In India, ice cream preferences come with their own distinct identity, one that often surprises the rest of the world. Take butterscotch, for instance, it’s a flavour that only exists in India. Globally, it is recognised as toffee or caramel but in India, it is not just named different, it’s a flavour so intricately rooted in the Indian palate that even international experts find themselves puzzled by its name and profile until they realise it’s our own take on something familiar, yet entirely unique. This was one of the fun facts we learnt as we sat down with Ankit Chona, Founder of Hocco ice creams for a quick chat at his office in Ahmedabad, surrounded by the hum of machines making some of India’s most viral and loved ice-creams.
When you hear Chona speak about ice creams, you see something beyond a founder just talking about the product he manufactures. For him, this isn’t just business, it’s his inheritance and his legacy. Ice-cream means everything to him, he says, “My grandfather used to make ice creams. My father makes ice cream with me. He’s my mentor and I make ice creams. So I think if there’s any dessert in the world that I know well, it’s ice cream.”
Hocco’s story starts in 1950s India, it is a tale that almost feels cinematic and right out of a movie. Chona’s grandfather, Satish Chona ran a small cafe and ice-cream parlour in Karachi, Pakistan; the business moved with him to India after partition where he started making ice-creams and chana puri at the Ahmedabad railway station during the 1950s. Havmor, as this business was called, eventually became a giant ice-cream and food brand not just across Gujarat but the country. The brand was expanded by his son Pradeep Chona and eventually sold to a South Korean company, Lotte, specialising in food in 2017 for ₹1,020 crore.
With such a legacy comes its share of pressure, the kind that could make even a waffle cone crumble. “I think there were certain expectations from us that we will come at a certain scale with different products. Will the distribution channel trust us, will retailers want to experiment with a new brand? Those are the questions I asked myself every single day. In hindsight, everything worked out well, but there was a lot of second guessing in the beginning,” says Chona.
To put it into perspective, during peak summer this year, Hocco will be manufacturing about 200,000 litres of ice creams per day. Once their second plant in Panipat begins production, the brand should be making about 2,25000 to 2,30,000 litres of ice cream per day this summer. And for the summer of 2027, they plan to get to over 300,000 litres per day.
As Hocco scales, its roots remain firmly in Gujarat, long a hub of India’s dairy industry and home to brands like Amul and Vadilal. “Purely just by the geographical location, it just makes sense for there to be value added dairy products also from Gujarat and ice cream is probably one of the most sought after products in India.” says Chona, explaining why the state continues to lead India’s ice cream story.
But with so many brands fighting for market space, what makes Hocco different is their constant innovation. When they launched the Aamchi, the mango shaped ice-cream last summer, it almost instantly went viral on the internet with people asking when it will be made available in their cities. Apart from the Aamchi, their Oh Cone which is a ball shaped cone ice-cream and ice-cream cakes are also equally loved. Chona says for them the challenge is the opposite, “How do we not keep innovating? If you leave it to us, we’ll have a product every week out in the market.” A lot of the novel ice-cream forms we see Hocco experiment with are inspired by the team’s travels, viral fruit shaped products that they’ve seen and adapted like the Aamchi for instance. “We live in India, there’s nothing better than eating a cold mango on a hot summer day. Aamchi is just the next best thing to having a fresh chilled Ratnagiri Alphonso. When it comes to the innovative form factor, the Aamchi, we know it will do well. The question is can we make it and how many can we make. Even today, Aamchi is in short supply every single day because we just took a call that we can’t make more than what we can and that’s okay. Some products you have to wait a little longer to have.”
Innovation cannot really hold ground without flavour. And trust us you’d want to be a fly on the wall of the room where Hocco does their tasting sessions. “All of us here love ice-creams so it’s very little about the tasting and more about the eating of the ice creams,” quips Chona. There are no professional tasters at Hocco, there’s a panel of about 10-12 people and the R&D team that shortlists products and compares them to competition. Hocco’s advantage? Several products that they are innovating are usually not made by competition, so they don’t have any benchmarks per se, it’s just them doing it for the first time. There is no bad idea, the team is open to tasting anything and everything. If a significant majority involved in the tasting believes it will do well, they go ahead with it. Sometimes they even have a voting session among shortlisted flavours, and if there is still a deadlock, they involve the sales team and senior sales members to try it and decide where it falls.
Looking ahead, as the second plant in Panipat starts manufacturing, Hocco will be in a position to manufacture even more ice-creams per day than what they do currently. With innovations, Chona tells us there are a few interesting products being prepared for launch, from some mango variants to dry fruit ice-creams and something exciting along the lines of Aamchi. Because for Chona, this isn’t just scale or speed, it’s something far more personal. It’s a craft passed down through generations, one scoop at a time, still evolving, experimenting, and rooted in a love that refuses to melt away.
