™ve worked in many of our family’s businesses over the years and felt that it was time to give something a go myself. I’ve got a background in graphic design and have started other businesses in the design space, but I wanted to do something where I could be really creative and also build a brand.  I thought for a long time about what that could be. I wanted to explore something within the realm of hospitality, and something that I could really perfect and have complete control over…because I am a little bit of a control freak. Of course, nothing is controllable, but within food, patisserie is quite a science. So, why gelato? I grew up eating and making gelato with my dad, who learned the art of gelato-making, and he always had that up his sleeve. I remember him saying things like, ‘If the building industry goes bad, I’ll open a gelateria.’  We would eat gelato at Christmas and Easter and family birthdays and special occasions and all through summer. It was this amazing product that I couldn’t find anywhere else. gelato was like coffee 20 years ago, where the only place I could get traditional Italian coffee was at my grandparents’ house. I had that lightbulb moment of thinking, ‘Maybe I should open a gelateria.’ I felt like I had landed on a good idea and found a niche in the market for something that didn’t exist. IR: I know you have seven stores in Melbourne, and they’re quite special from a design perspective. Can you tell me how you’ve approached the customer experience in stores?  SF: We’re just in Melbourne at the moment, but we’d love to expand interstate. We’re very focused on design and quality and fitout and working with the best designers in the industry. When I started the business, I used some of my contacts in the design world to talk through the concept of what I was trying to do – execute a space where people feel like they can come and gather and experience more than just eating gelato.  IR: One of the interesting things about your business is that you collaborate with a lot of other chefs and brands in the hospitality space. What’s the thinking behind that?  SF: Again, I always lean into the design world, because that’s what I studied and was immersed in for many years. When you know good design and you understand things that are higher quality, it’s hard to take that away from how you approach any business. To me, it made sense to approach other people who are doing really interesting things and see if they wanted to work together to do something that hadn’t been done before.  How do we choose whom to collaborate with? It’s just looking at what other people are doing, and then finding that synergy and starting a conversation. We’re approached by lots of people and, often, it’s hard because you’d love to say yes to everything, but we’re quite selective about who we work with. We love collaborating with people who are creating something themselves. I love working with other chefs, but then artists and architects and painters and filmmakers – people who create and express themselves creatively through their art. It’s about how we can visualise or conceptualise a product that’s so accessible, like gelato, and express that in different ways. That’s what I find really interesting. IR: We touched on interstate expansion just before. Is that something that’s on the cards in the near future? SF: I would absolutely love to expand interstate, but it’s a really big move that requires a lot of planning. We’re building a new production facility at the moment, which means that we’ll have a big capacity to produce our products. Everything is made from scratch, so we require a big kitchen with a big team of pastry chefs and gelato-makers. We don’t buy anything pre-made. We have all the raw ingredients and we make every jam, every ganache, all the crumbles, all the sauces, everything in our kitchen. That’s been one of the biggest restrictions for us in the last 12 months. We’ll be moving into the new facility toward the end of November, and that’s a really exciting phase in the growth of our business.  We’d love to open more stores in Melbourne, but also interstate. I think if you can make a gelateria work in Melbourne, where it’s cold a lot of the time, the further north you go, the greater the opportunity. We’re just excited about the possibilities.  IR: Let’s talk a bit about that new production facility. What pain points will it solve for you guys? SF: It’s just the huge volume that we’re producing now with our seven stores. We’ve had incredible growth, and we’ve completely outgrown the current operation. That has meant that we’ve had to say no to opportunities, or we’ve had to scale back on the volume of products, so we haven’t been able to do as many limited-edition products. The production facility opens up all of those possibilities, but the greatest is definitely the ability to open more stores.  IR: Just to clarify, all of your products are made in the production facility, and then shipped out to stores? SF: That’s right – all of our chefs work in one location and hand-make everything, and then we deliver it to our stores. We do churn gelato in some of our stores, so we may go back to that in some locations, but we’ve found that having all of our chefs in one location means that we’re able to make sure that the quality of the product is at a premium, and we’ve got full visibility on what’s going out and when. We just have much more control.  I think the new production facility will allow us to be very consistent across all of our products and make sure that every time a customer tries our gelato, it doesn’t matter which store they’re purchasing from, they’ll always be getting a very consistent product. That’s really fundamental to who we are and what we’re about.  IR: As a Melbourne-based brand, which had one of the longest Covid lockdowns in the world, can you tell me about the impact the pandemic had on Piccolina?  SF: It was a really scary time because people didn’t know what was going to happen, so there was a lot of unknown and a lot of uncertainty. Just before the pandemic, we signed a store lease on Degraves Street [in downtown Melbourne], and I remember driving through the city, thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, what are we going to do?’  I went straight after that to my dad’s place – he was pretty unwell, he actually passed away a couple of months after the pandemic hit – and I said to him, ‘I’ve just driven through the city, it’s a ghost town.’ I was worried, and he said to me the one thing I needed to hear to keep going: ‘When everyone else is scared, that’s when you need to be brave and keep going.’  Funnily enough, an opportunity came up where we are now located, on the corner of Hardware Lane and Little Bourke Street. It was a Flight Centre, and I saw all the articles about Flight Centre closing, so I made a call and asked if we could have that space. So, not only did we keep going in the face of the pandemic, but also we took on three leases, did the fitouts, basically moved in and locked the doors for a year.  It was pretty confronting, but we just rode it out. We were lucky in that we were able to stay open and do takeaway. We had a kitchen full of pastry chefs and gelato-makers, and I made it my business not to close the doors – I wanted everybody to keep their jobs. Within one week, we developed a wholesale range, which we photographed and took out to specialty delis and independent supermarkets. We pivoted pretty quickly, and it was successful.  The feedback we got about our product was just that it made people happy. They were able to go for a walk and get a scoop of ice cream. I think that’s the role we played in people’s lives through the pandemic.  IR: Is the wholesale side of the business still going? SF: No, it’s not. We came out of the last lockdown, and that summer was just incredibly busy. We had to make a decision about whether to continue that business as a spin off, or keep focusing on the gelato area, and my heart’s just really not in wholesale. Making all these incredible products and seeing them on a supermarket shelf, maybe a bit frosty looking, or marked down, it didn’t resonate with me.  I really love retail and love expressing the brand through retail stores. I love being customer-facing, being on the high street. It was hard to cut off wholesale because it was making money, but it just wasn’t the direction I wanted the business to go.