Published: 28 March 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
When Roz Kaldor-Aroni realised that making ice cream was all about mathematics, she was hooked. The founder of Elato shares her passion for sugar, fat and helping those less fortunate.
Roz Kaldor-Aroni was always interested in the frozen treat. Then again, who isn’t. But she became really, really interested when she discovered that it was all about maths.
“I was doing some hobbying with ice cream and my husband bought me a recipe book which had a ‘highly recommended’ by Heston Blumenthal on the cover and I looked straight at the back of the book and it was all mathematics,” says Kaldor-Aroni, who couldn’t believe she was involved in a dessert which revolved around her favourite university subject. “Anything with maths I’m excited about.”
To call it “hobbying” understates how far she had already taken her ice cream interest. “First I enrolled myself in some online classes, then we were going to be in Italy and I attended a couple of classes at Carpigiani Gelato University (near Bologna)."
When she returned home, she decided she needed to know more, and as luck would have it, Carpigiani was running a beginner and intermediate class on making gelato in Melbourne and she attended both. While she loved them, “there wasn’t enough maths for me”, says Kaldor-Aroni, who then enrolled in the advanced class back in Italy. “And that was all maths, the entire class. We were being taught by this experienced gelato maker who just happened to be very good at maths.”
A Sydney lawyer by training, Kaldor-Aroni worked in intellectual property for a big law firm, then moved to work in-house on patenting for a biotech research company. She relocated to Melbourne (“my husband’s a Melbourne boy”), completed an MBA and became a commercial manager with Telstra.
Fast forward to November 2021 - just 18 months ago - and Elato was born. The artisan ice cream with an impressive three-star health rating is now available in four flavours (and the promise of more to come) from nearly 400 stores across Australia.
What turned Kaldor-Aroni’s adventures in frozen desserts from personal interest to a profession? She says it was a decision to leverage her knowledge and skills to do good.
Having co-founded and, for a number of years, run AUSiMED, a not-for-profit that supports medical research collaboration between Australia and Israel, the organisation was “pretty much self-sustaining and it didn’t really need me anymore. It was time for me to make my next career move.” While she wasn’t sure how she was going to work a “do-good” element into her new business, she knew that more training was required. So she headed back to Italy.
It was in Italy that she became obsessed with the idea of making her gelato healthier. But the constant barrier she came up against was sugar. “The amount of sugar in gelato is huge,” says Kaldor-Aroni. In earlier classes she had taken on low-sugar gelato they had substituted in sweeteners, but they caused diarrhea, so that wasn’t an option. “Sugar gives you that beautiful creamy texture. There’s no other real substitute.”
Kaldor-Aroni made a shocking discovery. While gelato was low in fat but high in sugar, ice cream was the opposite. "Since we now know that sugar is the enemy, not fat, I was learning the wrong product. I’d backed the wrong horse."
It was at this point that she made a shocking discovery. While gelato was low in fat but high in sugar, ice cream was the opposite. “Very high fat, much much lower in sugar. And since we now know that sugar is the enemy, not fat, I was learning the wrong product. I’d backed the wrong horse.”
Changing course, she headed to Canada for a masterclass with Professor Douglas Goff, co-author of what is considered to be the industry bible - Ice Cream. She already knew that ice cream used 30% less sugar than gelato, but a further revelation came in a class on lactose-free products when the professor said that once you break the lactose down into its two parts, glucose and galactose, it becomes three times as sweet.
Using the enzyme lactase - the same enzyme that’s found in the human gut - Kaldor-Aroni is able to split the lactose in two and get more sweetness from her reduced sugar content. So why isn’t everybody in the industry doing it? She claims that the first reason is the cost involved in adding the enzyme.
The second reason is legal. She has a patent on the process she’s developed of adding soluble fibre to compensate for the changes caused by the enzyme. “So if you try and combine soluble fibre with lactose-free, in Australia anyway, you’ll fall foul of our patent.”
Fortunately for Kaldor-Aroni, her unusual mix of qualifications - degrees in Applied Chemistry and Law - has allowed her to both develop her product and then legally protect it.
I suggest to her that her whole life has been getting ready for ice cream. “Yes, I’m glad you said that! That’s exactly how I feel. Every step of the way has led me to where I am now. Also, most start-up ice cream brands don’t have people with the skill and knowledge I have. They have to buy it in. I’m one of the few product developers in the market that basically develops her own products.”
She’s really a one-woman show. “I don’t have any employees. I have a number of consultants who work with me, including a contract manufacturer, so I have a virtual business.”
Originally, Kaldor-Aroni did investigate setting up her own production as a social enterprise, employing disadvantaged kids, but the costs for ice cream manufacturing are much greater than for gelato because the equipment is much more expensive. (Specifically, a homogeniser to smash the dairy fats, and a high-pressure churn which creates a lighter mouthfeel.)
The business model she settled on was giving half of Elato’s profits to OzHarvest, to use the enjoyment of ice cream to give back to the community and save the planet.
Better, she thought, to outsource the production and establish a sound scalable business that could quickly give back through its profits, maximising the potential for good.
Given her mission to do good, the business model Kaldor-Aroni settled on was giving half of Elato’s profits to OzHarvest: “To use the enjoyment of ice cream to give back to the community and save the planet,” she says.
And it’s more than the profits which do good. Every stage of Elato’s production aims to be sustainable and ethical, from the recyclable tubs to the sourcing of fair-trade flavours. Their triple vanilla ice-cream uses Heilala Tongan vanilla, which empowers local communities.
The cold brew decaf cafe latte - which has already won two gold medals, most recently at the 2023 Sydney Royal Easter Show - uses Colombian coffee from World Vision’s Change Coffee brand. And the organic vegan chocolate ice cream uses Solomon Islands chocolate from the social enterprise maker Solomons Gold.
After all her clever work around breaking down lactose, why did Aroni-Kaldor opt to make her chocolate ice cream vegan? “If you make a dairy ice cream it has to have 10% milk fat to call it ice cream. That’s the legal requirement. And you can only have 13% fat in total in ice cream or you get this fat palate thing, which is horrible. So that left me with 3% for the chocolate which wasn’t enough.”
"I’m not a tokenistic vegan brand. If it makes sense, we make it a vegan product. And if it doesn’t, we make it dairy. We are agnostic. It just has to taste delicious."
Her solution was to go vegan, allowing her to use the amount of chocolate she needed and the amount of vegan fat to make her "ice cream"’ delicious, without having to worry about the legal limitations of having it dairy-based. “I’m not a tokenistic vegan brand. If it makes sense, we make it a vegan product. And if it doesn’t, we make it dairy. We are completely agnostic as to where we go. It just has to taste delicious.”
Kaldor-Aroni has just launched her fourth flavour, which already carries a Sydney Royal gold medal. It incorporates a ripple of an “incredible fig jam” she discovered a few years ago, which she had been spooning on to her ice cream at home. It’s made at SisterWorks, a Melbourne not-for-profit that provides programs for asylum-seekers and refugee women. “It’s a joy to work with them and the product is out of this world,” she says.
The ice cream market is already huge and is hard to break into. What difficulties has she faced getting her product into stores? “What I’ve found is because I’m quite passionate, I get a lot of cut through. I get a seat at the table because we send samples and people go, ‘Wow, that’s great! We’ll meet her'.”
Kaldor-Aroni is so confident about Elato that, in the early days, she would send out blind tasting samples of her three flavours and the closest major competitor for each one. “I would say to people, choose the best, and basically 90% of the time they would choose my product over the lead competitor. That was very, very powerful selling.”
Photo: Roz Kaldor-Aroni at work (supplied)
