Planning a Summer Gelato Range in Australia

A summer gelato range is sold between November and February and decided some time before that, whether or not anyone sits down to decide it. If nobody does, it gets decided in December by whatever is left in the cool room, by whoever is on shift, in the busiest week of the year.

The work is not difficult. It is a cabinet plan, a short list of decisions about how each flavour is made, and an order placed while there is still time to change it. October is the last comfortable month to do all three.

Start from the cabinet, not the flavour list

The constraint on a summer range is not imagination. It is the number of wells, how fast each one turns over, and how many batches the kitchen can produce on a hot Saturday. Write those three numbers down before writing a single flavour.

Then give every well a job. A range that works through summer usually has three kinds of flavour in it, and the mistake is letting one kind crowd out the others.

Anchors are the flavours that sell every week of the year: pistachio, hazelnut, chocolate, fior di latte, a vanilla. They carry the cabinet in winter and they still carry a large share of it in summer, which is easy to forget when the fruit is exciting.

Fruit is where summer volume moves. Mango, strawberry, lemon, passionfruit, coconut — the flavours customers walk in already wanting when it is 35 degrees.

One or two talking points are the flavours people photograph, ask about and come back for. They earn their well by bringing customers in, not necessarily by volume.

Decide the number of wells for each before choosing what goes in them. It is far easier to argue about which fruit gets the fourth fruit well than to notice in January that there is no well left for it.

Fruit: decide, flavour by flavour, how it is made

Every fruit flavour on the board is made one of three ways, and each one costs something different.

Scratch, from fresh fruit. The best result when the fruit is genuinely good, and the most labour. It also carries the risk that Australian fruit arrives at a different sugar and acid from the one the recipe assumed — Sorbet Balancing for Australian Fruit covers how to measure for that rather than trust it.

A fruit paste over a base. A paste such as Fragola-Fragole 100, dosed at 100 grams per litre of water and carrying chopped fruit, gives a consistent strawberry every batch. A mango paste does the same job for the flavour that is at once the easiest fruit to sell in Australia and the hardest to satisfy.

A complete fruit base. Conca d'Oro 500 is dissolved into water at 500 grams per litre, in eight flavours from mango and lime to coconut. Sugar, flavour and stabiliser are already balanced. It is the fastest route to a full fruit cabinet, and the right answer for the flavours that need to be reliable rather than remarkable.

Most gelaterias end up running all three: two or three scratch flavours built around whatever is best that month, and the rest of the fruit wells filled from pastes and complete bases so that the attention goes where it earns something.

Between scratch and complete there is one more decision, about texture. A low-dose fruit base such as Nolat Base Frutta pushes the result toward a sorbet; Base Frutella 50 uses vegetable fibre to push it toward creaminess. Both are dosed at 50 grams per litre of water. Choose per fruit: a loud fruit like passionfruit suits the sorbet structure, a gentle one like peach usually reads better creamier.

Read the dosage basis before you cost the range

Fruit products are almost always dosed per litre of water. Cream pastes are usually dosed per litre of mix. A yoghurt or soft-serve base may be quoted against water or milk. These are not interchangeable, and treating them as the same number is the most common way a summer costing goes wrong — the batch comes out too weak or too strong, and the cost per litre on the spreadsheet is fiction.

Every product page on this site states which basis its dosage is quoted against. Cost each summer flavour against the right one before committing to it.

Anchors stay, and get easier

Summer is not the time to reinvent pistachio. The anchors should be the most settled recipes in the kitchen, so that the people making them in January do not have to think.

That argues for choosing anchor products for consistency and cost per litre rather than novelty. Pistacchio Puro 100%, at 80 grams per litre of mix, is built for exactly that role: a direct pistachio that reads clearly across a busy board, at a cost that lets pistachio run every day rather than as a special.

Yoghurt and soft serve

Yoghurt reads as light, which is what a customer reaches for in the heat. It is also one of the harder flavours to make well from scratch: the tang and the texture pull against each other. Gran Yoga 500 is a complete yoghurt base at 500 grams per litre of water or milk — water for a cleaner tang, milk for a rounder body — and it takes that problem off the summer list entirely.

If the site runs a soft-serve machine, Yogo Soft 400 is the yoghurt member of the Soft 400 line, at 350 to 400 grams per litre: built for whoever is on shift to get the same result as whoever was on yesterday.

The talking-point well

Every summer has a flavour the internet has decided on. Pistacchio Dubai, a kataifi and pistachio cream variegate dosed at 10 to 20 per cent of tub weight, is that flavour at the moment. It is worth a well.

It is also a fashion product, and fashion products end without notice. Buy it for the season in front of you, not for a year, and decide in advance what replaces it when interest drops. The well matters more than the flavour in it.

Heat changes the recipe, not just the menu

A recipe that holds in a 22-degree shop in August does not necessarily hold with the door open in January. Cabinets run harder, product near the glass softens, and every opening lets in humid air that refreezes on the surface as coarse crystals. Siting, servicing and loading the cabinet itself are covered in Gelato Cabinet Performance in an Australian Summer.

Plan for it in the recipes, not in December. Lean summer fruit flavours toward the firm end of their window. For gelato presented in display wells, a corrective such as Technoice at 10 to 20 grams per litre of mix changes softness and spatula behaviour without moving anything else in the recipe — but weigh it, because two grams is a large error at that scale. If texture is degrading through the day rather than being wrong at extraction, the problem is water management rather than balance, and Solving Ice Crystallisation covers the difference. Any change to sugar or solids should go back through the balance sheet in How to Balance a Gelato Recipe.

A timeline that works

October. Fix the cabinet plan and the well count. Run test batches of every new flavour, cost each one against the right dosage basis, and place the order. Stocked lines are the easy part; anything that has to be indented takes longer, so ask about it now rather than plan around it in November.

November. Re-measure the scratch fruit as it comes into season and adjust. Train whoever will be making the anchors and the bases, so the recipes do not live in one person's head.

December to February. Change as little as possible. Write down what sold, what did not, and which wells sat untouched.

March. Read those notes while they are still fresh. They are the most useful document you will have when planning next summer — and next summer's planning starts in August.