The making of an accidental ice cream empire

Happenstance and sweat – and a lot of the latter. Former corporate-suit-turned-entrepreneur Kamal Manilal cofounded Roska Artisanal Ice Cream with his wife, Roshni, just over two years ago.

It was no overnight success and is still a work in progress but after starting up at home with a single ice-cream maker and an idea, the pair now has premises near Gold Reef City, seven full-time staff, and loads of ice cream.

And it is just the beginning, with plans to build the company into a global, premium dessert brand.

Corporate life was not panning out the way that Manilal had envisioned and career turbulence became a burdensome bugbear. Initially he was looking for something to take his mind off the hassle of daily toil.

And one morning, after browsing through Facebook memories, he came upon an old post and a picture of an ice-cream maker someone had gifted him a decade ago. It was a moment of inspiration and after dusting off the machine, he began experimenting.

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It was a passion project at first, but co-workers, family and friends soon started ordering large volumes of ice cream after tasting batches he shared in the beginning.

Said Manilal: “I almost threw in the towel a couple of months into the venture.”

But he was racking up growing numbers of orders from colleagues, friends and family. He said: “I’d been churning ice cream for a full week, and I was exhausted, my lower back was killing me. I was on my feet the entire weekend and it was a Sunday night, and I was outside washing dishes for hours on end. And I just thought to myself, I can’t do this. It was hard. I was exhausted and I just felt I needed help.”

His wife, Roshni, stepped up to the plate. That moment became the genesis of the Roska brand. A debut staffer was employed and trained, while branding expert Roshni developed a logo and packaging. The brand became a portmanteau of the couple’s first names.

Manilal developed the recipes and flavours himself, experimenting relentlessly. The outcome, an eggless creamy and premium product in delicious flavours.

He said: “As each day went by, I started coming up with various recipes. It took a lot of time and a lot of research. Eventually we had a catalogue of 17 flavours.”

He said part of his mission was to bring back the classic authenticity of ice cream he remembered from his childhood. To this end his research also included anecdotal input from retailers and restaurateurs to better understand taste-demand.

“A lot of the variants we developed were inspired by this input.”

Manilal said that working with his wife is invaluable. The honesty of a relationship is brought into the workplace, he said, and there is no pussyfooting around issues. “We tell it like it is to one another. It’s honest, it’s engaging and far more productive than the wide berths reality is sometimes afforded in the corporate world.”

In addition to its debut menu of flavours, Roska now produces smaller ice-cream cups and ice creams on sticks, named Belgian Chocolate Ice Cream Bars.

The large, now industrial looking ice-cream tanks and machines at the couple’s new southern Johannesburg factory churn all-day long to fill the line of freezers that hold stock for delivery to restaurants, bespoke ice cream stores and a growing number of supermarkets.

The couple are still on the floor, making the product alongside employees. It’s a hands-on business, fuelled by passion.

“We’d like to play with the big players in the market,” Manilal said of Roska’s future. “We would also like to take our product overseas too. We’ve got big aspirations.”