How I Built A $2.8 Million/Year Ice Cream Company

You can't ship anything other than overnight and with dry ice.

These are all added expenses.

The ice cream world is very hard.

My name is Pooja Bhavishi.

I am 42 years old.

I am the founder and CEO of Malai.

And in one year, my ice cream business brought in about $3 million.

Malai is so different because we go beyond chocolate and vanilla by introducing South Asian flavors like cardamom, rose, saffron, nutmeg into ice cream.

Flavors that are so ubiquitous to so many people around the country and the world that we want to mainstream into American flavors.

We just did a flavor change, and I like to make sure that the flavors taste like how they're supposed to taste.

It's a hard job, but

someone has to do it.

Welcome to Malai's production space.

This is where all the magic happens, where we produce some of our ice cream and all of our novelties for our scoop shop.

Kulfi pops, ice cream sandwiches, ice cream cakes.

Kulfi is actually a very traditional South Asian dessert.

We serve it in pop form.

It's a little bit chewier and denser than ice cream.

We pint everything up.

These are actually 3 of our most popular flavors.

It's our rose cinnamon roasted almonds, our cardamom pistachio crumble, and our mango and cream.

Um, we want to make sure there's plenty of these pints at each of our stores.

We have 4 brick-and-mortar Scoop shops.

One is in Brooklyn, one in Washington, D.C., one in Philadelphia, and one in Manhattan.

That's our newest one.

Malai has brought in about $3 million over the course of one year.

About 80% comes from our brick-and-mortar stores.

The rest of that revenue comes from wholesale, e-commerce, and catering.

Our scoop pricing starts at around $7.

It varies between different scoop shops in different locations.

Certainly tariffs, inflation, rising costs for transportation, storage fees, everything has gone up.

And so we have to take that into account when we're pricing our products as well.

We use very high-quality ingredients in our ice cream, including sustainably sourced dairy, sustainably sourced spices.

We have to constantly explain why we have higher prices.

It's no longer how it used to be.

It's historically a lesser-priced product, and it really recalibrated when our brand role models like Jeni's and Van Leeuwen came out and they really turned ice cream on its head.

They introduced really good quality ingredients.

They made really good quality products, and they let smaller players like us come in and actually compete.

I had always wanted a dessert business my entire life, since I was a child.

I love the idea of being in the business of providing joy, and that's what desserts do.

The idea of Malai came to me when I was actually hosting a Friendsgiving in the fall of 2014.

I pulled these two spices out of my pantry.

It was very simply a ginger and a star anise and robustly flavored this ice cream base.

And I just remember my friends being like, "We've never had anything like this before." I had no experience in the food industry.

I, of course, doubted myself.

But once I conceptualized Malai in that second to last semester of business school, it really felt like— I cannot describe it in any other way except that was the only direction I could

go in.

I just need to make it like more chocolatey.

So it didn't take me very long I mean, Friendsgiving is in November.

I started the business in January.

Yeah, that's better.

Okay.

I'll write this up.

Hahaha.

Malai means cream in North Indian languages like Hindi and Gujarati, but it figuratively translates to cream of the crop or the best of something.

My family is from the northwest part of India called Gujarat, so I thought it was a very apt name for this ice cream company.

We actually have our own proprietary blend of chai masala.

My grandmother used to grind her own spices together to make our family's chai masala.

This is what tastes like family to me.

The early days of Malai actually didn't need much funding at all.

I would use my grocery budget to make ice cream.

I needed to know exactly who my customer was.

What they were looking to buy, what their buying behavior is, and who I'm catering to.

If I didn't have that information, I had no viable business.

And so I would try to gather that data every single time I sold.

I had this whole stack of surveys that first summer.

And then at the end of that summer, it just so happens that a New York Times food writer walked by and our first piece of press happened to be in the New York Times.

And that basically propelled other parts of the business.

So I opened a friends and family round, and I thought it was to open our first brick and mortar.

It just so happens that nothing goes the way you plan in business, and so it took a while to find the space.

In the meantime, as we were considering other opportunities, we used those funds for working capital, other expansion opportunities.

We had pop-ups, we had food food halls that we were a part of.

And so it actually didn't go towards building our first brick and mortar.

So when we actually did build our first brick and mortar, we spent about $200,000 on credit cards, and that's how much debt the business went into.

We opened our first Malai brick and mortar location in Brooklyn in March of 2019.

I certainly looked at more traditional financing.

We hadn't developed enough business credit at that point to be able to qualify for those.

So the only option that I had in a short amount of time was credit card, and I needed to get it done to be able to open in time.

Going into any type of debt is scary.

However, it got us to the next step of growth and started bringing in a lot more revenue for us as well.

And so I just knew that we needed to get to that next step, whatever it took.

You don't have growth without spending money.

Every single time I ran payroll, I would have to think about whether or not I could take my salary that pay period.

It wasn't consistent until just a few years ago when I was able to consistently take a salary, which was a huge victory for me.

The first year that Malai was profitable was 2024.

The challenge in reaching profitability is actually our ambitions of growth.

To be able to achieve that growth, um, and to be able to hit profitability are two very challenging things happening simultaneously.

So we're really proud of the fact that we have hit profitability.

The total amount that we've fundraised so far is $1.8 million.

I have given up equity in the company to be able to take in the funding.

It's so interesting to think about 10, 11, 12 years ago where I did not know anything what I know now about this world, about this industry.

And I think that it was just passion that was driving it and like pure guts.

Indian flavors are not experimental.

These flavors have been enjoyed by billions of people all over the world on a daily basis, but also for generations.

That doesn't seem novel, that doesn't seem trendy, that doesn't seem new.

And so the fact that we're introducing it to the mainstream American market and the fact that we're a leader in that actually makes me so proud.

So we're just getting started.