A Philly-area man invented a gummy cone for water ice. He says it’s vegan, halal and gluten-free.
When Joe Osborne created the GummiCone in 2015, he was a gamer who didn't want to have to put down a cool treat to play.
Gluten-allergic snackers and those with celiac disease can’t eat most traditional ice-cream cones. The most common way to manufacture gummies features pork gelatin — a forbidden ingredient in halal and kosher diets. And the most common halal gummies simply replace pig products with beef, leaving them off-limits to vegans.
Joe Osborne wasn’t necessarily trying to solve all of that when he created the GummiCone in 2015. At the time, he was a sales rep at Comcast, an avid gamer and a loyal patron of Jimmy’s Water Ice in South Philly. He’d go home, ice still in hand, and fire up his console. Since water ice generally comes in a broad, flat cup, he’d have to put the controller down to eat. And he’d have to put the treat down to cycle through the game menus.
“I thought, ‘You know, if I was eating an ice cream cone, I could get through these menus,’” Osborne said. Why couldn’t water ice have a handheld of its own?
Initially, Osborne thought the snackable cups would best resemble a watertight Jolly Rancher. His wife, Maureen, recommended the cone be a gummy instead. They melted down a bag of Haribo bears and froze the liquid around a conical mold.
Osborne, 40, is now living in North Wales and working on the gummy cones full-time. He has business partners and associates ready to produce them in large numbers. He’s handed out samples. They’re not available in Philly’s grocery stores or water-ice stands just yet, but he’s aiming to make his family invention as readily available as any frozen treat on the market.
A gummy cone needed to differ from the traditional candy in several ways: It couldn’t come apart as a stretchy, gooey dribble — what Osborne described as “mozzarella bites.” It couldn’t become stiff and brittle in the freezer, nor could it boil down to a formless sauce in the summer sun. In other words, Osborne’s invention couldn’t come from the collagen of a pig or cow, as most gummies do. So, he spent nearly a decade perfecting a formula that used parts of seaweed plants to produce his desired mixture.
The Osbornes started Mojo Industries in 2016 to oversee the project; the company became known as Mojoz — for Joe and Maureen Osborne — in October 2024. And the GummiCone launched Nov. 13, 2024. Mojoz’s partners in the candy world include food consultant Jeff Bogusz, who helped popularize Nerds Gummy Clusters, and Carlos Veloso, a machinist hired to develop a process for shaping the gummies into cones from a Linden, N.J. factory. The firm hired Rutgers-educated food scientist Abdul-Rhaman Kharboutli to perfect the cones’ formula.
That formula, it turns out, made the cones gluten-free, vegan, and halal. Mojoz hadn’t just pioneered a new kind of snack accessory; they’d developed one that could fit a vast range of dietary requirements.
“It just kind of worked out that way,” Osborne said.
For sweet-toothed shoppers with dietary restrictions, that’s no small development. The gluten-free cones could offer new options for people who can’t or don’t consume bread, Osborne noted. Meanwhile, videos abound in TikTok and Instagram’s Muslim communities, surprising viewers with the revelation that dozens of everyday food items are unclean.
For many, only halal and kosher grocers can guarantee their fare is ceremonially pure — no nutritional detective work, no second-guessing.
“There are many times when people would come and say, ‘I’ve been searching for halal supermarkets for a long time,’” said Ahmed Sam of Alaqsa Halal Meat and Grocery in North Philadelphia.
“With candy, there’s beef gelatin,” Sam said. “There’s fish gelatin. Candies can be halal — or not.” Halal bags of Haribo gummy bears, Sam continued, feature a green emblem on the packaging, meaning they were made from cow products sourced in accordance with Islamic standards. Others bear a “Made in Turkey” label.
But this can come at a cost. For livestock ingredients to be halal, Sam said, “the animal must be slaughtered in the most humane way possible and the quickest way possible.” Cheap, factory-farmed meats are out of the question; specialized hand-slaughtering raises prices across the supply chain.
Price has also been a barrier for Osborne. Traditional ice cream cones sell for roughly 15 cents apiece to wholesalers; Mojoz’s creation sets them back $1.50. Candy simply costs more to manufacture than bread, Osborne explained, making the cones a risky bet for companies skeptical the public would buy a new product en masse.
Osborne says he’s undaunted. He believes his product tastes better than a waffle cone, carries more versatility, and addresses unmet dietary needs.
How far does Osborne think the Mojoz cone can go?
“My vision is, anywhere that you can get an ice cream cone, you’ll be able to get a GummiCone,” he said.