Style: October 30, 2020

Style | Feature 31
Olive always saw queues outside Dunedin’s Rob Roy
Dairy, well-known for its ice creams and desserts, even in
winter. So she knew Dunedin people had an appetite for
ice cream. She quickly went down a Google rabbit hole
to figure out why there weren’t more people making ice
cream.
“Back in the 1950s, every little New Zealand town had
its own ice-cream place and they drove around in vans
doing deliveries. But they were kinda cannibalised by the
big guys. So it went from 30 to 40 independents to pretty
much none,” she explains.
Those were odds Olive liked. She quit her job and set
to work on her food truck concept – selling artisan ice
cream crafted by her own hands.
First, there was a trip to fetch Betty from Ōamaru.
There is, says Olive wryly, a very good reason why
Betty will never leave Dunedin. One white-knuckled trip
at 15km/h crawling over the hills into Dunedin was quite
enough for both of them.
Unfortunately, Betty wasn’t quite the young sassy thing
she used to be and it took a bit to get her kitted out with
freezers and a hotplate. It was February 2018 when Olive
launched – the end of summer. Not ideal, but Olive is
not one to be deterred, so the duo hit the road.
“I was totally petrified and not really even sure I had
done the right thing. I was in a financially precarious
position. It is easy to say, ‘Oh well, worst-case scenario,
I’ll sell the house,’ but when you actually have to think
about doing that you are like, ‘I don’t actually want to
lose everything.’
“A couple of weeks after I started I sold nothing. I was
parked up, got a coffee, put up a post on Instagram, got
another coffee and sat there. Nothing. I was feeling like a
loser.”
Olive decided to head out to St Clair beach, where she
parked, set up, and promptly ran out of fuel.
“That was the worst day I ever had,” she laughs,
because, well, she can now. There would be a series of
bleak days where there was only $30 to be made, but a
chat to a customer and a better shift than the previous
day kept her going.
“I didn’t want to be defeated. I was doing everything
possible, taking the truck out five days a week, plus
working three nights [at a restaurant], doing anything to
survive,” she says.
Olive believed in her product, with its mix of
traditional and more eyebrow-raising flavours. Some of
her creations include an ice cream with blue cheese and
candied pear, a honey and lavender ice cream that steeps
for months, and a tangy plum balsamic treat. Her latest
concoction is Beer and Nuts, which has candied pecans
crushed through stout-flavoured ice cream.
Seven months after she launched, the lines began to
form at St Clair.
“One warm Saturday we sold more ice cream that
day than I had the previous three weeks. It wasn’t much
– 30 litres – but word was spreading.”
The lines grew even longer and Olive wondered
how many people saw them and moved on. In late
September, she opened Patti’s & Cream The Scoop Shop
on Eglinton Road, Mornington.
“It is so surreal to be standing up in the shop after all
this time in the truck. It’s like living in a tent and now we
have a house,” she says.
But Betty won’t be retired. Olive loves the crowds out
at St Clair, and she enjoys the food truck scene culture.
“It is really friendly; everyone does know everyone,
which is what I love about it. You get to be collaborative,
which is different from restaurants.”
When she hears we are interviewing Tom from Hussey
& Laredo next, she is full of praise.
“He’s so cool. He’s been around longer than me. I’m
at the uni today with the truck and he is just around the
corner from us – he’s just lovely,” she says.
But she won’t get there on time if she doesn’t get
off the phone and finish making biscuits for ice-cream
sandwiches. And hopefully tonight she will have time for
a few more episodes of Dragon’s Den.
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