“If you want people to love you, don’t be a leader, sell ice cream,” Steve Jobs once reportedly said.
Judging by the paeans to Raghunandan Srinivas Kamath, the founder of Naturals Ice Cream, posted on social media following his death on Friday, the “Ice Cream Man of India” was not only beloved by his customers, he successfully became a quality leader in the food business.
And indeed joy was extracted from the freshest fruit, condensed to ideal temperatures and packaged to exacting standards by Kamath at his single 20-ton capacity factory in Kandivali, Mumbai, every day for almost 40 years. A company that spends less than 1 per cent of its revenue on advertising and yet has 165 franchises and self-owned retail stores must be the envy of ice cream brands whose market share Naturals pruned significantly in the last few decades.
Since 1983, when he broke away from Gokul Refreshments, his family operation, to create Naturals, the brand has grown from 10 flavours to 125. Kamath’s obsession with an all-natural product made only with fruit, milk and sugar and with no additives, is legendary.
Naturals could have covered more cities, even countries, under its umbrella of chilled delights much sooner but for one critical element in ice cream production, which greatly affects quality: Maintaining temperature. Ice cream, once melted, loses the air that’s whipped into it during the machine-made process (known as overrun) and when it re-freezes, its texture is ruined. In a hot climate like that of western India, a product with fresh fruit and no preservatives creates even more challenges. Refrigerated trucks are prohibitively expensive, and if the distances are long, it is harder to maintain quality and keep your product affordable. This means you need a new factory in every city you service. Kamath chose to grow more slowly than other competitors to maintain quality and this is what earned his brand respect and loyalty.
Creating a brand so loved in India is no mean feat. India is still a culture that relies more on home-cooked food than store-bought products and meets most new brands with suspicion. Kamath understood this and dove deep into the culinary traditions of his mother’s kitchen. He also relied on the no-nonsense tradecraft of his fruit-seller father, whose deep knowledge of fresh produce, including how to source the best fruit at the best price, paid him rich dividends. In a sense, Kamath’s ice cream feels like something your grandmother would make if she had a fridge and the hours to whip your ice cream into creamy submission.
Naturals has jousted with far older ice cream brands for its market share — including ones with deeper pockets — like Joy, Vadilal, Giani’s, Kwality, Havmor, Dinshaw’s, Hindustan Unilever and Mother Dairy. To risk making a tender coconut ice cream or fashioning a delicate fruit like tadgola (ice apple) into delicious ice cream takes chutzpah and genius, both of which Kamath had in plenty. His risks paid off, with Naturals’ Tender Coconut making it into TasteAtlas’ top 100 iconic ice cream flavours.
For all the nostalgia attached to it, ice cream is a lucrative and competitive business. According to a report by Expert Market Research, the value of the Indian ice cream market crossed USD 3.46 billion in 2023. It is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 15 per cent in 2024-2032, to USD 12 billion by 2032.
What is it about ice cream that Indians love so much? Is it the relief it gives on a hot summer day? A cognitive association with friendship or family? In 1998, the average per capita consumption of ice cream in India was a paltry 10 ml per year. By 2010, it rose to 300 ml. This is low compared to the US, which consumes almost 30 litres per person. The room for growth is immense. Americans love the cold, creamy balm of ice cream, a product they were introduced to long before India, in the early 18th century, when refrigeration science was luring people away from ice houses and ice boxes. In India, for a long time, ice cream was an exotic and rare treat, requiring the purchase of costly ice from faraway sources. For example, in the mid-1800s, the Byculla Club in Bombay shipped ice in from Boston to make its famous Byculla Souffle.
The first time I ate ice cream from Naturals was in the 1990s, when I was on my way home from a TV shoot. It was strawberry. Until Naturals launched this flavour, most of the strawberry ice cream in the market was made with red-tinged artificial flavouring. Once you eat ice cream made with real strawberries, you ask yourself why you were eating anything else. That is exactly what Naturals did — it changed the way we look at ice cream and what we expect from it.
In my family, pizza followed by Naturals’ Choco Almond ice cream is a tradition. We have tried to introduce different chocolate ice cream brands to the kids, but we keep going back to Naturals. Today, I raise a bowl of coffee walnut ice cream to Kamath. May his sweet legacy continue to captivate.
Deshpande is an actor and writer