EDISON, New Jersey/New Delhi: For anyone who grew up in India during the second half of the 20th century, ice cream is inseparable from the name Kwality.
When the brand arrived in the country in the 1950s, it awakened a nationwide infatuation.
During sweltering Indian summers, people would dash to the lit-up cases of Kwality at their local dime store for a block of nutty butterscotch ice cream, or the triple-layered ice cream bar called "cassata".
But its popularity waned after a corporate takeover left its taste altered.
Now, a take on the Kwality brand in the US (also under the name Kwality) is inspiring a kind of childlike elation: lines out the door, breathless Yelp reviews and daily demands for more stores to open.
Fresh, white, rich, creamy
The cookbook author Raghavan Iyer recalls his first experience tasting Kwality’s vanilla ice cream as an eight-year-old in Bombay.
“It was fresh, white, rich and creamy, with no icicles,” he said. “It was something totally elusive.”
The fluffy tufts of cream were silkier and more melt-resistant than kulfi, with flavours that were wide-ranging and whimsical.
The brand became ubiquitous, and was acquired by Unilever in 1995 — leaving the company’s chief food technologist, Kanti Parekh, without a job.
Parekh, a cheerful scientist with a hearty laugh and a deep love of sweets, developed some of the company’s most beloved flavours such as butterscotch and mango.
But after the acquisition, Parekh said, “they started modifying certain flavours and lowering the milk content to reduce costs.”
“What ice cream I developed was totally lost,” he added.
Cool hobby
That year, Parekh left India for New Jersey to consult on quality control and ingredient selection for packaged foods, but ice cream remained his favourite hobby. “Any town I would visit, I’d count up how many ice cream shops there were, and then taste all of them,” he said.
One day in 2001, a friend approached him about developing desserts for his Indian restaurant. Parekh happily agreed, and, using the same methods he had developed for Kwality, made a few batches of ice cream.
Soon, restaurant patrons were begging Parekh to start his own ice cream shop. Just two years later, equipped with his recipes and a name he knew would connect with his Indian customers, he opened Kwality Ice Cream in a small strip mall in the Little India section of Edison.
“We used the same name to capitalise on the good will the brand had built,” he said. “We wanted people to think of the back-home taste.”
The word Kwality, he added, was not trademarked in the US, so he felt free to use it. (Unilever did not respond to requests for comment.)
The design of the tucked-away shop plays off the nostalgia of American ice cream parlours — bright pops of red on the walls, posters of caramel drizzling temptingly over a sundae, a flashing neon sign — though the ice cream’s taste appeals to a nostalgia of a different sort.
That distinctive flavour profile was specifically engineered by Parekh to appeal to Indian palates, which he observed are dulled by the vast consumption of spices.
“They recognise flavours only if they are intense,” he said. “If you look at ice cream made with more sugar and less butterfat,” as with US brands such as Dairy Queen or Ben & Jerry’s, “you are tasting the sugar first, then you taste the water, and the cream taste is only slightly at the end.”
Making upgrades
As a result, Parekh’s formula centres on milk with high butterfat and very little sugar.
Over time, he has made a few upgrades to his original recipe, increasing the butterfat content to 14 per cent (as opposed to the original Kwality’s 10.5 per cent), and adding liquid flavourings he developed with a scientist at Rutgers University.
The end product is an ice cream that is luscious, like a frozen whipped mousse, and aromatic. It’s a sensation that his Indian customers immediately recognise. “It is what my childhood memories are made of,” chef and TV personality Maneet Chauhan said.
These days, Parekh’s company has 10 locations across the country, in cities with concentrated Indian populations such as Fremont, California.
There’s also a factory adjacent to the flagship, where the ice cream is made fresh daily and shipped out in trucks.
In Parekh’s eyes, there is no better business proposition than running an ice cream shop. “My life’s mantra,” he said: “One God, one wife, one ice cream.”
—New York Times News Service
