding more dates/tickets to their museum in San Francisco and bought tickets immediately.  They can sell out quickly!