Feb 14, 2020
As the fourth generation enters the business, meet the Ghais
Source &courtesy : mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com
As the fourth generation enters the business, meet the Ghais, who gave the city its first ice-cream parlour and put their products on the world map. By the mid-1980s, Iqbal Krishen ‘IK’ Ghai’s ice-creams were a household name, not only in India, but also in the Middle East. He had also earned a reputation for being an intrepid businessman, having bought a dilapidated building on Marine Drive and turned it into a bustling hotel in 1959. All of this would have been inconceivable to him when, at age 20, IK made his way from Jhelum to Delhi in 1939 and set up a small shop in Connaught Place. He would hand-churn ice-cream and sell it to American GIs — stationed there during the China-Burma- India operations started in 1942 — for one ‘anna’ a scoop.
Today, the irony is not lost on IK’s 22year-old great grandson Shivaan, who has just launched his own brand of low-calorie ice-cream. After all, it was his family that put India-made ice-creams on the world map. “Rather than insist, I join the family business, my father urged me to find my own calling,” says Shivaan, who graduated from NYU Stern School of Business in 2019. His father, Gaurav, who took over the reins of the company in the 1990s, says that he didn’t want Shivaan to feel like that was expected of him, especially with a Wall Street career on the cards. “Business can be very stressful,” says Gaurav, who discovered this when he introduced India to a popular American ice-cream brand in 1993. It cost him $100,000 to set up a single outlet in Mumbai. While the product had to be priced accordingly, “no one wanted to pay Rs. 32 per scoop,” he says. Seated beside him in the family office in Colaba, Gaurav’s father Ravi adds, “Back then, it cost more than beer.” Gaurav’s team incorporated a slew of changes, which turned the business around. It included a shift to smaller outlets that focused on deliveries and takeaways. Shivaan, who will take his brand, The Brooklyn Creamery, to other metros soon, will largely follow this model. Aside from banking on online sales to drive profits, he’s relying on the expertise of a team “with 40 years of experience”, he says. Sweetened with sugars that occur naturally in milk, and with plant-based sweeteners, Shivaan’s 12 offerings range from classics like kulfi to new-age flavours like sea salt caramel, and a Rs. 65 scoop (120 ml), he says, “contains only 89 calories”.
A cool family history: (From left) Shivaan, Ravi and Gaurav stand before a picture of the man who started it all, IK Ghai
He also plans to open an ice-cream parlour at Kemps Corner. Incidentally, Yankee Doodle, the parlour his grandfather launched in the 1980s, “was Mumbai’s first ice-cream parlour,” says Ravi, of the open-to-sky property, which was located in the family’s Marine Drive hotel. Ravi played a pivotal role in whipping IK’s ice-cream business into an international entity — even though what made him a regular in the society pages in the 1990s were his big parties, love for horse racing, and the popularity of the nightclub he launched and christened with his initials (which would draw the likes of NusliWadia, Vijay Mallya, Shah Rukh and Salman Khan). More than a decade earlier, Ravi was instrumental in expanding the ice-cream business. While holidaying in Dubai in the mid-1970s, he was quick to forge connections that led to building an icecream factory in Sharjah.
“The Arabs would buy 24 cups at a time, and eat them as a main course,” Ravi recalls. A casual chat with a diner at a restaurant in Muscat helped him bag an order to deliver ice-cream for the entire population of Muscat to enjoy on November 18, Oman’s National Day, he says. By that time, the company had a wide array of offerings. “We had imported state-of-the-art machines.” This was before India’s economic liberalisation. “To get equipment worth $10,000, we had to give an undertaking saying we would export $20,000 worth of merchandise. We had to buy the export credits from exporters to make that possible,” says Ravi, who joined his father in the business after graduating from Cornell University in 1966. Interestingly, rather than his formal schooling, he credits the life experience he got while working at the Frankfurter Hof hotel in Germany — where he waited tables and washed dishes for nine months, before starting at Cornell — for his success. “It teaches you about life,” says the doting grandfather, who wanted Shivaan to learn about human relations in a similar manner. The years away from home taught Ravi to stick to a simple diet, but Shivaan loves desserts. “I weighed close to 100 kg when I was 16,” Shivaan says, remembering how his great grandmother Krishna would prepare “the best gulabjamuns and gajjarkahalwa in the world”. The healthy lifestyle he adopted in his teens helped him shed 20 kg and bulk up. “I wanted to marry my fondness for good food with the idea of staying healthy and fit. And since ice-cream has been such an important part of my family business, I thought I’d start with that,” he says.
Churning success from scratch
In Notes on the Great Indian Circus, Khushwant Singh mentions IK Ghai in the context of his father’s parties: “Sometime in the 1940s, a young Punjabi man from Lahore came to see him [Sir Sobha Singh, a prominent real estate developer in Delhi] and persuaded him to let him make ice-creams for his parties. My father agreed to give him a trial. For the next many parties, this young man and a friend came to our house, carrying their own churner, ice, saltpetre and the ice-cream mixture…The guests admitted they had never tasted anything like it before…That was the humble beginning of Iqbal K.Ghai, who was later given the title of Maharajah of Ice-Creams and chosen by the BBC as one of seven foremost self-made persons in the world.”