Sweet way to get your greens

Her ice-cream made from cauliflower, drew hundreds of people to the Massey University site at Fieldays to sample this unique dessert. It comes in three flavours, strawberry, chocolate and mint and looks and tastes like ordinary ice-cream.

What started off 20-years-ago as just making delicious dairy alternatives for her children and their friends is about to be launched nationwide on the menu of the Hell Pizza chain.

“When our family went vegan and there were no alternatives on the market, so I tried making ice-cream out of different things like chickpeas, lentils, carrots, pumpkins and cauliflower,” she told Rural News. “As it turned out, cauliflower came out the best because it was creamier, had a subtle flavour and the colours were neutral.”

The breakthrough for Matheson came when she pitched her idea at a ‘start up’ weekend in Taranaki. The idea caught the imagination of Milli Kumar, who’d just completed a food tech degree at Massey University, and the pair decided to form a company. Then came the task of scaling up the product and for this they enlisted the help of fourth year Massey students to help them.

“The home-made formulation that I made was only in small batches like one litre at a time, whereas we were looking at producing 600 litres at a time,” Matheson explains. “To do that the process changes and ingredients level changes and the equipment changes – so it’s taken us two years to get from a benchtop formula to what we have now.”

Sourcing cauliflowers for ice-cream is also quite special. Matheson has a deal with a company called Perfectly Imperfect, which obtains the product from growers that the supermarkets won’t accept because they don’t meet their very strict specifications. She says there is nothing wrong with the cauliflowers and they are supporting growers and the environment.

“It’s been a fun, crazy wonderful journey and I am looking forward to the future and in the process hopefully making a difference,” she says.