Pioneering World-Class Experiences Through a Pop-Up Gelato Cart

What We Need to Grow, Episode 065: Pioneering World-Class Experiences Through a Pop-Up Gelato Cart. A Founder Talk conversation with Michael Franano, Owner and Founder of Gelatano. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

Caleb Pedosiuk: Michael, this is so cool. I'm so excited for this conversation. I want to hear a little bit about your background and how you got here. But just for context, you are rolling a custom Italian gelato cart into weddings, corporate events, people buying Ferraris and Lamborghinis. You're shoulder to shoulder with people at some of these peak moments in their lives, and you're pairing that with these peak flavours that you learned to make as a master gelato crafter over in Europe, and you've brought this over. Please share a bit of this journey and how it's going.

Michael Franano: Well, firstly, thank you for that introduction. You make me sound way more accomplished than I really am.

The way it all started, my wife Caroline and I lived in Abu Dhabi for about five years, and at that time we were both with Etihad Airways. Towards the end of our stay there, Caroline was quite keen to fly to Bologna and take the Carpigiani Institute, or Carpigiani University, course, which is a full one-month course. It's 11 or 12 hours a day, six days a week, and it's very comprehensive. That ultimately didn't end up happening.

However, after we relocated to Nashville in 2021, I was with a software as a service firm out of the Netherlands, and that came to an end in June of '23. At that point I was sort of like, well, what am I doing with my life now? I just really couldn't see myself starting a new position in corporate. Caroline and I had fairly deep conversations around what my next move in life was going to be, and she recommended I get into gelato. And I said, well, of course, I don't know anything about gelato. She said, well, you don't know anything about most of the stuff you've done, and you seem to have done pretty well with it.

So we did a tremendous amount of research, and more importantly, we did a tremendous amount of market research. Caroline at that time was a committee member of ILEA, the International Live Events Association, ILEA Nashville, and she dragged me to every single event that was happening in town. That included catering events, wedding events, meeting planning events, literally everyone in the industry. I had mocked up what the cart would look like, what the service would look like, some basic pricing models. And literally everyone that we spoke to, especially the caterers, said, please do this, because Nashville needs something new. It needs something fresh. At that time the market was fairly stagnant, and it was a lot of the same thing.

So they were quite excited about the idea of having something new to offer their clients, and true to their word, once we were up and running, they began hiring us. This year especially, over last year, we've seen tremendous growth in repeat business. There's one meeting planning company that also happens to own, I think, five or six major venues in and around Nashville, and I will have worked with them, I think, ten times this year, which is huge for us. Several of the meeting planners refer us to their clients, recommend us, or just hire us directly.

As a matter of fact, next week I'm repeating for, this will be the third time, so our third year with them, a large global consortium all around sustainable farming, and it's actually hosted by former Vice President Al Gore. So we're really excited about that. I think the greatest indicator of us having made the right decision and grown the business organically is that repeat business.

Caleb: From our first conversation, I got a glimpse into the craft of shaping these flavours. I think it was on Instagram or on your website, I remember seeing trays of marshmallow melted and being burned with a torch to make this s'mores-inspired gelato, and I think you have over 90 different flavours. What is it like when you're at these events, guests come up, they're not expecting a gelato cart, and you hand them a little bit of gelato? They're like, what is going on? They've got gelato that's some of the best in the world at some event where they're maybe networking, their focus is on something else. They could be looking to buy a vehicle, or at some celebration. What is that like? Because you're right there, observing these interactions, these reactions.

Michael: Interestingly, that was probably the number one reason Caroline essentially talked me into starting the business. She said, you need to get back to something, number one, that you do with your hands. You need to create. You can see behind me, I'm a songwriter, and the creation process is something I took for granted for a long time, and I forgot how much joy that brings.

As far as the service side goes, what's interesting about this market, Nashville, is that there really isn't a tremendous amount of gelato in the city, and the gelato that is here is made with a different process than we use. I don't want to get highly technical, but we use something known as the Florentine process. We cook our gelatos first, then age them for 24 to 48 hours, and then run the frozen batches. The other aspect is that we imported our machines, so we're using real Carpigiani gelato machines. The principal difference in gelato is fat content and air content. Gelato has less fat, but more importantly, it churns at a slower rate, so it has less air. Because of that, it's incredibly smooth and velvety.

My favourite aspect of this entire thing, and I never get tired of it, ever, we've done hundreds of events at this point, is seeing the look on someone's face who has either never had gelato or never had real Italian gelato. That look of surprise is something I just thrive on, and it happens constantly. Another side of this, mentioning the event next week, is that several Italians participate in and attend that event. And we've served at weddings and corporate events where there were Italians who had flown over for that particular event. When you see the look on their face, that's the real seal of approval.

Using this process is a little more time consuming, and the machines are about double the price, but we decided that if we're going to do it, we're doing it the right way. And I think that comes out in the end product.

I think it's also interesting because I've been in the hospitality and events industry for most of my career. When you're doing something similar for years, you can lose some of that initial excitement. You get into patterns. I was in executive-level leadership for several years, and you lose that immediacy. And when we were in Philadelphia, I transitioned my team through COVID, when everything went from live events in a ballroom or some special event venue to fully virtual. So probably the greatest aspect for me has been getting back to talking to people directly. Serving people. And that sense of almost community that you have.

Since I used the word community, that was another aspect of this we were really keen to explore: being part of a community. We were relatively new to Nashville, and we've been huge foodies for decades, but it was that sense of being part of something. And we have become that now. We still work out of an incubator kitchen right here in East Nashville, and so many of the food trucks and food trailers cook at the same kitchen I do. So we're now part of that community, and that's been really great for us. It was an idea that ended up becoming a lifestyle.

Caleb: I know Hollywood sometimes likes to romanticize key moments in life, but there's some truth in it. I almost picture what it would have been like for your wife and you to be at some of these events you were hosting with a multinational airline company, and at some point gelato entered the equation. I would love to have been able to go back in time and space and be at that moment where you observed it and that first moment hit, where you realized, wow, this is something. And then later, when you were considering switching up what you were doing, when you connected a completely different path.

It's interesting to me, especially given how much disruption there is right now, with robotics, with AI, with the shifting of the silver tsunami, how many roles are adjusting, and a lot of people wondering what to do, whether it's for a hobby or a career move. So much adjusting is happening. I feel like your story is a decision to pioneer not just something new, but to pioneer excellence, in a frontier where gelato really is not as common.

Michael: Well, look, Caroline and I have never been the type of people to take the road most travelled. It's funny, my best friend, who was best man at our wedding, said to me once, because Caroline and I figured out that since we've been together we've relocated nine times, he said, do you realize the amount of money you must have spent moving? Thanks for that, Murph. I really appreciate it.

I don't know, it's strange. I've always followed my gut, on everything. I've found the only time I ever really got into trouble in life is when I didn't listen to the little voice and made a decision I felt only moderately confident about. I need to be fully invested in something, but once I fully invest myself, it tends to work. And I also learn on the job. I'm just one of those kinds of people.

What's interesting in what you're saying, with the advent of AI and its promise of ubiquity, because it's not quite there yet, and they certainly haven't learned how to monetize it yet, is looking back three years ago, right when we made the jump. I established the LLC, we named the company, and then we ordered everything from Italy, because that was going to take a while. It took about four months for everything to arrive. Looking back at that and seeing where we are now, with everything that's going on, three years makes a big difference, doesn't it? In some strange way, there was a sense that we were all moving towards all of this, and we decided to go the other direction. We brought it back down to something very local. Very tangible, very tactile. In many ways it's an older model of a business.

We didn't start this business with world domination as the principal purpose. It was quite the opposite, actually. We had worked globally, we've lived abroad, we've worked with billion-dollar companies, and I think this was really a way to move away from that and get back to something smaller. But what's ultimately happened is the business has grown organically. I wish I could say I was some marketing genius, but in all honesty, it's just organic growth. Year over year, and we're only in October, we've seen 57% growth over last year. So it is growing into something larger than it was a year and a half ago, but it's happening in a way that we're part of, and we're growing with it as it grows. Again, I wish I could say I had a crystal ball, or that I understood global politics and global finance more than I do, but it is interesting the way that worked out.

As far as the inception of it, I think it was a natural offshoot of the things Caroline and I were already interested in. As I mentioned, we're foodies. We have several recipe books that are the size of the old phone books from back in the day, and we're constantly coming up with new recipes. That's actually her favourite part of the business, coming up with new flavour profiles. And what has driven that is that we've created several custom flavours for clients. We've even matched cosmetics by colour. They sent me the Pantones, and we don't use food colouring, it's all a natural process, so it's, okay, how are we going to find these five flavours that are presentable and delicious? And we go about doing it.

So there's a creative aspect and there's a service aspect, and that's who we are. That's what we've spent our careers doing. It was a chance for us to apply the skill sets and experience we already had, but do it in a totally new way.

And why gelato? There are a couple of reasons. Number one, it's such an open palate. You always start with your base, but then it's the flavour profiles, so there's the creative aspect. The other side is that this market was wide open for it, so it was a smart business decision as well. And frankly, as a business, the margins are phenomenal. Again, I wish I could say we knew all of this immediately. We didn't. These were things we learned. We knew the market was open to it and that we had little to no competition going in.

But the creative side has grown. We started off a little more traditional, as you would, and then the requests started coming in. We've matched everything from wedding cakes to retail products, and with corporate events, they love to have flavours that reflect their brand colours. And there were themed events as well, and many of our more exotic flavour profiles have come from those themes. If it's a Valentine's Day event, or last year, when we began doing holiday events, we came up with recipes that were indicative of that particular theme. So the list just began to grow, and we crested 90 about six weeks ago.

That process is a lot of fun, and I think it's also a value add for our clients. With many of the dessert options you're going to find in the market, you're picking from a menu. We offer the ability to take it one step further. We also offer printed cups, spoons and napkins, so for a lot of the corporate events we're adding their logo or a graphic. We try to personalize it as much as we can.

As far as the incentive, when Caroline said to me, you should really consider the gelato business, she surprised me a bit with that. But once we jumped into it, started doing the research, and I understood what the business looks like, and then flew up to Brooklyn to take classes from a master chef, I could begin to visualize exactly what it was going to look like. From there it's been a continual learning process, experimentation, and growth.

Caleb: Very cool. The question I love to ask at the end for every guest is, what is it that you need most to grow right now? If you had to put your finger on one thing. For some people it's capital, for some people it's awareness, for some people it's a launch going well.

Michael: To be honest with you, this year has been vastly different in a couple of key ways. One is, as I mentioned earlier, the amount of repeat business, which has been just incredible. But what we've also noticed this year is that where last year there may have been two or three of what we call last-minute bookings, anything less than two weeks from the actual event date, this year half the business has been that, including some of the repeat clients. So as far as events and bookings go, we've been incredibly happy. We had doubled last year's number of events by mid-August. It's grown exactly the way we needed it to, and we've been extremely pleased with that side of the business.

The next obvious step for us is bricks and mortar. Believe it or not, the first question we get asked is, what's your favourite flavour? And I say, well, I make them all, so I taste them all, and it really just depends on my mood at any given time. But the next question is always, where's your shop? So for us, what we need is to establish that home base.

It accomplishes a few things. We're in a unique position. Say we had just started with a shop: just like a restaurant, you're looking at 12 to 18 months to establish any kind of real customer flow and customer base. Well, we have the benefit of having served thousands of guests at every type of event, private events, corporate events, social events, festivals, markets. So we've already established a very strong customer base. The event business would drive business to the shop, and vice versa. And we'd have the added benefit that all of our gelato and sorbetto products would be manufactured in our own space, which is a huge benefit to us.

We spoke about it at the beginning of the year, and the idea was, let's keep it mobile for this year and see where we end up. Well, the growth has been so dramatic that at this point, that's our next step. We're somewhat seasonal, although right now our November is more than double where it was last year, and I'm expecting December to do the same. But I have that January, February period where I'll begin to push towards the bricks and mortar. We know we want to keep it here in East Nashville, which is growing dramatically, with some of the best restaurants in the city. We can walk to them from where we live, and our kitchen is right here as well.

That'll be my major focus moving into 2027. We just want to find the ideal space. And then, of course, I'll need to put my manager hat back on, because at that point we'll have full-time employees, and that will dynamically change everything. Ultimately, what we'd love to see happen is for Caroline to take over the event side of the business, and I would run the shop and the business side with her support.

So what do we need? We need a really great 450-square-foot space, ideally in a high foot traffic area that is, if not attached to, certainly next to a high foot traffic restaurant or restaurants. That would help me tremendously, because the infrastructure would already be in place, which would allow us to build out more quickly and ultimately open the doors more quickly as well. We already have the design elements in mind. We know exactly what we want it to look like and the functionality of it. That's our next step.

Caleb: Very cool.

Michael: So hopefully by the end of the spring, by Memorial Day-ish, I'll be able to make some announcements. We're very excited about that. But more importantly, we're confident, because this isn't a situation where we're using outside funding and have that pressure to build a customer base quickly. We know they already exist, and we're genuinely excited to make that announcement. We feel we'll have that support pretty quickly.

Caleb: So, Gelatano. G-E-L...

Michael: G-E-L-A-T-A-N-O. Gelatano is our last name, Franano, and gelato together. And it only took me four weeks to figure that out, because, as you probably know, when you establish your LLC, they run a name check, so you have to have a name. I kept walking around here saying to Caroline, what are we going to call this thing? Gelato Franano, I hated. And one day it dawned on me, why don't you just put them together? That seems to have worked out pretty well.

Caleb: Perfect. Excellent. Well, Michael, thank you so much for sharing. It sounds absolutely phenomenal, what you guys are doing.

Michael: We appreciate it, and I appreciate the time. Thanks for asking me to be on today. Keep an eye out for that announcement. And next time you're in Nashville, you've got to let me know. I'll make a couple of batches for you.

Caleb: Amazing. Thank you so much.

Michael: Thanks, Caleb. Take care.