Maine Food Insider: Gelato Fiasco raises money to expand
File photo / Tim Greenway
Joshua Davis, co-founder and CEO of Gelato Fiasco in Brunswick, in a freezer stacked high with pints of gelato.
With hot summer months around the corner, Gelato Fiasco Inc. of Brunswick plans to expand its shops, employees and revenue after raising a little over half of a $1 million equity offering.
“One of the purposes of the fund raise is to grow the business to the $20 million range in 2018,” Joshua Davis, co-founder and CEO of Gelato Fiasco, told Mainebiz. He was a 2016 Mainebiz Business Leader of the Year. The company had under $10 million in revenue in 2015.
He added that the money also will be used to open two to three new retail shops outside Maine that will make their own gelato onsite in the next 12 months, with each shop hiring 12 to 15 employees. He said he can’t disclose the locations until he signs leases. The company currently has a flagship store in Brunswick and another one in Portland’s Old Port. It also ran a pop-up store on Boston’s fashionable Newbury Street from Dec. 6-11, 2016.
Davis said he also wants to add eight to 10 people for a new, second shift at the Flavor Foundry in Brunswick, where it makes the company’s gelato and sorbetto sold in pints through its 4,100 wholesalers in U.S. supermarkets.
He said that so far, Gelato Fiasco has had to train all of the gelato makers it has hired. Another purpose of the fund raise is to find good people and retain them.
The company currently has 57 full-time employees, up from the 49 in 2016, plus another 25 part-timers that it brings on for the summer.
In a June 1 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Form D filing, Gelato Fiasco had raised $524,966 of a $1 million equity offering.
Listed on the offering were Davis, co-founder and president Bruno Tropeano, and board members Nathaniel Henshaw of CEI Ventures in Brunswick, Richard McGoldrick of Commercial Properties Inc. in Portland, John Moore of Harpswell Capital Advisors in New Gloucester, Geraldine Canning of Pine Street Trading Co. in Gardiner and Board Chairman David Barber of Barber Foods in Portland.
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