Nayanika Sampath - Icy Cloud Kitchens

 Setting up an Icy Cloud Kitchen

Nayanika Sampath

The transition from working in the hotel industry to starting my own small ice cream business, called Summer Handcrafted Ice Cream, has been an exciting journey.  A passing comment made during an ice cream session with a friend in Delhi, when we joked that life would be good if we could make ice creams for a living, laid the foundation of Summer Handcrafted Ice Cream.  It does seem ironic that an ice cream brand is named after the hottest season of the year, that too in Chennai. Yet, it somehow feels apt. 

Graduating from the IHM Chennai, which were some of the best years of my life, and later joining OCLD to work as a sous chef, I have always been fascinated by the world of food and knew that I wanted to work with it. Sometime in 2021 though, I decided to pursue my dream of becoming an entrepreneur. I moved back to Chennai that year, for some RnR, and started brainstorming ideas for what I could do next. My mind kept drifting back to some of those castles I had built in the air. And so it began in May 2022. 

Starting a small business all on my own has been no easy feat. They say that sometimes the biggest enemy is our own mind. It took some practice to allay the anxiety of going from a steady, salaried income to the uncertain life of a small business owner. Still, having the independence and freedom to experiment with flavours and being a little more in control of the balance between my personal and professional life, felt relieving. 

As my favourite saying goes “Your life, your rules.” Summer has given me that freedom. I get to make a product that I truly enjoy, combining flavours that pique my interest. And it is fulfilling, in all senses, that I get to share the experience with other people. 

While the idea of a cloud kitchen itself is a fairly new concept, ice creams as a cloud offering was novel. Not having traditional business model to follow, I have had to figure out many things on my own. I couldn’t just focus on production anymore. I had to also look into, marketing, costs and profitability. It has been a huge learning curve.  For instance, Summer, being cloud-based means that I have to put in twice the effort into getting the word out and work extra hard on visibility. I’ve had to be resourceful at every step of the way. 

Recently, I had the opportunity to showcase Summer’s ice creams at different pop ups in Chennai. Sounds fun in theory. In reality though, transporting a tonne of ice-cream in one of the worst heatwaves and then figuring out how to keep it from turning into milkshakes, because we all know no amount of AC can ever keep Chennai cool, was just one of the hardships I had to overcome. I have since then been a vendor at 3 more pop ups, each one more successful than the last. I also supply ice creams to a standalone restaurant and am hoping I can grow there too.  Winging it and learning on the go, that’s something they teach you in the kitchen, and that I have applied to my life ever since.

Summer, in business terms, is fairly new. Still, in just this one year, I have experienced personal growth and the deep satisfaction of starting something of my own. I don’t know if there is any advice I could dispense, per se. I do know though, that most problems do have solutions, especially in this age of technology. You can market your small product on Instagram and WhatsApp, start a cloud kitchen, get an AI to write an article for your college magazine (not saying that I did). 

You just have to be resourceful and even when you need to take a step back. Just remember that you can take a break before moving forward, it’s not the end. In fact, it’s just the beginning for ‘Summer’, so I hope I get to see all the readers here dropping in orders 😉. 

Nayanika Sampath, Batch of 2017