The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mansoor Ahmed, Founder and CEO of Heritage Kulfi

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

Mansoor Ahmed, Founder and CEO of Heritage Kulfi Heritagekulfi.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

Welcome to the big show, the big circus tent in the podcast sky that doesn't make any sense there's no podcast tent in the sky and there is now anyway i don't know what the piece i just make it up folks as it goes welcome to the anonymous or the random anonymous ramble i have no idea what i'm rambling about but it sounded kind of funny when my head but it doesn't sound funny when it's coming out of my head. And hopefully that makes you giggle. Anyway, guys, that's the best I can do for the Rambo this time. Just think of a big podcast tent in the sky.

I think I'm going to go get the dot com on that after the show. Be sure to refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. As always, you know the drill. Today we're going to be talking about ice cream. We had a company and a CEO, founder, ship us a bunch of his tasty ice cream. And we got to indulge in it for several weeks. I try and make ice cream last because I'm wearing enough ice cream as it is when it comes to sugar. But he sent us some of his amazing ice cream.

And we got a chance to sample it. And I think you're going to love it as well. we have mansour ahmed on the show with us today he's the founder of heritage kulfi it's a south asian inspired ice cream company based in princeton new jersey uh he is originally a new yorker and attended manhattan college and columbia university and he recently uh made his way to the Ice Cream College at the Pennsylvania State University. And I should do that. I've eaten enough ice cream to be awarded some sort of degree, haven't I? I don't know. But my diabetic doctor says so. Anyway, welcome to the show, Mansour. How are you?

Thank you for having me, Chris. Very excited to be on and talk more about ice cream, which I have now discovered is my current passion. There you go. Well, if you're going to have a passion, have a passion that has sugar in it. That's my policy. I don't know. Go ahead. My diabetic doctor disapproves of my policy, but I'm just kidding.

I don't have diabetes. So welcome to the show. Give us your dot coms where people can find you on the internet, please. It's heritagegulfi.com. I can spell that for you. That's H-E-R-I-T-A-G-E and K-U-L-F-I.

There you go. So, it looks like you took some twists and turns in life. Tell us some of your upbringing and kind of what brought you to the point that you discovered that ice cream is your thing. So I grew up in a traditional South Asian household and as any kid I enjoyed desserts and anything that was put in front of me and kind of fast forwarding a bit I didn't really appreciate these kinds of really decadent desserts and foods I was eating. And that comes in part from growing and being

able to appreciate and understand. And so recently when I was engaged in doing all the R&D for the brand, I really got to engage with each of the flavors, the ingredients, and find out all kinds of cool, interesting stuff about them. There you go. And that allowed me to really engage these ingredients to showcase them in the flavors that I have. So what were you doing before this? And what made you want to turn the key on going into ice cream?

What made you say, hey, that's where I'm going? So right kind of after pursuing my master's at Columbia, I had an opportunity. A family friend had reached out and asked if I would do some marketing and some graphics design for a product that they had. And I said, why not? I mean, it seems like a great opportunity. I can be creative and also engage with the local South Asian community that I was already a part of. I enjoy driving. So it allowed me to travel a lot as well as kind of like flex my language skills and stay connected and create something that

previously didn't exist. And so I got an introduction to, then I started my own frozen distribution company in about 2014 and then did that for quite a bit. And COVID changed things up a bit, quite a bit because Nework city was pretty hardly pretty hard impacted and um that's when i decided to take a step back and work on my own brand and try to share something unique and innovative in the frozen dessert world there you go a lot of people with covid you know they kind of reanalyze their life and said you know i i think i want to do something that i enjoy and maybe find my purpose in life as opposed to doing this other life for other people that's pretty fleeting no matter where you call it. So you might as well do something you enjoy.

Absolutely. And ice cream and food in general, it's so emotional. So kind of tapping into that and creating that experience for people. I grew up in New York, so I also have an emotional connection to pizza. At the same time, it's interesting to tap into that and in a way, create a new experience for

people. Hey, has anybody done pizza ice cream? That might be a thing. They have, yes. They have? Where do I order that? Find where to order the dim! Yeah, I'm just kidding. Pepperoni ice cream. I don't know about that.

I feel a bit of a more purist and taking a traditional approach. Yeah. I don't know about pizza and mushrooms, and then somebody's going to put pineapple in it. You know, that's going to happen. There's something for everyone. I mean, pineapple is good in pizza or in ice cream, but I don't know about pepperoni. That's something for everyone. I mean, pineapple is good in pizza or in ice cream, but I don't know about pepperoni.

That's kind of interesting. You might have to be drunk or high for that one. So you decide to start an ice cream company. How does this work? Help other entrepreneurs understand the roadmap of, you know, not to do what you do, of course, but, you know, the road of, like, how do you discover this is the thing you want to do? How do you develop the idea, et cetera, et cetera? Of course.

So, I mean, the road of an entrepreneur is a lot of satisfying moments, but a lot of… Wait, there's satisfying moments during this journey that I'm supposed to be on? It definitely happens. When do those happen? Those come and go pretty quickly. A lot of the journey is uphill and full of all kinds of reflections, let's say.

And so I got, I guess the way I started was initially understanding what assets I did have. I did have a strong connection to my community and knew that if I could bring a great product, they would accept it. And also, it had an opportunity to launch within an existing account base. And so the part where I did have to learn was how to commercially make ice cream. And so I do not have any culinary background or experience in commercial ice cream making. And so I reached out to industry professionals. I mean, the great thing about, I guess, any industry is that there's a lot of people out there that would help you and guide you in

different ways, explain to you different things, and you can benefit from their experience in this regard. So I was pursuing that at the same time, and then I managed it. So each segment of the brand was its own journey. There was the graphic designing part of creating the packaging that's unique and appealing. And that required a lot of market research.

And then there was the flavor development part of each recipe. So for example, I went through probably a hundred different kinds of vanillas to choose from and then different variations of them. And each one is unique in its own way. There's a vanilla, there's vanilla products, there's extracts and flavorings and so my goal was to recreate a certain kind of experience and nostalgia with these flavors and also make something that's authentic in certain

ways but accessible because i wanted um the brand and all the flavors to appeal to a wider audience. There you go. Yeah. So the journey continues. Each day is an adventure. There you go. Now, there's something that sounds pretty unique about your ice cream, the healthiness of it. I'm trying to pull up the back of one on your website,

but I remember there's like, I think there's non-GMO or there's, tell us about that. It's true. I mean, I wanted to take the approach of making a traditional kind of ice cream where you use a handful of ingredients and the simpler and better ingredients, the end product you're going to get is going to be superior in many ways. So yes, it is egg free. It's vegetarian-friendly. We use pure organic cane sugar. It is GMO-free. And so you'll find that our ice creams are basically milk, cream, sugar, and the one ingredient that makes up our flavor.

And it makes all the difference. I mean, I've learned to get sugar out of my diet for the largest part and then eat good, healthy foods. And once you kind of get the addiction of sugar and all the crap you eat out of your pie hole face, you start to redevelop a new taste for what things really taste like as opposed to this jacked up high fructose corn syrup. Exactly, exactly. things really taste like as opposed to, you know, this jacked up high fructose corn syrup. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, ice cream, I think ice cream fundamentally is a enjoyable and kind of definite experience and you don't necessarily need to eat volumes of it to get a good taste or feel good about it.

So that's why we try using the best ingredients. You can pack a lot of flavor and taste in a small amount. Yeah, and that's one of the things I really enjoyed about it. I don't like normal commercial ice cream. I'm not an ice cream person, but we really enjoyed the flavors you sent to us, and I was really impressed. And, you know, because normally when I eat commercial ice cream, it's just like shoving a pound of freaking sugar in my mouth.

And I'm just like, you know, it's got some fake flavoring. And I've learned to tell the difference. One thing that's interesting, you sent us the Alfonso mango. Did I pronounce it correctly? That is, yes. Yes. And you've got actually real Alfonso mangoes. Yeah, so Alfonso mangoes are a particular kind of a mango.

They're known as the king of mangoes. And I import mine directly from india where they grow and um yeah they pack the best flavor and so i use a ton of them in the ice cream and so a good way to kind of find out you know reading ingredient listing is how they're kind of listed and they're listed in terms of what is most dominant in a particular package product there you'll find that in our packaging it'll be a milk cream and alfonso mangoes in there and so use a lot of them and rely on the actual kind of natural ingredient to bring that flavor forward as opposed to extracts or flavorings there you go real stuff in it. I think you sent us the cardamom chai, and then you sent us the rose water, and then you sent us the pistachio.

You also have coconut, earl gray, vanilla bean, and saffron. And I really loved, as we talked before in the green room, I really a real pistachio experience where I could taste part of the nuttiness of the shell or that salt, you know, pistachio shell, that roasted sort of taste that you kind of get off of the shell. I could taste a little bit of that in the thing. It wasn't overpowering, but it was enough to give you the full experience of a pistachio. Absolutely. Pistachio is my favorite. So I kind of really went overboard with the pistachios. We use, and you know, trying to find a good pistachio ice cream in the market is almost impossible.

Yeah. So I use a lot of pistachios in the base of it. I also salt and roast the pistachios, and so that kind of leans into, I guess, the genetical makeup of a pistachio and brings that flavor forward. There you go. I mean, I think it's probably the best pistachio I've ever had. It really tastes like a real pistachio. And the experience of sitting and eating, you know, a bunch of them, you know, you kind of get a little bit of the salt or the shell sort of roast.

The shell is kind of part of the roasted thing. I'll often get feedback and people have pistachios and they're like, oh, wow, it tastes like a real pistachio. And to me, that's exciting. And also like, oh, man, have you been being scammed this whole time where you're surprised by the fact that it tastes like what it says? Yeah, you see the artificial flavors and a bunch of flavoring, coloring you can't figure out on the back of most commercial ice creams. So there's the rose water, too. That was really good. What does that mean from a rose?

So the rose water, the inspiration behind this particular flavor was a kind of a summer drink that I grew up with. I would say I would compare it to a a banana float where you have like the base is like a vanilla ice cream and then there's a rose syrup that goes on it and so this was kind of extremely uh very nostalgic for me uh all my summers i would have this but couldn't really find that that taste represented in ice cream so yeah we use water, which is essentially distilled from roses. So, I mean, everyone knows what a rose smells like. And it always gets people by surprise, this particular flavor. It does. Some people are immediately like, oh, we love this.

And it's like emotional and nostalgic for them. And for others, it carries a kind of perfume that they grew up with. I've heard that, oh, this tastes just like grandma's perfume. And so that's kind of the range. But, you know, it's one of my best-selling flavors. I liked it. And I didn't – at first when I saw the front of it, I'm like,

am I drinking a rose ice cream? But I'm like, yeah, it tastes great. I don't care. It's a very delicate balance because if you do it less, then you don't achieve that flavor profile. If you do it too much, then you do run the risk of it tasting like a perfume, essentially. And the cardamom chai, what is a cardamom?

What is that? Cardamom is a spice um and i grew up with um chai as as a people i guess sometimes grow up with coffee or tea and so chai is um i would say immediately um nostalgic and personal for all south asians they have their own version of it, what kind of spices they put into it. And so what I wanted to do was replicate this chai that I grew up with. And so in order to make this flavor, I use a traditional steeping method that people use for tea. And that's really what imparts that natural flavor. And so I developed a proprietary steeping process, and we'll go ahead and dump in hundreds of pounds of black tea leaves, cardamoms, and cloves.

And there's no other way to kind of replicate that. And, yeah, it's exciting. I didn't grow up with, like, spicy chai in a certain way, so this is a bit more balanced. The cardamom and the cloves do give a bit of smokiness to it. It's great tasting. So you got the ones that we didn't sample were Earl Grey, Coconut, Saffron, and Villalobine. Why did you pick these certain flavors?

Why did you go with these? Altogether, I think the goal was to demonstrate a kind of expertise in these different areas. So there's the fruits, and then there's the spices, and then there's the florals, like the vanilla and the rose water. And the goal was to present all these flavors to as wide of an audience and allow people to kind of choose what would be their introduction. So oftentimes when I go to a retailer or I'll hear back from customers, they'll tell me, oh, we're not too familiar with the saffron, but we'll try the Earl Grey. And then they enjoy that and then often build to trying other flavors. So the goal was to have the widest appeal possible and also show a level of, I guess,

expertise, um, in introducing such a wide range. There you go. There you go. And you kind of, you have unique flavors that kind of separate you from the commercial competitors in the,

in the market as well. Absolutely. I mean, I, I spent a lot of time, um, in the R and D phase, which involved going to supermarkets, seeing what's available, how to envision my brand on a store shelf and see how it could be unique and different and offer something that's innovative to customers. I developed a pretty good understanding of the competition out there.

There you go. That must have been hard, eating all that ice cream to test it. If you ever need a research and developer, you can call me. Absolutely. Especially if you do tacos. If you ever do a taco ice cream, I'm good at eating tacos and burgers. I'll write that down. That sounds gross, burger ice cream.

But somebody would probably make it good. In-N-Out burger ice cream. Actually, you could go to In-N-Out burger and just shove one of their ice creams in there. I'm getting hungry just talking about this. Can you tell? Can you tell? I'm just getting hungry. This is a hungry, hungry podcast.

So how do people get a hold of your ice cream? Can they order it? Is it local? They have to be? So currently we're in about 200 retailers in the New York City area, New Jersey, Connecticut, and expanding locations. We're available every week. And so just available at retail locations. It's important for me in the beginning to support these independent stores and build these relationships with them that have existing customers.

And so that's what I've been prioritizing. But hopefully soon I am considering providing directly to consumers, so shipping ice cream, even though it's not the most environmentally friendly option. Yeah, that's true. You guys shipped us a case and got here pretty good. Not too much trouble. But, yeah, it looks like there's a lot in Long Island, Philadelphia, Wilmington, New York, I guess New Jersey, New Haven area.

Yeah. Well, close to. We are expanding. I'm hoping to expand to several key cities, so Texas as well, and that's something we plan on doing late spring of this year. Are you guys able to scale with your formulas and the process you use to go nationwide? Of course. I mean, absolutely.

The goal in creating the flavors originally was to produce them on a commercial scale and make sure that they are scalable. I often found that other brands who have like a homemade or home style of a product, especially an ice cream, it's almost impossible to scale up because the recipe changes and then you've built up a customer base that enjoys this particular variation. And so it was important for me to understand the commercial ice cream making process, how I can essentially manipulate it, use it to make these flavors. And that was new to the world of ice cream. It's not traditionally how it's done. There you go. And I'm looking at the top one of your cases on Instagram.

Looks like you got some good words from the New York Times. Yeah, that was a really big win for us right in the beginning. And it's a really renowned food critic and reached out to her and she's like, is it actually kulfi or is it like American ice cream? And so I explained to her, yes, we use these traditional cooking methods and the flavor is each one of the ingredients are steeped. It's very creamy. It's what you expect out of kulfi.

And she agreed to give it a try and wrote a glowing review. That's really exciting for an emerging brand like mine. I was going to ask you, Kulfi, what does that mean? Is that something in another language? Kulfi essentially is a South Asian style

of ice cream. It's best to probably think of gelato being an Italian style, whereas ice cream being the it's best to probably think of like gelato being in an italian style oh whereas you know ice cream being like the parent category and then you have you have the gelato you have goofy you also have a french custard style uh which incorporates eggs in it so these are various styles and it does have key attributes so in, you're looking for a very dense ice cream, which means it's very little air inside. It has a certain level of creaminess. It'll be high in butterfat. And then there's a slow cooking method involved as well. So that allows the ingredient to infuse in the ice cream

base mix. And also you use certain ingredients and flavors such as rose water, saffron, pistachio. And so traditionally you'll find them in molds or popsicles in South Asia. So I'm hoping to introduce Goofy as a category in the kind of the American premium ice cream world. There you go. I've had some of the newer commercialized fake ice cream that is, I don't know if whipped is the right word, but there's a whipped cream that they pumped it with air. They pumped it full of air. They do, yeah. Like some of the low-calorie ones, they're just like somehow they pumped it with tons of air. Legally, they're allowed to go up to 100%. Essentially, overrun is the technical term,

which means that half the product in the container is going to be a liquid mix, and the other half can be air and still legally be called ice cream. Jesus. And it's just, there's nothing to it. It's kind of like eating cotton candy ice cream. Yeah.

And something else that I kind of noticed and taken up as a consumer awareness cause is that the pint, the pints that are available. So I have this in place and I shared one pint equals 16 ounces because a lot of the national brands and several brands have these containers that are essentially 14 ounces. And so it's not something anyone really notices much, but, you know, it puts a brand like mine at sort of a disadvantage because you're like, why would you do that? And, you know, there's other, I guess, inflation concerns, but also most consumers don't notice. So I'm hoping to create awareness about that.

There you go. I was going to ask you about that because I saw the featured products and hoodies and stuff, shirts that you have on your website about one pint equals 16 ounces. A lot of people don't realize that. It's been happening a lot the past few years with COVID. And I forget what they call it, but it's where they basically downsize the packaging and still increase the price. Shrinkflation. Shrinkflation?

Shrinkflation, yeah. There you go. That's it. It's similar to what's happened with potato chips or basically any packaged chip. Yeah, it's basically gotten, it's basically you're getting less, but it's gotten smaller

in size. And you're just like, I remember this being bigger. But I also remember this being bigger. But I also remember this being half as much in cost. And so, yeah, the shrink inflation. And they're good at making it look like you're still getting the same thing.

Definitely. I wear this shirt on when I'm going to my accounts and just generally and people often ask me. And they're usually aghast at the idea that this has been happening under their noses this whole time. They're like, wait, this is 14 ounces? Yeah.

I'm going to have to watch my stuff. But, yeah, this would be really awesome when you roll it out. I really love the flavor. I really love the taste. Anything more you want to tell us about some of the other flavors that we didn't talk about? Yeah, I have two more flavors that I'm launching soon. Oh, yeah.

Next month. And they're on the dairy side. And I've also been developing a vegan line as well. And so I'm hoping to launch that later this year. And I record a lot of extensive recipe development. So I'm pretty excited to bring that forward. Can you tell us what the names are yet? Or do we have to be?

Of the two flavors, yes, it's somewhat now kind of public knowledge. So one is a Malai sweet cream. And so it's essentially a sweet cream flavor. And Malai means the cream that rises to the top when you cook milk. So essentially a portion of it. And so this is meant to just highlight ice cream in its truest form. And the other is an almond blossom.

And so that's kind of inspired by almond treats, French pastry in a certain way. And it's so difficult to find a... almost impossible to find like an almond ice cream. So I'm particularly excited about sharing that one.

There you go. There you go. I imagine the coconut and vanilla bean are as good as you can probably get. Vanilla beans are great for shakes and it's great for everything you want to mix it with. I'll often hear back that the vanilla bean that they tasted is the best vanilla they ever had. Wow. I'll stand by that. That really speaks to the quality.

It does. Does coconut have bits of coconut and stuff? The coconut is I feel like it's an underrated flavor. I always try to get people, I encourage them to try the coconut. What's different about my coconut is that

I do have coconut flakes in there but i've i actually have soaked them in a syrup and coconut fluid that allows them to soften up so it's not like you're tasting coconut i guess like almost shards in a certain way and um so it elevates the experience quite a bit. Nice. You know, you should make an ice cream for snozzberries that tastes like snozzberries. Sorry, I had to do a Charlie Chocolate Factory joke there. I had to get there.

Is there a snozzberry? Is there even such a thing as a snozzberry? I don't know. There probably is. I don't know. It's a TV's reel, right? So this has been pretty interesting. What more have we touched on that we want to talk about with what brand you're building and how you're building it?

I mean, I would say it's an exciting space to be in. And for other entrepreneurs, it's, you know, stay at it. And I would say that there's so much resources out there that you can tap into and reach out to all kinds of people that can help you so to not be discouraged along the way and that there is there is light at the end of this tunnel and yeah stay engaged with your consumers and your target audience and it is satisfying. Yeah I mean it sounds like you interact a lot with your clients and you listen to what they want from you. I do.

I mean, I'll often set up in-store demos. So I'll be there. I was like, here's the founder and here, try some ice cream and see if you enjoy it. So it's always fascinating to interact with people, see their live reactions. Sometimes they're pretty skittish about, oh, Rosewater, I don't know, you know,

and then you're like, just try it, you know. Just try it. It's good. Just try it. And they're like, oh, okay, wow, this is something interesting. I didn't know. And then you have people who come in and they're like, let's just go straight for the mango and we'll be the judge of it,

how good it is. So, you know, it's just the reactions you get are endless, but also very satisfying, encouraging. And people are looking for products that are unique, innovative. And I think being in New York City area and around you, you get more of that. So I'm hoping to share it with as many people as I can. Plus the healthy aspects of it, you know, the non-GMO and all that stuff.

I mean, other than creating a really good, delicious ice cream in the end, you're not necessarily focused on cutting corners. You're choosing better ingredients, and this allows you to also support the kind of individuals who are producing these items in the whole chain of kind of ingredients. So that's important to me as well to kind of work with family-owned and operated ingredient vendors or others. And so it's really a supply chain that you're supporting and promoting in a certain way what's the hardest thing you found to being an entrepreneur uh the fact that you don't really have a choice about how many different hats you have to wear

to make it work yeah i i wish there was some kind of formula to be like, well, you know, once you do this and, you know, then it'll be okay. But that's not the case. I mean, each time you have to learn and adapt and pull through. And every entrepreneur or, you know, business startup will tell you that. But, you know, they have the passion and they wouldn't give it up. Yeah. You know, that's part of the journey of being an entrepreneur, you know, the, the self accountability, um, you know, it's you,

you're always carrying the mantle. Like you used to have people that would say to me, uh, you know, it's great that you do something you love and, and you enjoy coming to work every day, you know, chasing your passion. I'm like, some days it's hard to come to work, man. But you don't get to call in sick. You don't get to punch out at five and go, I'm out of here. Somebody else's problem is this thing. Ice cream is not going to eat itself.

That's true. That's true. That's a shirt I wear. That's my motto. Got it blazing on the refrigerator too there. So there you go. Anything more we want to tease out about the brand and the ice cream that you're doing, bud? I'm excited to share. I hope that your viewers will give an opportunity and try it, reach out to us, and even in any capacity, I'd like to keep in touch.

And, yeah. There you go. Order it up. I'd be excited to see you make it so people can order it nationwide, you know, over the mail and stuff. It is something I'm working on. Yeah. Yeah, that would be fun because we sure enjoy the taste of it.

And I shared some with my mom, and she loved it too. We split all the things. But, yeah, I took my time eating it because there was like four of them. And it was really good. The pistachio. I just want to make the flavors last forever. So awesome sauce. So give us your dot com so we wouldn't look you up on the interwebs, please.

Yeah. So you can find me at HeritageGulfi.com. We also have an Instagram, which is at HeritageGulfi. Give us a follow. We often post our updates where we're available at new locations and all the good stuff. There you go. There you go. Check it out if you're in the tri-state area. Is that how I say that?

Yes. Did I say that right? The tri-state area of New York, New Jersey. New Jersey. There you go. Check it out, guys. Be sure to check out all the stuff we do across the Internet with the Chris Voss Show. And thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have it.