4 sugar-free brands luring consumers into healthier snacking
Vitamin-packed vegan ice cream
The ice cream brand Perfect World is the brainchild of Chris Conklin, a Boston-born entrepreneur. Conklin has lived in the UK for 30 years doing everything from music gigs to property development and dealing antiques in auctions at Christie’s.
“I was doing ice cream in the kitchen for my kids and myself — I was on a keto diet, so I stopped eating carbs and sugar. At the same time, my kids were coming home, eating a lot of junk food after school. I was trying to do something better for them,” says Conklin.
Perfect World is Conklin’s first venture in the food sector. It took about a year for him to realise he had found a niche in the market. Little did he know that the business idea could see him pioneer the dairy-free and vegan category in the ice cream segment, taking the frozen snack to a whole new, healthier experience.
The ‘eureka’ moment that took place in 2009 came to fruition in 2013 and Perfect World was established co-founded by Keith Davison, a former Saatchi & Saatchi director. The first ice cream brand entered the market the following year in the same price point and quality packaging of Ben & Jerry’s.
“Everything that was dairy-free or vegan ice cream wasn’t interesting at all, and definitely nothing available with no sugar, ” says Conklin. “We were the first company to put stevia in ice cream in the UK — now you have all these American brands that have come and done it and made [the no-sugar concept] explode,” he adds.
Perfect World also pioneered inclusions in ice cream. “In dairy-free, no one had cookies in it, or anything, the flavour was plain vanilla, chocolate, and it was disgusting!” he says.
Conklin believes he must have made thousands of version in the kitchen before going to market: “Am I really starting an ice cream company? It felt a bit strange. It took quite a while for the idea to settle,” he says.
Time to scale-up
With a self-funded budget of £10,000, Conklin and Davison spent a week at the food and nutritional sciences department at Reading University to learn how to scale up the recipe to a factory level.
The search for a manufacturing partner led the duo to a handful of trials. “Ice cream is a complex product for the structure of it, and we are using a lot of different ingredients. The manufacturer has to have the capacity and flexibility to work with a start-up. We tried three manufacturers in the UK and the third was a winner,” says Conklin.
The flavours in the product range are as bold as the concept Perfect World was set out to achieve in ice cream. Conklin explains: “We tried to do Ben & Jerry’s flavours, like choc brownie, banana, walnut chip, and strawberry, but we changed that to the flavours we now have, which are based on more high-end ingredients like pistachio, and carrot cake, for example.”
For Conklin, having unique flavours is strategic. “Some of the flavours we did before don’t translate in other markets, so regional flavours is quite important,” he explains.
“Mint chocolate chip is one of the best-selling flavours in the UK; the Americans would have it, but no one else in Europe; It’s such a British flavour!” he adds.
The range is made of double choc chip, pistachio, raspberry ripple, caramel pecan, mint choc chip, and sweet expresso. Conklin reveals the company is now developing a new flavour combination to sell in the Netherlands and Nordic countries: salted liquorice.
Nutritional claims
Perfect World entered the market as dairy-free, no-added-sugar ice cream. Building on a reformulated recipe, the brand became vegan: products are gluten-free, wheat-free, and soy-free. Polyol is the sweetener of choice; a naturally occurring sweetener that is found in fruit and vegetables.
The commitment to creating a healthier option led Conklin to find a way to boost the nutritional profile of the ice cream by adding vitamins. He explains: “Vegans need B12, for example, because they can’t get it from a plant-based diet, and when you turn 50 your body can’t break it down anyway if you wanted to.”
Today, Perfect World ice cream is high in vitamin D, E, B1, B2, B3, and B3, all of which have science-based health benefits.
Conklin says he follows the EU register of nutrition and health claims to the letter for making sure the recipes and nutritional claims are compliant with current regulations. “You can only say ‘no added sugar’ if you have added nothing into your product that includes monosaccharides, so you can’t add apple juice or agave syrup or dates into a product to sweeten it, for example,” he explains.
“Sales have gone up because new customers are buying”
Chris Conklin
Perfect World is today a well-establish, premium range of ice cream, with products sold in Ocado and in Jumbo, a major supermarket in the Netherlands. Conklin is bullish on the sales in the Dutch market: the retailer is expanding the brand’s presence from 75 stores to 250 locations across the country.
In the UK, sales through Ocado have remained steady. “Ocado has been amazing, flexible, and approachable,” says Conklin. He recognises that online sales amid the Covid-19 lockdown have meant the retailer is out of capacity, and that he was concerned about the impact on sales, but the opposite happened. “Sales have gone up because new customers are buying,” he explains.
Conklin says the company has sold 600,000 tubs since its launch in 2014, including sales abroad. Building on the expanded distribution in Jumbo, he foresees selling 2.5 times the numbers in the Netherlands this year.
John Sykes, the former Unilever executive turned investor, got on board Perfect World as investor director following an initial investment in the company.
“There were four things that attracted me to Perfect World: the product tasted good, and had a proposition bang-on-trend: a tasty product that is good for you,” he says. “The packaging has evolved and it also becomes fully vegan, but the core proposition has not changed,” he adds.
The final factors that convinced Sykes include the market size and the founders’ dedication. “Ice cream is a big market, so you only need a small share to have a sustainable business,” he says. “Finally, Chris and Keith were full of enthusiasm and committed to making the business work,” he concludes.
Perfect World closed a crowdfunding campaign on Seeds raising more than £330,000 in the round. The new capital is set to fuel the brand’s expansion across Europe.
Next page: Conscious Chocolate.