Make it centrally, churn it fresh
When Nick Palumbo looked at the Australian gelato scene at the turn of the century, he wasn’t impressed. With Sicilian roots and a few years of gelato-making already under his belt, he reckoned the country deserved better, so he founded Gelato Messina in 1999 and opened the first shop in Darlinghurst in 2002.
The trouble with doing everything in the shop is that it doesn’t scale. Every new store would have meant another full production kitchen and another chance for quality to drift. Messina’s fix was elegantly simple: pasteurise every mix in one place, then churn it fresh in each store. The base is identical everywhere; the gelato is still made on site, every day.
“As long as you look after them, they will live forever.”
— Nick Palumbo on his Carpigiani machines
Everything made in-house
The headquarters is less a factory than a small food town. Alongside the gelato production there are kitchens for chocolate, patisserie, and dulce de leche, caramel and jam, because Messina makes nearly every component that goes into its gelato. Dedicated chocolatiers now turn out a full range of chocolates, and there’s a little restaurant on site where every dish carries a gelato element.
Palumbo calls the philosophy the ‘sum of the parts’. Great gelato is the start, but so is a shop designed for its neighbourhood, a playful flavour board that changes every week, and staff who treat customers like friends rather than with stiff formality. As for the machines, he has used Carpigiani since 1995 and nothing else, and plans to keep it that way as Messina heads overseas.
