Ice cream is the ultimate comfort food. Bad day? Grab a cone. Ice cream speeds up your metabolism. People love ice cream round the year in the West. Ice cream stores are open in the dead winter. Winter makes eating ice creams a leisurely & pleasant act, it won’t melt and drip over everything.
Diwali is approaching and with that the enjoyable Indian winter. This brings to mind a meeting several years ago I had with a Danish company who had ambitions of selling ice creams in India. Denmark prides itself to produce some of the best ice creams in the world, as a consequence of the great quality milk that they produce. The Danish company presented the sale of ice cream in the year. I was surprised to see that there was only a little dip in sales during their winter months. And I would assume that the Denmark would be cold through most of the year. Then how is it that ice creams sold equally well in all the months?
The company could not explain. It then struck me that all homes in Denmark would be centrally heated, to say 22 degrees the comfortable living temperature. My belief solidified when I read a survey – restaurant customers maintain steady purchase in December and January as they did in Summers. For the same reason, people loved ice creams in the cozy comforts. It would be like the weather in Bangalore throughout the year in of most of their homes, and undoubtedly all the restaurants. Then why not ice Cream all year long.
Indian homes are not heated, nor are several offices or public transportation. Hence ice cream sales is inverse to the weather – one falls, the other goes up! However, south of India enjoys equitable sales of ice cream I would assume, but 70% of India would find less favourable. No wonder Coke and Pepsi and Walls would thank Indian topography for keeping their sales hopeful.
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