Although it’s a challenge, it’s one Emerald Foods is obviously meeting — with 300% growth in exports over the last three years, and accelerating. New Zealand Natural has just entered its 22nd country, United Arab Emirates, and opens a new store somewhere in the world every nine days. The first containers entered Russia’s west in December.

“The New Zealand Natural brand continues to perform. It’s more than just the ice cream, though, it’s the franchise model,” Lamont says. It is New Zealand’s most global franchise and propelled Emerald Foods Group to last year win New Zealand’s best international business with a turnover of $10-50 million, and its owner Diane Foreman to be named New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year.

The company spends around $1 million a year on R&D, and constantly introduces new flavours throughout the world — this summer it’s manuka honey and golden kiwifruit icecream and a superfruit sorbet.

But, even with a world of choice, it’s still vanilla, chocolate and strawberry that are the clear favourites — and in New Zealand, hokey-pokey. Chocolate Ecstasy is the biggest seller in parlours worldwide.

Lamont, like most manufacturers, believes New Zealand’s innovation in ice cream making, coupled with our premium dairy products, are the reasons behind its global success. He sings the praises of New Zealand’s food technologists (he was one himself), but laments there is a serious shortage in the ice cream industry.
De Raadt, an Australian, says New Zealand’s “spirit of innovation” is still strong in ice cream.

“For example, Tip Top has pioneered a couple of world-first technological advances. Fruit whip, to the best of our knowledge, is a world first; we were the first to triple dip, and the first to insert a large inclusion into an icecream [biscuit into the Memphis Meltdown Big Bikkie]. We call the technology the pizza board, after the guys who were working late and drew the idea on the back of a pizza box.

“Maybe it’s that we can’t rely on one or two things and stamp out tens of millions of them, like big factories in Europe, that we have to be good at everything.”

Tip Top’s ice cream makers and Fonterra’s 350 dairy researchers have worked with medical researchers at the University of Auckland to develop the ReCharge ice cream — now in the second phase of clinical trials to assess its effectiveness in reducing chemotherapy-induced diarrhoea and anaemia. The strawberry flavoured ‘medical dessert’ for cancer patients is another world first.

That feel-good factor of ice cream is still strong, even if there are lumps — like cost hikes — in the cream.
As Barbara Simon puts it: “My grandfather first made ice cream in 1928, and he always reckoned people would spend a penny for an ice cream, but couldn’t afford a pair of shoes. I think that’s still the same today.”

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