Published in the Australian Financial Review, Oct 18, 2024
By Michael Bailey
Donato Toce is the creative mind behind Gelato Messina’s signature flavours. Photo: Dominic Lorrimer
I’m about to have lunch with the head creative chef and co-owner of Gelato Messina, Donato Toce, but it might as well be with Willy Wonka.
On a nondescript street in an industrial zone of Sydney’s Marrickville, surrounded by panel beaters and warehouses, the Gelato Messina factory is akin to stumbling upon the Golden Ticket.
Over here, a safety-capped worker walks past carrying a tub of freshly roasted hazelnuts. My nose follows when he walks back the other way, toting bushels of mint.
Another worker stands on a ladder filling a pasteuriser with milk, which I’ll learn later comes from Gelato Messina’s own grass-fed Jersey herd on a farm it bought near Shepparton and converted to no-till. A third ladles the thick, flavourful-looking stuff into a giant kettle, carefully reducing it with sugar to make oozy, caramel-coloured dulce de leche.
I wander away from those aromas to the equally welcoming smell of just-baked croissants, destined for the shelves of the on-site patisserie.
In an adjacent room, a tray of milk chocolate peanut fudge is in the oven, almost ready for a batch of Messina’s popular “Robert Brownie Jr” flavour. A lady with a piping bag puts the finishing touches on some fairy bread bars, enrobing burnt butter cream in white chocolate, on whose surface hundreds and thousands create a colour splash worthy of a John Olsen painting.
The Gelato Messina factory’s walls are mostly glass, yet few would know that in 2023 this place produced a whopping 1.7 million kilograms of gelato. That included 1.3 million kilograms of gelato base, made from milk, sugar and a little cream, then 400,000 kilograms of pureed fruit and nuts and other goodies added to it, ready for dispatch to its 32 company-owned stores and, after a good churning there, your cup or cone.
Chocolatier Millie Jung with Gelato Messina co-owner Donato Toce, making couverture chocolate. Photo: Janie Barrett
“One of the few things we formulate for here is making sure the store staff are able to scoop the gelato easily,” says Toce (pronounced Toe-chay), the man with creative control over all this, after he’s come downstairs from his office to greet me.
“The temperature it’s served at has to be just right.”
The 49-year-old is wearing a T-shirt and chinos, not a top hat and tails, but it’s clear Toce takes his dessert-making as seriously as any Wonka. Behind its melt-in-your-mouth image, gelato is after all a fiercely competitive business, and Gelato Messina is among just a few out of hundreds of aspirants to have achieved significant scale. Only Gelatissimo, another homegrown business that franchises 50 outlets in Australia and another 20 offshore, is thought to be larger.
The national sweet tooth is worth targeting. The on-the-go ice cream and gelato market is achieving a compound annual growth rate of 1.7 per cent, according to GlobalData analysis, and is forecast to hit $2.7 billion in annual revenue by 2026.
Gelato Messina will do about $60 million in 2024, Toce tells me. With that potential upside, it’s little wonder he’s trying to become to ice cream what Adriano Zumbo is to cakes, currently starring as a contestant on Network 10’s Dessert Masters, after earlier cameos on MasterChef.
But lunch comes before dessert, and it’s no coincidence that Toce has invited me to Messina HQ on a Wednesday. That is the day each week that Carla Palumbo, the mother of Nick Palumbo – who founded Gelato Messina with a single Darlinghurst store in 2002 – prepares either her lasagne or her meatballs for the 45 factory staff.
Donato Toce during one of his appearances on hit TV show MasterChef. Photo: Channel 10
I’m visiting on lasagne day, and as Toce and I grab a plate of it and walk across the carpark to the restaurant adjoining the retail gelateria, its rich red sauce creates yet more enticement.
Messina Creative is the place where Gelato Messina “flexes”, in Toce’s words, throwing six-course degustation dinners where its core product is the hero of every dish. Jalapeno sorbet on a beef tartare brioche roll with shaved black truffle, anyone? How about tarragon gelato on Gundagai lamb with chargrilled fennel?
Lasagne is a much simpler fare, and Carla’s is so good that I’m not missing the Heston-esque ice cream experiments. “Carla’s cooking is always a crowd-pleaser,” says Toce, as we both tuck in.
This is a man who knows a thing or two about food from Italy. Toce was born there in 1975, in the southern town of Corleto Perticara, just above the instep in the boot, and migrated with his parents to Melbourne aged four.
While Dad worked at General Motors, Mum was a “signora in the kitchen” at various restaurants around Lygon Street and Albert Park, perfecting sauce recipes and knocking out gnocchi.
Nick Palumbo has traced his obsession with gelato to the age of eight, when his grandfather took him to the renowned Patisserie Irrera in Messina, Sicily, now in its 114th year.
‘An inkling for flavour’
Toce offers no such exotic origin story. In fact, he remembers getting Streets Viennettas from the freezer for dessert as a kid. (Predictably, he remixed them into a “Messinnetta”, with chocolate gelato and a strawberry gel, for MasterChef last year.)
However, thanks to Mum, commercial kitchens always intrigued him. By 13 he was working after school in his corner pizzeria.
Toce did well enough in his VCE exams to get into an arts/law degree, but he couldn’t ignore the servery’s siren call.
“Back then you were getting $270 a week on Austudy, and I was making $700 a week cooking and I didn’t have to study!” he marvels.
By this time, he was working in the larder at Bortolotto’s, the three-hatted St Kilda institution run by Olimpia Bortolotto, who would start the equally famous Cecconi’s at Crown in 1998 (where Toce would also work).
Donato Toce, head chef and co-owner of Gelato Messina. Photo: Dominic Lorrimer
Reality hit when he decided to get serious and do an apprenticeship. His pay dropped to $250 in the same week he remembers working 76 hours.
”Thank god kitchens have calmed down. Back in the ’90s, let’s just say they weren’t the most nurturing of places,” he says, with a visible shudder. “I tell our apprentices what we went through, and they can’t believe it.“
The silver lining was that at Bortolotto’s, Toce got to make ice cream from scratch. “It was great fun, and I just seemed to have an inkling for flavour,” he says, between mouthfuls of lasagne.
However, in that era, Toce recalls dessert was not the priority it has become in an age where rainbow-coloured food plays so well on Instagram.
He went on to run his own restaurant, Termini in St Kilda, and was so focused on its house-made pasta that he didn’t even buy an ice cream machine. Toce moved to Sydney in 2007, to become head chef at the hatted Italian restaurant, A Tavola, on Victoria Road in Darlinghurst.
Ice cream was back on the menu – or more specifically, its lower-cream, more compressed Italian cousin, gelato. Not only did Nick Palumbo and his brother own part of A Tavola, but they also operated the first Gelato Messina, directly across the road.
Toce’s eyes light up as he recalls the night he made his first Gelato Messina “special” – the adventurous, rarely repeated flavour combinations of which the chain now introduces five every week, and which accounted for 25 per cent of last year’s sales.
”I was making ice creams at A Tavola, so I’d cross the road after closing and talk to the boys, we’d have a scoop and discuss flavour combinations,” he says.
One night, after a few encouraging noises from A Tavola diners, Toce took the Palumbos a tumbler of his latest creation – an orange and Campari marmalade gelato. “Nick tastes it, smiles, and two weeks later it’s in Messina’s cabinet,” says Toce, still beaming with pride 17 years later. It was the first flavour to be added that wasn’t made by Palumbo.
Messina’s first queue
In a happy coincidence, Toce was tiring of head restaurant chef hours, so when the Palumbos offered him a new role as head creator at Gelato Messina, he ran with it.
Toce introduced the rotating weekly specials, inspired initially by simply wanting to use up ingredients left over from making what was then 20 “classic” gelato flavours (there are now 35).
At the same time, a former physiotherapist and professional deejay who shared an office with Nick, Declan Lee, was brought on as branding and marketing manager.
“He jumped us into social media at just the right time,” Toce recalls. “We’ve never paid for a shred of marketing, and back in 2009 an organic strategy could take you a long way.”
He can’t remember exactly what inspired it, but he still remembers the night he and the Palumbos were walking back to the Darlinghurst store, and saw a queue stretching outside for the very first time. “We were on trend with the hipsters. I think we’ve grown too much to have favour with them anymore, but they helped get us a proper market,” Toce says.
One might think the novelty of the specials would have worn off by now, but apparently they had not. “We made 1800 kilograms of ‘Friend-chip Goals’ last year, with cookie dough and toasted cookie chips, and it sold out in two days,” he says.
The Gelato Messina factory in Marrickville, Sydney, produced a whopping 1.7 million kilograms of gelato last year. Photo: Dominic Lorrimer
Toce is married and renovating a house in Rose Bay, but doesn’t have children – the demographic I’d suggested to him would be his best focus group as he dreamt up new specials. The chef counters that it is actually women aged between 22 and 33 who are Messina’s biggest customer segment. He tells me about a superfan from that demographic who lives in Liverpool and keeps a notated spreadsheet of all 5000 specials Messina has ever made. She has even suggested new ones that have ended up in the cabinet.
“We get requests all the time. Most of them would never work, but hers? Bangers – we virtually copy-pasted them into the recipe book,” Toce says. The superfan was even offered a job on the strength of “You Cannoli Live Once”, a concoction of creme patissiere gelato, pistachio fudge, pistachio praline and cannoli shells, which went back on the specials’ rotation this month.
“People nagged us about that one for three years,” Toce says. Its creator turned down the employment offer, but Nick Palumbo has long sought to bring good people into the fold.
Gelato Messina now has 13 shareholders, with the founder retaining 28 per cent. The other three core partners – Danny Palumbo (who heads operations), Toce and Lee – each own between 10 per cent and 20 per cent. Their respective second-in-charges also have equity, as do key staff such as Steve Arnold, who runs the dairy farm at Numurkah that also supplies fresh ingredients like mint.
“Steve’s the hardest-working partner,” Toce says. “We had this romantic notion of how nice it would be to customise milk for gelato, but it’s not been easy.”
Farming in an area prone to bushfire and flood has not been Messina’s only challenge.
The partners bought a hazelnut plantation with 1000 trees in 2015, only to discover that the variety was no good for gelato because the nut’s skin didn’t come off when roasted. They pulled them all up and planted the variety which Ferrero uses for Nutella – then learnt those trees take seven years to grow a nut.
“So we’re using our own hazelnuts for the first time this year,” says Toce with a slightly rueful smile. “It’s been a long-term investment.”
There were also failed attempts last decade to expand directly into the US and mainland China. Learning its lesson, Messina used its first franchise partner to enter Hong Kong in 2021. Toce says that the store, to which milk from Numurkah is flown every week, is doing well.
“We’ve always been a have-a-go, hands-on kind of place,” he says. As if to prove the point, when he’s showing me out later we pass the wood shop. There are the Palumbo brothers on the tools, waving hello as they make fittings for a store that’s about to open in Sutherland.
The urge of Messina’s partners to control their own destiny hasn’t made the business a happy hunting ground for private equity managers. “They used to come around all the time in their three-piece suits and ties. We’d be here in our tees and shorts, and they’d want to know what our plan was,” Toce says.
“We’d sort of look at each other and shrug,” he says. “They don’t come around so much now.”
Self-funded and profitable, Toce hints that Gelato Messina is in no hurry for a scoop of external funding – at least for now. “We don’t pay ourselves a lot of money, so we get to work as many hours as we want to work and enjoy our life,” he says.
Speaking of which, it’s dessert time.
We repair to the gelateria next door, where I join the one-quarter of customers opting for a special. Toce scoops me a peanut butter and brownie mash-up that’s a crunchy, gooey delight. Because he can, Toce puts three flavours into his cup – choc mint, coffee and the dulce de leche made 30 metres away.
I ask about Messina’s most popular flavour, and he motions to the bucket of pistachio praline. With its nut paste sourced from a prized contract with a Sicilian boutique, the light-green gelato accounts for 10 per cent of all in-store sales and is about to spearhead Messina’s first foray into Woolworths.
“That’s one of Nick’s from way back,” he says, in response to my obvious question.
“But I’ve got a few ideas to top it.”