The Joelato Story
Hi I’m Joe, the owner of Joelato. I am a foodaholic. More specifically a gelatoholic. Food has played a big part in my life forever, and I think about it almost constantly.
Major life events are marked by what I happened to be eating at the time. Holidays are made memorable by, you guessed it, the food. Which brings me onto how Joelato came into being.
Do you remember the taste of the ice cream you had on holiday? I do. The intensity, texture, authenticity of the flavours. I can still taste the grapefruit sorbet I had in Italy. I will never forget the Salted Caramel and Blackcurrant sorbet I had at Berthillon in Paris.
Why could I not find such ice cream in Scotland? And a business idea was born.I would take our wonderful local fruit, milk and cream to create gelato that would make people go ‘daaaaaamn that’s good!!’. I would recreate those ice cream holiday memories that we all have (it can’t just be me... surely?).
I just needed to know how. So, how?
So How?
For years I had been tinkering around making ice cream in my kitchen. But, I’d just been following other people’s recipes. If I wanted to create ‘super-WOW gelato’ and to make a successful business from it, I would need to know what I was doing. So, in February 2019 I hopped on a plane to Bologna, a city known as ‘the fatty one’ (perfect for me!), one of the gastronomic hearts of Italy and the location of the world-famous Carpigiani Gelato University.
After a mind-blowing and hugely inspiring few weeks, I returned to beautiful Perthshire, refined my business plan, sourced some second-hand gelato equipment (holy smokes the new stuff is pricey!!) and my wife and I went about building a commercial kitchen in a shipping container (as you do), determined to get Joelato ready for Spring.
May 2019 and. We. Were. Ready. We launched Joelato at Logierait market. We sold out. We met lots of wonderful people and traders and our journey (sorry...) had begun.
Today, we are hugely excited to be serving gelato from our first gelateria in Edinburgh, in Bonnie & Wild (a Scottish food market in the new St James Quarter) alongside our brand new shop in Stockbridge.
Go Behind The Scenes
If you want to delve even deeper, have a watch of a short documentary that was made about us, the Joelato journey and the process of creating our gelato.
If you want to delve even deeper, have a watch of a short documentary that was made about us, the Joelato journey and the process of creating our gelato.