Frosty Boy innovates

March 10, 2015
Inside FMCG

Australian frozen dessert and beverage manufacturer, Frosty Boy Australia, has flagged product innovation as key focus for the company following the launch of its beverage range, The Art of Blend.
Frosty Boy specialises in producing powdered base products including soft serve, frozen yogurt, and beverage bases for cafes, convenience stores, and quick service restaurants. It manufactures the equivalent of two million serves of soft serve ice cream daily for domestic and international markets.
Dirk Pretorius, CEO of Frosty Boy, told Inside FMCG within the soft serve category, gourmet and Asian inspired flavours are two growing trends which it intends to capitalise on.
“We’re doing a lot of work on the innovation of soft serve and the gourmet side of soft serve as well as Asian flavours to capture that wave,” Pretorius said.
“As a retailer if you’re not offering [dessert] as part of your menu customers will go and spend those dollars next door at the next retailer. I think it’s really important for all retailers to have a quality dessert range.”
Frosty Boy also launched a premium beverage range, The Art of Blend, last year.
The Art of Blend range includes Aromatic Spiced Chai, Creative Yoghurt Smoothie, Finest Belgian Chocolate, Exquisite White Chocolate, Premium Mocha Latte, Velvet Dairy Frappe Base, and Original Iced Coffee. The range allows retailers to be creative and make the products their own by adding fruits, flavouring, toppings, syrups, or water to the powders.
“I think it’s the right time to hit that trend in the market for beverages,” Pretorius said.
“Frosty Boy is very much associated with desserts so for that reason we went with name The Art of Blend. I think it suits the range a lot better than the Frosty Boy name, but it is still endorsed and manufactured by Frosty Boy. We have a lot of focus on that range now and getting that settled down.”
Over the past 14 years Frosty Boy has maintained an average compound growth of 18 per cent per year. The company distributes to 48 countries, with 75 per cent of its sales generated from export, but Pretorius says the Australian market will always be important to the company, with several projects currently in the works.
“Australia will always be our home base. We market the brand as Australian as hard as we can overseas because Australia is viewed as a country that produces quality product.”