Cosmic Treats & Sweets in Mars, PA: A Local Family's New Scoop Shop

"There wasn't anything in Mars at all for ice cream, let alone homemade ice cream, so we thought there was an opportunity there."

— Mac Purvis Jr., quoted in the Butler Eagle.

The gap he described sat in plain sight on Pittsburgh Street for years. Mars has a coffee shop with a claim to "the finest coffees in the universe." It has a taproom that pours a beer named after a Bigfoot pun. It has a flying saucer parked at the corner of Pittsburgh and Grand that's been photographed by strangers and locals alike since a group of residents built it by hand in the early 1990s. What it didn't have, until this past June, was a place to get a scoop of ice cream that wasn't made somewhere else and trucked in.

Cosmic Treats & Sweets opened its doors on June 24, 2026, at 509 Pittsburgh Street. The name fits the town's long-running space theme, but the backstory is less about branding and more about who was willing to take the swing.

The Category Mars Never Had

Small downtowns fill in unevenly. A coffee shop opens, then a brewery, then a pizza place, and eventually someone notices the one thing that's still missing. In Mars, that missing piece was homemade ice cream. Not a national chain scooping factory product, but something made on site, with a local dairy base and a recipe the owner controls start to finish.

Purvis has been explicit about the standard he set for the shop. Ice cream has a legal butterfat threshold, which he puts at 10 percent. Cosmic Treats uses a base sourced from Marburger Dairy, blended to meet that level. Some flavors fall under what the shop calls a "simply stellar" line, made without artificial colors or flavors. The signature order, a blended treat the shop calls the Supernova, plays off the same Planet Mart and Mars naming convention that shows up on the family's gas station signage down the street.

None of this happened overnight. Before the doors opened, the team ran weekend tastings and set up at community events including Apple Fest, and by Purvis's own estimate, somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 people had already sampled the product before a single scoop was sold at the counter.

One Family, Side by Side

The part of this story that separates it from a typical new-restaurant opening is who's behind the counter. Purvis Brothers is a 95-year-old family-owned fuel distribution company. That same family also owns Planet Mart, the small chain of gas stations and convenience stores that residents already recognize from daily errands. Cosmic Treats & Sweets sits directly adjacent to the Planet Mart on Pittsburgh Street, and Mac Purvis Jr., the current owner of Purvis Brothers, is the one who decided the timing was right to add ice cream to a portfolio that's spent nearly a century in fuel and convenience retail.

The Purvis name was already familiar to Mars before the first scoop was served. Cosmic Treats & Sweets adds ice cream to the family's presence on Pittsburgh Street.

The shop's day-to-day is now run by manager Amie Mackrell and assistant manager Tonia Hufnagel, and it's open seven days a week. The case rotates through 16 hard flavors alongside four soft-serve options, giving regulars enough variation to keep coming back without the shop overcommitting to any one recipe.

Here's what's actually different about the shop, beyond the space theme:

• A 10 percent butterfat base sourced from Marburger Dairy
• 16 rotating hard-serve flavors plus 4 soft-serve options
• A "simply stellar" line made without artificial colors or flavors
• The Supernova, a blended signature treat named after the shop's Planet Mart lineage
• Year-round operation, not a seasonal stand that closes after Labor Day

Pittsburgh Street Fills In While Grand Avenue Shifts

The building itself has its own small history. Before Cosmic Treats moved in, the space was home to Mars Pizza, a longtime local pizzeria. Mars Pizza didn't close. It relocated to a new spot on Grand Avenue, one street over from where it had operated for years. That's worth sitting with for a second, because it's not the story of one business closing and another taking its place. It's two businesses trading real estate within the same four-block downtown, each landing somewhere that apparently made more sense for what they're trying to do next.

Pittsburgh Street already carries a good share of downtown's daily foot traffic. Mars Brew House sits nearby, and the flying saucer at the corner of Pittsburgh and Grand remains the borough's most photographed landmark, sunk into a small parklet that also holds the bell from the decommissioned USS Mars. Stick City Brewing Company, a taproom on Irvine Street just off the main strip, still shows up as a participating brewery in the annual Mars Brew Fest, held each June along Pittsburgh Street and Grand Avenue together. None of that changed when Cosmic Treats opened. What changed is that the street picked up a category it didn't have before, sitting a few doors down from a business the same family has run for years.

For a town this size, that's not a small addition. A dedicated ice cream shop is the kind of stop that turns a walk down Pittsburgh Street into an actual destination rather than a pass-through on the way to somewhere else, and doing it as a year-round operation means it's not disappearing the moment summer ends.

What Living Here Looks Like Now

If you already live in Mars, the practical version of this story is straightforward. Cosmic Treats & Sweets is open every day of the week, with a rotating flavor case that gives you a reason to check back rather than order the same thing twice. It sits at 509 Pittsburgh Street, next to the Planet Mart convenience store, in the building that used to hold Mars Pizza. If you're looking for that pizza, it's still around, just a block over on Grand Avenue now instead of Pittsburgh Street.

The bigger point is that Cosmic Treats & Sweets joins the Purvis family's established business presence in Mars; Purvis Brothers is a 95-year-old family-owned fuel distribution company.

Downtown Mars keeps adding pieces one storefront at a time.

If you're thinking through what a move to Mars or the surrounding north Pittsburgh suburbs could look like, from the small stuff like this to the bigger picture of buying or selling in the area, Chelsea Dolny is happy to talk through it with you.