Meet the MBAs Behind Frutero, Philly’s New Tropical Ice Cream

My first bite of Frutero passion fruit ice cream was unexpectedly rich with a lingering light, citrusy taste. Frutero doesn’t stop there, though — it makes a whole host of fruit flavored ice creams using mangoes, guavas, and other tropical fruits from Colombia. 

Instead of joining the race to Wall Street, Wharton MBAs Mike Weber and Vedant Saboo decided to have some fun, founding
Frutero (https://www.fruteroicecream.com/).

Mike is from Stamford CT and went to the University of Maryland. He worked in consulting at Deloitte for a few years and most enjoyed consulting for food businesses. In fact, one of his favorite clients was a large ice cream company. From there, he worked for a beer analytics firm, and then he came to business school with the intention to found his own company.

Vedant is from East India, where he studied at IIT Delhi, later travelling to Japan to pursue research. Next, he worked in consulting in McKinsey, before spending a few years working at Blackstone Private Equity in India. He moved to the US recently to pursue his MBA and he also came with the intention of starting his own business. 

I got to sit down with them and chat about the inspiration behind their tropical fruit flavored ice cream, how they met, and their biggest challenges as ice cream entrepreneurs. 

How did you meet?

(MW) We were assigned to sit together on the first day of class, Management 610. We didn’t realize that we both had the same goal of starting a business. Because we were both interested in it, we would continue to see each other in entrepreneurship classes we were both taking. One night we grabbed dinner together and Vedant said to me, “We both want to start a business. Let’s start brainstorming and do it.” We met every day for a few hours and would brainstorm with a theme. After a month of doing this, we decided on an idea. 

What was the inspiration behind starting Frutero?

(MW) In December I went on a trip to India. Vedant told me I had to try this tropical fruit flavored ice cream called Naturals. I loved it and immediately questioned why there wasn’t tropical fruit ice cream like this readily available in the US. 

(VS) And so we started making ice cream at my house. We outsourced the R&D to my mom in India. She would come up with the recipes in her kitchen and show us how to make them ourselves over FaceTime. We started sharing our ice cream with the Indian community at Wharton through hosting classmates for samplings and people were a huge fan. Some even started offering to buy our ice cream when all we had were samples in paper cups. We came to realize that these tropical fruit ice cream flavors are really popular not just in India, but in so many countries where people eat tropical fruits. We then started sharing our ice cream with the Latin American community at Wharton too. Making this company felt like an interesting opportunity to cater to people who love tropical fruit in a way that hasn’t been done before in the premium grocery ice cream segment. Now we’re selling in over 400 stores. 

Has ice cream/food always been a big part of your life?

(MW) I’ve always been a big foodie. I basically fall asleep thinking about what I’m going to eat the next day. And I love eating ice cream. Like, really love. Now I have it at my house all the time, which is awesome. 

(VS) I love food, and fruit especially is a really important part of life for people like me who grew up in tropical climates. In the US, there’s a really low variety of fruit in grocery stores. I missed having delicious mangoes and guavas available to me all the time and eating delicious fruit ice cream.

How did you find the perfect fruit for your ice cream?

(VS) When we were looking, every day we would get fruits Fedexed to my apartment from international suppliers. It’s really difficult to make ice cream with the fruit. Fruits have a lot of water content and the moment you mix them with ice cream, the water from the fruits form ice crystals. Fruits also need to be perfectly ripe and soft to blend into ice cream. We tried fruit from all over the world until we found the best in Colombia.

(MW) We met a man who’s an investment banker in the US who got burned out from his job. His father had a guanabana farm in Colombia and so the ex-banker decided to go help him out. As a business opportunity, he decided to start exporting the guanabanas to other countries. This went well so he started doing this for other people in his community and now has his own business exporting farmers’ fruit. Farmers in Colombia have fantastic quality fruit. It was a mix of luck and active searching to find the best fruits, which are in Colombia. Nothing could replicate the way the Colombian fruits blended with the ice cream. We actually now no longer get the whole fruits – we get them in a pureed form. 

What is the ice cream making process like?

(VS) The fruits come from Colombia. The dairy comes from Pennsylvania. Philly actually has a long history of ice cream. Bassett’s is owned by an ex-Wharton student and he is an active mentor to us. We tapped into the ice cream community in Philly (Weckerly’s, Franklin Fountain, Little Baby’s, etc.) to get an early perspective. At the time, Mike was consulting for Little Baby’s and we came to learn that their facilities in North Kensington had excess facility time. We offered Little Baby’s free consulting services in exchange for use of their excess facilities. They accepted, and that’s how we started making ice cream.

(MW) Ice cream is a difficult product because it has to be frozen all the time. When we started, we did all the sales and deliveries ourselves. I own a car and we would pack it with ice cream and then drive all over Philly making deliveries before the ice cream melted. Now we work with a distributor, which has large trucks that carry our ice cream along with other brands to stores, and has made our lives a lot easier.

How do you get into the stores that you sell in?

(MW) We literally go door to door and enter stores and ask to speak to the owner or manager. We mainly go to independent stores, where the owner is often working at the store. We would pack samples in a cooler bag to have on hand always so that our product could speak for itself. 

Where does the name come from?

(VS) Frutero is Spanish for fruit vendor. We made a list of eighty names and had our friends vote on which they liked best. We actually didn’t like the one that they voted for so we ended up just choosing our own favorite, which was Frutero.

(MW) Our product is all about the farmers and the fruit and that’s what we celebrate. We want to tell the stories of those farmers in Colombia and other countries we source from in the future. 

Where do you see your brand going?

(MW) We’re working on launching a coconut ice cream using coconuts from Thailand. Over the next few months we’re expanding in New York and Florida. We started this company because we found a massive underserved role in the market for tropical fruit ice cream. We see ourselves becoming the premium natural tropical fruit ice cream maker.

(VS) Naming our company Frutero was a very conscious choice. Even if we are to expand beyond ice cream, we will always keep fruits at the core of the business. 

What are your favorite flavors?

(MW) Our new coconut flavor! I had three samples of it for breakfast today. I also love the passion fruit flavor. It’s loaded with fruit – there are two entire fruits in the half pint. 

(VS) I love the mango one. I grew up in India eating amazing mangoes so initially I didn’t think I’d like any of the mango flavored ice creams we’d come up with, but ours is amazing. 

Where can Frutero ice cream be bought?

(MW) You can get our ice cream delivered to you on GoPuff, in Gourmet Grocer here on campus, and in 400 places throughout Philadelphia including grocery stores (such as South Square and Rittenhouse Market).