Cauliflower ice-cream startup founder is an award finalist

Plant-based ice-cream company Kinda Ice Cream is set to launch in summer 2022 with its product made from cauliflower that’s not pretty enough to be sold in supermarkets.

“We’re creating a delicious product from waste and creating another income stream for farmers,” said Mrinali Kumar, who worked with Jenni Matheson and four others to develop the plant-based ice-cream concept.

“An ice cream made without farming animals, with a lower environmental impact... Kinda sounds good to me,”  Kumar said.

She is one of the 18 finalists for the Momentum Student Entrepreneur award at the KiwiNet Research Commercialisation Awards. The awards celebrate scientific discoveries being successfully commercialised within New Zealand’s universities, Crown Research Institutes and other research organisations, and their impact on Aotearoa and beyond.

Kumar graduated from Massey University in 2021 with a Bachelor of Food Technology (Hons) in Product Development and is currently a postgraduate student at the university.

Through her studies she developed technical expertise and said: “Food Technology is an engineering degree — even though this was frustrating at the start (I really hated physics), in later years and especially now I understand the importance of learning fundamental science. Technical knowledge allows us to solve the problems that we face when trying to commercialise innovative foods, safely.”

The startup is set to commercialise its cauliflower ice cream later this year, and Kumar will find out if she’s a 2022 KiwiNet Awards winner on 6 October in Auckland.

Image credit: iStock.com/ahirao_photo