Gelato served at the stores in Portland and Brunswick, as well as food trucks on Portland’s Eastern Promenade, is made in Brunswick. The company makes as much as 400 gallons of gelato daily
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As you step inside Gelato Fiasco, an Italian ice cream store in Portland, you are greeted by several gelato flavors and the sweet smell of homemade waffle cones. The counter is filled with several varieties of gelato, including Maine blueberry crisp, as well as chocolate and cake batter.
The gelato is made at Gelato Fiasco’s kitchen in Brunswick (where the company also has a store).
It all starts with the hot process in a pasteurizer, where a combination of whole milk, light cream, sugar, skim milk powder, guar gum and xanthan gum is used. Once the base has been aged and cooled, it’s time to add the flavors.
The kitchen staff uses an immersion blender to incorporate ingredients such as cocoa powder, mint, caramel and coconut cream, as required by the specific gelato flavor. The ingredients are blended and then placed in a batch freezer to harden the gelato.
“We get our milk and cream for the base from local farms here in New England,” says Mitch Newlin, retail director and an owner of Gelato Fiasco.
Ingredients come from Pineland Farms Dairy Co. in Bangor, Houlton Farms Dairy in Houlton and Kingdom Creamery in East Hardwick, Vt. Seasonal berries come from Fairwinds Farm in Bowdoinham. Two items that aren’t grown in New England, pistachios and hazelnuts, are imported from Italy.
Two decades of gelato making
Gelato Fiasco, which was founded in 2007 by Joshua Davis and Bruno Tropeano, is sold in Maine stores like Warming’s Market in Brunswick, the Georgetown General Store and Nezinscot Farm in Turner.
Gelato served at the stores in Portland and Brunswick, as well as food trucks on Portland’s Eastern Promenade, is made in Brunswick. The company makes as much as 400 gallons of gelato daily. Since 2019, Gelato that’s sold in pints in supermarkets and specialty stores has been outsourced to an out-of-state ice cream maker.
In 2013, Gelato Fiasco built a gelato manufacturing plant with a room-sized continuous freezer, pasteurizing vats and a three-story fridge. But bigger is not always better, Newlin said. The company closed the plant in 2019, and wholesale production was turned over to a third-party producer, Royal Ice Cream, in Manchester, Conn. Pints of Gelato Fiasco are sold at Whole Foods and other retailers.
“Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have refocused on producing premium, small-batch gelato of exceptional quality and have scaled back our wholesale business from over 10,000 grocery stores to fewer than 500,” Newlin says.
“While we have a much smaller overall volume today, we are able to make the creative flavors with the highest quality ingredients and not risk losing money on each pint from attempting to match the price of Ben and Jerry’s or other brands,” he adds.
