How I Built A $2.8 Million/Year Ice Cream Company
Pooja Bavishi, founder and CEO of Malai, shares how she built a $2.8–3 million/year ice cream company by introducing South Asian flavors like cardamom, rose, and saffron to mainstream American markets. Starting from a Friendsgiving experiment in 2014 with no food industry experience, she scaled to four brick-and-mortar locations across major U.S. cities. Despite going $200,000 into credit card debt to open her first store, Malai reached profitability for the first time in 2024 after raising $1.8 million total.
Summary
Pooja Bavishi, a 42-year-old entrepreneur, founded Malai, an ice cream company that generates approximately $3 million in annual revenue. The business is built around a distinctive concept: infusing traditional South Asian flavors—cardamom, rose, saffron, nutmeg, ginger, star anise—into ice cream to bring them into the American mainstream. Malai operates four brick-and-mortar scoop shops in Brooklyn, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and Manhattan, with about 80% of revenue coming from those locations and the remainder from wholesale, e-commerce, and catering.
The idea for Malai originated at a Friendsgiving gathering in November 2014, when Bavishi flavored an ice cream base with ginger and star anise and received an enthusiastic response from friends. With no food industry background, she relied on passion and business school training to launch the company in January 2015. Her early strategy was data-driven: she used her grocery budget to produce ice cream, conducted customer surveys, and gathered buying behavior data. A pivotal early break came when a New York Times food writer discovered her product, generating press that helped propel the business forward.
Funding the business proved challenging. An initial friends-and-family round raised for a first brick-and-mortar location was redirected toward working capital, pop-ups, and food halls when plans changed. When it came time to actually open the first Brooklyn store in March 2019, Bavishi put approximately $200,000 on credit cards after being unable to qualify for traditional financing. She describes the debt as frightening but necessary to reach the next stage of growth.
Malai has raised a total of $1.8 million in outside funding, giving up equity in exchange. For years, Bavishi could not consistently pay herself a salary, describing the ability to do so as a major personal victory. The company hit profitability for the first time in 2024, a milestone complicated by the simultaneous pursuit of aggressive growth goals. Operational challenges include the cold-chain logistics of the ice cream industry—requiring frozen transport, dry ice, overnight shipping, and constant freezer access—as well as rising costs from tariffs, inflation, and storage fees. Bavishi positions Malai's higher price point by citing premium, sustainably sourced ingredients and pointing to brands like Jeni's and Van Leeuwen as pioneers who elevated quality expectations in the ice cream category.
Central to Bavishi's vision is the argument that South Asian flavors are not exotic or trendy novelties—they are flavors enjoyed by billions of people across generations worldwide. She sees Malai as a leader in mainstreaming these flavors in America, drawing personal inspiration from her Gujarati heritage, including her grandmother's proprietary chai masala spice blend.
Key Insights
- Bavishi argues that South Asian flavors like cardamom, rose, and saffron are not experimental or trendy — they have been enjoyed by billions of people for generations — and that introducing them to mainstream America is a leadership position, not a novelty act.
- Bavishi credits brands like Jeni's and Van Leeuwen with fundamentally recalibrating consumer expectations around ice cream pricing by introducing high-quality ingredients, which created space for smaller premium players like Malai to compete.
- Bavishi opened Malai's first Brooklyn brick-and-mortar in March 2019 by putting approximately $200,000 on credit cards after failing to qualify for traditional business financing, framing the debt as a necessary step to reach the next stage of growth.
- Bavishi describes her early sales strategy as deliberately data-driven, using customer surveys at every transaction to understand buyer behavior before she had a viable business — a process that led directly to the New York Times feature that helped launch the brand.
- Bavishi states that Malai only became profitable for the first time in 2024, explaining that the core tension was trying to achieve aggressive growth and hit profitability simultaneously — two extremely challenging goals in conflict with each other.
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