It's almost too good to be true. In the unforgiving Indian summer and at a time when ice-cream sales are soaring on the back of a 45-percent spike, a non-descript ice-cream parlour in Chennai is selling ice-cream cones for Rs 2 apiece. But by his own admission, V Vinoth, who runs Vinu's Igloo says, he doesn’t make margins on the sale.
"I make no profit from selling Rs 2 ice-cream at my ice-cream shop," he says, "But the best part about selling ice-cream for Rs 2 a cone is that customers end up ordering high-margin products like the cake with ice-cream, or brownie with ice-cream or the Paalkova (milk mawa — a well-known dairy-based dessert) ice-cream. That's how I make money."
(Photo Credit: Dhieja Prabhavathy)
Located in a dusty corner of Chennai's sleepy West Mambalam neighborhood, Vinoth's ice-cream store is choc-a-block on an early Friday afternoon. Scores of children, still on vacation, line up with coins hoping to score a couple of ice-cream cones. Not far away is 70-year-old Panchali waiting in line, her Rs 2 in hand. "The heat really got to me today, and I wanted to get myself an ice-cream," she says, "I've been coming here every other day since the ice-cream is so cheap." Other customers, even some from far away Puducherry, wait their turn. All for a cone of ice cream worth Rs 2.
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Vinu's Igloo skyrocketed to prominence in February when the second-generation entrepreneur, who runs a wholesale rice business, decided to restart what was once the family trade. The kicker, though, came when Vinoth decided to adopt the age-old pricing strategy too, selling vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, pistachio and mango ice-cream for just Rs 2 per cone.
(Photo Credit: Dhieja Prabhavathy)
In 1995, Vinoth's father, Vijayan began selling ice cream cones at Rs 1 per cone, before hiking prices to Rs 2 in the second week of business. "Obviously, these rates didn't make headlines back then," says Vinoth. In due course, the business grew and Vijayan owned five branches across the city, including the popular West Mambalam one where Vinoth runs the business from, today.
"I would often bunk classes and accompany my dad while he made ice-cream from an old-fashioned cone machine — like the ones you'd see at old cinema theatres. It was only natural that I’d become part of the business in due course,” he recalls, "We were in business till about 2008 when we had to shut because of labour-related issues."
(Photo Credit: Dhieja Prabhavathy)
Today, Vinoth's return to local ice-cream vending is built on the back of the need to make ice-cream accessible to everyone, profit margins notwithstanding. Of the approximately Rs 50,000 business that Vinu's Igloo does every day, Rs 3,000 is accounted for by his popular two-rupees ice-cream. "That means nearly 1,500 customers, every day visit us for our Rs 2 ice-cream cones," says Vinoth. The rush has been so pronounced that Vinoth introduced a token system, recently. "Quite often, we end up crossing token number 999 in the middle of the day, and begin again only to see token number 800 come up in our second round of sales in the same day," he says.
A huge factor that drives sales of Vinoth's Rs 2 ice-cream is curiosity. "Customers visit — many of them from faraway parts of the city —to check for themselves if we’re really serving ice-cream for Rs 2 a cone," he says, "Once they satisfy that inherent curiosity, they actually end up staying and buying some of our other treats."
(Photo Credit: Dhieja Prabhavathy)
A large part of the popularity that Vinu's Igloo has received, Vinoth says, is thanks to social media and YouTube in particular. And while he is sure that the rates will stay, he doesn't want to experiment too much with flavours: "People like simple flavours — Vanilla and strawberry in particular. We tried experimenting recently and introduced watermelon and jackfruit flavours, but they didn’t exactly take off."
(Photo Credit: Dhieja Prabhavathy)
First Published: May 27, 2022 8:24 PM IST
