New ice cream brand pushes Filipino flavors

IT’S NOT LIKE you can eat strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate forever: how about switching to bilo-bilo ice cream?

On March 18, Marcelo’s Microcreamery was formally launched in the country, although they have been found on supermarket shelves since last year. The flavors aren’t quite what you’ll find in any normal store shelf: the brand has the Heritage Line, building on traditional Filipino snacks. These are Inutak, Ube Macapuno Champorado, Latik-Latik, Mangga’t Suman, Bilo-Bilo, and Chocolate Champorado. During a tasting at Romulo Café in Makati, they also unveiled their latest flavor, Pistachio Kunafa Chocolate (as in the Instagram-viral Dubai chocolate, done in collaboration with the chef who made it, Nouel Catis).

Due to an aversion to certain ingredients (my fault, not theirs), we stuck to something familiar: the Chocolate Champorado, made with tablea (cocoa tablets used for hot chocolate) and rice pudding churned into ice cream. This tasted richly dark and indulgent. We also had a bite of the Dubai chocolate one, and it proved very richly creamy, with a slight coolness of flavor (akin to mint) brought by the pistachios.

The flavors we tasted were made with milk, but the Inutak (smoked ube or purple yam pudding), Ube Macapuno Champorado (ube and coconut sport in chocolate rice pudding), Latik-Latik (toasted coconut curds) Mangga’t Suman (mango and rice cake sorbet, and Bilo-Bilo (a treat made of macapuno mochi, sweetened bananas, and jackfruit), all have a non-dairy coconut milk base. “Our drive is really to partner with local coconut farmers, local tablea farmers, to really help,” said Epic Brands Corp. Chief Executive Officer John Marcelo in an interview. They buy the raw materials directly from the farmers, and try to use local as much as possible. “I think it’s about time to get our flavors out there.”

A former racecar driver, Mr. Marcelo and his family always celebrated ice cream. One night, during a grocery run, he saw that all the brands in the supermarket offered the same thing over and over. The family already makes ice cream for other brands, so, “I wanted to create my own brand.”

They weren’t easy to make: he recalls making the rice-based ones, and them coming out rock-hard from the freezer. The same thing happened to the chunks of fruit. That meant researching cooking methods, such as stewing the fruits more slowly, and cooking everything in a slightly different way. They’re called a “microcreamery” by the way, because they only make the ice creams in small batches.

These flavors are tied to his own memories, making each flavor personal. The champorado flavor, for example, is a schoolboy memory, while the mangga’t suman was a memory of a weekend drive.

It’s this same idea of memory that’s driving their push to export, despite being quite new to the game. He told BusinessWorld that they are already in the Middle East (hence the halal seal on the pint), Australia, Canada, and the US. Right now, they are still in talks to bring it to Southeast Asian neighbors Malaysia and Vietnam. The reason for the push to export is the large numbers of Filipino expatriates in those countries: “We thought that the Filipinos overseas, they definitely miss all our kakanins (rice-based desserts).”

“I wanted to tap that market. Most of them, they miss home; they miss their families. So at least (we can) bring them something that can remind them of their childhood and spending time with their families.”

Marcelo’s Microcreamery products are available in the Philippines for around P460 a pint in Landers, Shopwise, Marketplace, and some Robinsons Supermarket branches. — Joseph L. Garcia