A Cool Idea That Turned A Million

Natasha Alomia looked to the freezer of her own fridge for her breakthrough business idea.

- Jay Caboz

Natasha Alomia literally used ice cubes as building blocks for her business. It all started two years ago experimenting with them in her home freezer. The ice burn she endured touching thousands of cubes of ice was worth it. Thirteen months on, it led to a R1 million ($75,700) empire built on champagne popsicles.

She spent months testing and tasting frozen sparkling wines, to see if her idea to make popsicles out of wine would be a hit on retail shelves and in cooler boxes.

“I was overseas on business and walked into a department store in London and I saw their own brand of popsicles. I phoned my business partner and said let’s make it ourselves. I got back to South Africa, bought 10 different brands of champagne and wine and literally experimented on my stove playing with water levels and fructose levels. At one stage, my entire freezer was filled with varying sizes of ice cube samples. Some tasted great in liquid form, but horrible when frozen,” says Alomia. Her bubbly idea was something South Africans had never seen before – frozen champagne popsicles. An idea so simple, you would think someone had thought of it before.

The pops come in two flavors – Cap Classique and Tranquille. A special tube, imported from overseas, is filled with the champagne syrup and sent through an accelerated freezer, a process the resourceful Alomia learned first-hand in her own freezer.

“I remember having dry ice burns on my fingers two weeks after the launch and going to breakfast with a friend of mine, and there he is having to cut my breakfast because I couldn’t hold the fork. You must be willing to do all it takes.