EatKinda Takes Its Cauliflower Ice Cream to the US Amid Scaling Struggles in New Zealand

New Zealand-based cauliflower ice cream startup EatKinda is moving operations away from its home country to focus on the US amid scaling challenges.

EatKinda, the New Zealand startup making dairy-free ice cream from cauliflower, is withdrawing from its home market and shifting focus across the Pacific.

The firm’s products sold out at Hell Pizza locations four weeks after being launched, and are currently available at 120 Woolworths stores. But it has faced challenges in scaling up its operations domestically, which has impeded its growth plans.

“Right now, we’re producing manually, hand-filling each tub, which results in high wastage and inefficiencies. It’s simply not a sustainable model for scaling,” explains co-founder and CEO Mrinali Kumar.

“New Zealand, with a population of just five million, has limited manufacturing options for a niche product like ours, making it difficult to produce at the volume and cost needed to grow further.”

This compelled Kumar EatKinda to look outwards, landing on the US as its next destination. Here, “viral social media content” has helped the brand attract significant interest, according to Kumar. “Following this momentum, we built an email sign-up list, where thousands of US consumers have expressed a strong demand for our products, particularly in the natural retail channel,” she says.

“EatKinda was always meant to be a global brand, and this decision to step back from New Zealand retail and foodservice is the best short-term move to ensure we can have a much bigger long-term impact,” she adds.

US manufacturing ‘more sophisticated’ than New Zealand

EatKinda was founded in 2020 after Kumar and her co-founder Jenni Matheson at a Startup Weekend event as strangers and worked on the cauliflower ice cream concept, which came third in the competition.

This was followed by two years of R&D, after which they landed on a recipe featuring a base of cauliflower, glucose, sugar, coconut oil, and pea protein. The ice creams are available in chocolate, strawberry, and mint chocolate flavours.

But despite experiencing “incredible growth” in New Zealand, as Kumar puts it, it’s a “small market with limited manufacturing options”, which has resulted in an “inability to scale”. Activity in the country’s manufacturing sector suffered from its longest contraction since 2009 over the last two years, and only just reversed the trend this month.

Kumar says EatKinda’s social media reach – it has 37,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok, with some videos receiving more than a million views (and one surpassing five million) – has proven demand for its cauliflower ice cream globally. “We funnelled this traction into direct consumer engagement, and the response has been incredible,” says Kumar.

“At Expo West, we saw firsthand how excited people are about a truly unique, sustainable, and allergen-friendly ice cream. Buyers, investors, and industry leaders loved the taste and were eager to see it enter the US market,” she adds. “Interestingly, we originally thought we’d need to reformulate for American tastes, but the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, our flavours and level of sweetness are already a hit.”

Plus, the US has “more sophisticated manufacturing facilities and openness to innovation”, paving the way for its market entry here.

EatKinda gears up for fundraise to support US move

EatKinda has high hopes for the US, given the demand it says it has witnessed. But this comes with its own challenges. Sales of dairy-free ice creams have kept falling in recent years, reaching $351M in 2023 (a 14% drop from 2021), according to SPINS data crunched by the Good Food Institute. The volume of vegan ice creams shifted has plunged even faster in this period (-22%).

But for Kumar, the market for allergen-friendly, plant-based options in the US is “undeniable”, with a quarter of Americans having a food allergy. “And that doesn’t even include those who are vegan or plant-based,” she says.

That said, she acknowledges the reality that “consumers still won’t settle for anything less than great taste”. Research shows that a third of Americans have been buying fewer plant-based products because they don’t like how they taste, highlighting a key hurdle for manufacturers in the space.

“The plant-based category is still evolving, and while we’re making strides, there’s work to be done in perfecting the balance between flavour and price. That said, we’re not backing down from the challenge,” says Kumar.

EatKinda is kickstarting a seed funding round to support the US launch, and is in talks with potential partners. “The US market is already familiar with cauliflower as an ingredient, thanks to the success of cauliflower pizza bases and snacks. That openness to innovation makes it the perfect place to scale EatKinda,” she notes.

This doesn’t mean EatKinda is out of New Zealand for good; its home country remains part of the long-term strategy. “New Zealand is home for both Jenni and me. We’ve built an incredible community of loyal EatKinda lovers, and we would love to bring our ice cream back in the future,” says Kumar. “This short-term pivot allows us to build toward that bigger goal in a way that’s sustainable and scalable.”

She adds: “Over the past few days, we’ve received so many messages of support – as well as requests from customers as our ice cream starts disappearing from shelves. That response means the world to us, and it reinforces why we started this journey in the first place.”