Noah Kueny-Lichtman was beaming. The first 100 people to arrive at the 16 Handles grand opening in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, had been promised a free frozen yogurt treat — and he was the last person to get one. His friends, right behind him, had to pay.

He took bites from a pink cup filled with cookie dough and peanut butter cup-flavored yogurt, topped with brownie bites, Oreos and hot fudge, chatting over the sound of D.J.-spun family friendly party bops. Mr. Kueny-Lichtman, 18, said his visit, coming as it did just weeks before he was to head off to Tulane to study finance and classics, was “a full circle moment.”

He used to frequent another 16 Handles in the neighborhood, now closed, as a young child, so returning to the shop, with its rows of yogurt machines and tubs of spoonable toppings was “pretty nostalgic.”

That the nostalgia might attract Gen Z and millennial treat-seekers, recalling the financial-crisis era fro-yo boom of their youth, or slightly older shoppers, craving the TCBY-style desserts of the 1980s, is all part of the plan. The vibe of 16 Handles is a “mix of nostalgic and cool,” said Neil Hershman, the company’s 30-year-old chief executive, bridging the industry’s slightly dusty reputation with his ambitions for another boom time.

Mr. Hershman believes that fro-yo is cool — that people love it, that the love never went away and that the last wave of stores was mismanaged but the field still has major potential. It’s core to his pitch. He says that 16 Handles, which operates with a franchise model, is profitable, and that he hopes to expand with more than 200 new stores across the country in the next few years. The people want fro-yo, he maintains. He is prepared to give it to them.

And people do seem to want fro-yo again. Manhattanites are jazzed about small uptown shops, New York magazine reported in May. A buzzy yogurt store, Mimi’s, is set to open in SoHo this month. Posts about craving “Obama-era froyo” have been rippling through social media.

16 Handles was Manhattan’s answer to the national fro-yo craze that exploded into city storefronts and suburban shopping malls in the years after the Great Recession. Started by the founder Solomon Choi in the East Village in 2008, 16 Handles opened a few dozen more locations, largely in the tristate area, in the years that followed.

Within a few years, the industry was slowing down, and since its 2010s boom, the sector has overall contracted: Servings of frozen yogurt were down 28 percent in 2025, compared with those in 2017, though they have ticked up a bit compared to a year ago. The number of stores declined by 35 percent from 2017 to 2024, according to data from the market research firm Circana.

One reason fro-yo shops “sprouted up all over the place” in the 2010s was their cheap start-up costs, said Alex Susskind, a professor at Cornell focused on food and beverage management. Self-service stores have low staffing expenses, and the machines and equipment were relatively affordable. But, he added, the combination of high prices per ounce (the “value proposition was out of whack,” he said) and oversaturation meant that the boom was “not a sustainable consumer experience.” He has joked to his students that, for a while, there were fro-yo places opening in the back room of fro-yo places.

In spite of a rocky decade, Mr. Hershman is enthusiastic about his business, and about business in general — in an interview in a 16 Handles shop on the Upper East Side, he dropped admiring references to Adam Neumann’s “blitzscaling” strategy (at WeWork) and to the operational prowess of the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman.

It was curiosity about business that led him to the fro-yo world in 2019. Coming off a stint working at a hedge fund and a side hustle creating a drink-chilling coaster, after graduating from George Washington University, he was interested in the food and beverage industry. He had an idea for a nautical-themed bar, and for a Great Gatsby-inspired one. He wanted to be the person to bring the fast-casual chain Cava to Manhattan, but was told it was not a franchise. That prompted him to Google what a franchise was.

“I go to 16 Handles,” Mr. Hershman recalled thinking, “maybe that’s a franchise.” Having seen the perpetually broken bathroom at the location near his home at the time in Murray Hill, he had some ideas for how to run it better. After doing some research and meeting with its owners, he took over the store at age 23 for about $500,000, he said, covering three-quarters of the purchase with a Small Business Association loan and the rest with his own savings.

He thought it would be turnkey. It was not. He ended up working 14-hour days for the first few months and, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic soon scrambled in-person business. But he added more Manhattan shops to his portfolio, taking advantage of the lockdowns to renegotiate leases. Within a few years, he was the chain’s largest franchisee.

Mr. Hershman bought the chain from Mr. Choi in 2022 — splitting the purchase with the YouTuber Danny Duncan, 33, with whom he struck up a correspondence after seeing the content creator posting from a 16 Handles in TriBeCa. (Mr. Choi died last year of a heart attack at age 44.)

Mr. Duncan, known for his line of “Virginity Rocks” T-shirts, said in an interview that he was interested in a new opportunity beyond YouTube, and he soon offered to help buy 16 Handles. Mr. Duncan sometimes posts about fro-yo on his channel, where he has some 8 million subscribers and an audience that skews young and male, but, he said, he does so out of pride rather than formal obligation. “I’m like a dad on Instagram just posting about his kid,” he said.

Mr. Hershman declined to name the purchase price, but estimated that the chain was now worth about $10 million. He still has six franchises of his own, and he works from an office in Midtown East managing a corporate team of eight. These days, he visits a 16 Handles location about once or twice a week, he said, often getting a plain tart yogurt with fruit.

His pitch is resonating with the fellow young and hungry: The new Cobble Hill franchisees are Dylan Vas, 31, who also works as a consultant at Accenture, and Eric Farber, 32, a former investment banker who is now a student at Columbia Business School.

Later this year, Mr. Duncan plans to open a 16 Handles in his hometown of Englewood, Fla. Those ambitions fit in nicely with the company’s expansion plans, which focus on suburban areas in Florida, Texas and the Carolinas.

Crystal and Ryan Waugh, a married couple with two teenage sons, opened a 16 Handles in Montgomery, Tex., near Houston, last year and are planning a second location. Fans of frozen yogurt from their time living in California, they thought such a business could do well in their area. They stumbled upon Mr. Duncan’s YouTube posts while researching the industry, and liked his energy — and that their sons knew who he was.

Ms. Waugh now drives a white Tesla with plates reading “16HNDLS,” and the couple’s sons work at their shop. They sound cleareyed about the challenges, though: Self-serve fro-yo can be “a very disgusting experience,” Mr. Waugh said. So they emphasize keeping the machines, toppings bar and tables clean. “People got tired of fro-yo not because of the fro-yo,” Mr. Waugh said. But because it became “icky. I hear a lot of ‘icky.’”

The ick factor is a tricky one, especially in a post-pandemic world sensitive to germs. “I thought it would never come back,” said Larry Fantl, 84, a psychologist who came across the 16 Handles opening while visiting Cobble Hill from his home on the Upper West Side. He marveled at the crowd, and that more people were not more wary: Think of all the hands touching all those handles. (He himself sometimes eats 16 Handles, he said).

“It’s dirty in there for sure,” said Leah Orlando, 29, who works in public relations but put in time at an Arizona frozen yogurt shop as a teen, clarifying that she was referring to fro-yo shops in general, not this particular location, which she said was clean. Eating fro-yo was “the thing to do in high school,” Ms. Orlando said, but “it just disappeared.”

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Mr. Hershman has plans to avoid the pitfalls of the prior wave. ”We always talk about cool, keep it cool,”

He welcomes children — he is the father of a newborn and a toddler — but also aspires to cultivate an energy where “you’re not embarrassed to post an Instagram story of yourself at 16 Handles.”

At night, he said, store lights dim and the vibe becomes more “clubby.” People could go there on dates, he said, especially if they are seeking an alcohol-free option. (It is a delicate balance: As he was describing this vision, an employee in the Upper East Side shop turned on a television and started playing “Bluey” for some young afternoon snackers.)

Mr. Hershman, who speaks quickly, saying things like “you can fro-yo anything,” has all sorts of ideas for the future. Maybe he could run a food and beverage holding company. Maybe he could get into the trash space, trying to serve other food businesses that deal with a lot of refuse. In a follow-up email, he noted that people told him “all the time” that he should run for office. But for now, he is focusing on expanding 16 Handles, trying to make the brand “a household name.”

“If it is a trend, we will ride it until the end,” he said.

Fro-yo is already all over the place in pop culture — and it is not always represented favorably. In the sitcom “The Good Place,” that the characters are served endless fro-yo is a sign they are in hell. Mr. Hershman, who said he had not seen that show, presented a different favorite onscreen fro-yo moment: In one widely-quoted line from the 2010 movie about Facebook, “The Social Network,” Justin Timberlake, playing the Napster founder Sean Parker says: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool?” His answer: “a billion dollars.”

A beat later, he tells the actors portraying Mark Zuckerberg and his crew that they’re heading for a billion-dollar valuation, “unless you take bad advice, in which case you may as well have come up with a chain of very successful yogurt shops.”

To the young tech executives in the movie, this is presented as a cautionary tale. To Mr. Hershman, it sounds pretty great.