Gelato Messina founder Nick Palumbo ready to take on the world

Gelato Messina founder Nick Palumbo is gearing up for a global expansion. But it’s been a rocky road to the top for Australia’s gelato king.

Gelato Messina founder Nick Palumbo at the company’s headquarters in Marrickville, Sydney. Picture: Justin Lloyd

Every year Nick Palumbo and his family travel to the historic Sicilian port city of Messina – the city where his family’s roots are and the place that sparked a life-long passion for crafting the world’s best gelato.

It was there, where as an eight-year old on his first trip to the motherland, that his grandfather introduced him to the traditional Sicilian breakfast of brioche with granita.

Inspired by his Sicilian culinary adventure, Palumbo dedicated himself to bringing authentic Italian gelato to Australia. And now he’s gearing up for a global expansion, taking the Gelato Messina brand to the world.

It’s a long way from the cafes and restaurants of Adelaide’s east end, where Palumbo first started experimenting with gelato making while running the old Cafe Buongiorno on Rundle St in the mid-1990s.

Gelato was only just emerging onto Australia’s dessert scene, with local producers scrambling to source the best flavour pastes from Italy rather than using the natural ingredients found in most gelato today.

Palumbo was one of the first movers in lifting the quality of Australian gelato, spending a couple of years mastering his craft in Adelaide before moving to Sydney and opening the first Gelato Messina store in 2002.

Nick Palumbo pictured at the Darlinghurst store in 2007.

“It was a space which was really underrepresented in the mid-1990s and the quality was definitely not amazing,” he says.

“And so I thought this is something I can try to be the absolute best at. For me it was always about not creating gelato flavours the way, at the time, they were traditionally made. It was creating gelato flavours from absolute scratch, using proper raw materials.

“And to be fair, there are now a lot of people that have invested the time, energy and resources to use real ingredients. But at the time there was no one doing that.”

From a single store in Darlinghurst, Gelato Messina has gone on to become a powerhouse brand, with more than 30 stores in Australia, Hong Kong and a recently opened outlet in Singapore.

Only Gelatissimo, another homegrown business that franchises 50 outlets in Australia and another 20 offshore, is thought to be larger.

But it’s been a rocky road to the top for Gelato Messina, from navigating Sydney’s exorbitant rental market to a failed foray into the US a decade ago.

After moving to Sydney in 1999 with grand plans to create a gelato empire, Palumbo ended up taking a job with Italian chocolate and confectionery giant Ferrero while he searched for the right site for his first store. That took three years.

The view of Messina's port with the gold Madonna della Lettera statue.

But while at Ferrero, Palumbo became inspired by the brand’s focus on authenticity, innovation and quality – three trademarks of the Gelato Messina brand that have been key to its success, and which continue to drive the company.

“The concept of mass-niche and the concept of doing beautiful things, not ripping off your customers and giving your customers an affordable luxury – that’s far and away the most incredible career lesson I could have ever had,” he says.

“And it gave me even more incentive, it gave me even more direction in how to build Messina.

“Today we treat every recipe, every flavour that we make, like its own unique recipe – there’s nothing universal or ubiquitous in this business.

“From the onset, as we grew, we promised ourselves that we would continuously innovate. We come up with a new flavour every single week. Maybe 5 to 10 per cent of them will never come back and see the light of day ... but for the remaining ones, they end up coming back on a rotation.

“The thing that we have, that I see our competitors still struggling with, is the ability to be nimble. And as we’ve grown to 30-plus stores, the factory spends a huge amount of time in logistics and in production to ensure that every single store in Australia, Hong Kong and now Singapore, offers the very highest quality.”

Dua Lipa popped into the Bondi store during her recent Australian tour. Picture: James D. Morgan/Getty Images

Some of the most popular ‘special’ flavours have included ‘red velvet’ – a cream cheese gelato with red velvet cake – and ‘little bloke’ – a peanut gelato with malt-o-milk biscuits and nutella fudge. But the more traditional ‘pistachio praline’ remains the fan favourite, according to Palumbo, while British singer Dua Lipa opted for salted coconut and mango when she popped into the Bondi store earlier this year while on tour.

Having ridden the social media wave, with 288,000 followers on Instagram, Gelato Messina has become more than just a chain of gelato stores. It has expanded into cakes and pastries, cooking classes, a cookbook, and late last year launched a new product range with Woolworths.

It even owns a dairy farm near Shepparton where it produces its signature Jersey milk, and a hazelnut farm in Seymour, north of Melbourne, where it plans to roast its own nuts as an alternative to its imported products from Italy.

Six more domestic store openings are planned later this year across Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and Geelong, while a third overseas store in Dubai is planned by the end of the year under a licensing agreement with a local operator.

Gelato Messina is known for its mix of traditional and original flavours.

Palumbo says future expansion is focused on overseas markets, including plans to return to the US, where Gelato Messina ran a store for two years in Las Vegas before closing the doors in 2017.

“We’re working on something really interesting for New York and we hope to be open by August,” he said.

“That’ll be a new concept ... and once we open that concept, then we will start rolling out Messina, starting from New York and then moving across America.

“We’re dedicated to building an overseas business, and that for us is what we see as the future.”

Palumbo and brother Danny retain a majority stake in Gelato Messina, with the rest of the company shared between 10 business partners.

Resisting several approaches from investors over the years, Palumbo says the focus remains on taking Gelato Messina to the world, and potentially, one day, handing the business to the next generation.

“For me this is my life. I wake up in the morning and what drives me is how do we make this brand remain relevant, honest, beautiful and trustworthy, and hopefully, at the end of it, make some money.”

Originally published as Gelato Messina founder Nick Palumbo ready to take on the world