Larry Gardiner, or “Chef G” as he is often referred to, is the 60-year-old owner of Twist, an ice cream parlour in Tower Isle, St Mary that has been making waves way beyond its immediate environs.

The parlour, with its 30 flavours of ice cream and a wall covered with the scribblings of guests who are asked to write their comments there, exudes the owner’s passion for ice cream.

Yet there is an additional twist to the story as the company’s name suggests and this is the full scoop.

Twist’s ice creams are not made from actual milk. They are made from coconut milk and the reason stems from Gardiner’s experience with ice cream throughout his life.

“I have always been around ice cream,” he declared. “When my older sister graduated from high school she went to work for a company called Dairy Farmers. I loved ice cream so much and my sister would bring home a gallon of ice cream every Friday.”

His mother also sold ice cream from their house in Vineyard Town, Kingston. According to Gardiner, she bought the ice cream from the Cremo company and she was the first person to sell ice cream from her home after which others in the area started doing the same.

Gardener migrated from Jamaica at the age of 21 and while he pursued different businesses throughout his career his passion for ice cream remained, but he often had bad physical reactions to ice cream due to its dairy content as he got older.

Inspired by friends in Atlanta who made soy ice cream, Gardiner started experimenting with making his non-dairy ice cream. After a lot of trials and many errors he finally developed his coconut milk-based ice cream that would not freeze into rock ice after one day. But the ice cream making continued as just a hobby.

It wasn’t until Gardiner retired to Jamaica in 2017, nine years after his mother passed away that he opened up Twist with the help of his wife and aunt.

For customers looking for non-milk, natural ice cream, Twist was a dream come true.

“All of our ice creams have less than seven ingredients,” Gardiner revealed. “No GMOs (genetically modified organisms). I don’t use any kind of flavourings, so if I am making soursop it is 100 per cent straight soursop. I don’t use powder. Everything is done 100 per cent from the fruit itself. We only use 100 per cent cane sugar and no other sugar.”

Gardiner’s commitment to a natural product does not in any way diminish his passion for the flavour.

“What I have done is, I have broken the flavours down into three sections,” he explained. “We have a classic section which is your traditional, your rum and raisin, your grapenut, coconut, vanilla, pistachio, chocolate, and stout.”

“Then we have our exotic,” he continued. “In the exotic we have 16 flavours. What we have is what we call a “farm to spoon programme”, so we actually buy fruits directly from the farmers, and we process the fruits in-house and we create our purees and make our fruit-based ice creams. So we have flavours like jackfruit, sorrel, soursop, guava passion, and grapefruit to name a few. We also have mountain sop which is a family of soursop and we have mammee apple.”

The unusual midnight dream ice cream falls into the exotic category. This offering is infused with activated charcoal and blackstrap molasses.

The third section is pairings where Gardiner combines flavours to produce ice creams like Jul-Indian, a combination of St Julian and East Indian mangoes, or sorbets like Passion-mento, a mixture of passion fruit and pimento.

In addition to traditional ice cream, there are sundaes, smoothies, shakes, pastries, cheesecakes and stir-fried ice cream. Stir-fried ice cream (rolled ice cream) is unlike traditional scooped ice cream. It is made in real-time by combining the coconut milk and the flavouring of your choice on a cold pan. These ingredients are then stirred to perfection, rolled, and served.

Twist’s creativity attracts customers from all over the parishes of St Mary and St Ann and Gardiner said he serves guests from as far away as Montego Bay, Portmore, and Kingston.

“Word of mouth has been really significant for us and we certainly have a good social media presence, as well.,” he indicated. “All I can say is God has been good. People had been saying you should be in Ocho Rios, you should be in Kingston, this area is not going to work for you, but the residents have been very engaging.”

Tourists have also started visiting the parlour. Most of them are brought there by drivers in the tourism business and Twist is seeing guests from as far away as Europe and countries like Holland, the United States, and South Africa.

The fact that Gardiner has made his ice cream project so popular in an area that is removed from urban centres is in no small part due to his skill as an entrepreneur. Since leaving Jamaica at the age of 21, he has owned a variety of businesses including one of the largest black-owned video production companies in Texas, a rap show that won an award for one of the best independently produced rap shows in the USA, a restaurant in Belize and a cheesecake store in Texas.

He has also been in the cheesecake business for 30 years and still provides cheesecakes to clients in Atlanta and customers of Twist.

The father of five children, ages 18 to 35 years said they are not surprised about his latest venture after retiring.

“My kids have seen me do so many things, and this is just dad retiring and still doing something,” he laughed.

The experienced entrepreneur is now seeking to expand his business in Jamaica and is considering additional locations in Kingston, Ocho Rios, and Montego Bay. He is also planning to sell quarts and pints in supermarkets and revealed that this had been his original intention.

I never intended to retail,” he said. “When I came to Jamaica, I thought I was so done with retail that I wanted to do manufacturing, but my wife and my father-in-law kept saying to me ‘you know you can’t have something so good and not make it available to the general public and while you’re trying to build the business you should open a retail location’.”

“The best thing I ever did,” he affirmed.

Gardiner is also building a mutually beneficial relationship with farmers to yield more flavours of ice cream.

“We have gotten a link with the Ministry of Agriculture through Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA) introducing us to more farmers so we have greater access to produce and we were at the Denbigh Agricultural, Industrial and Food Show recently,” he said. “Right now we are working with the ministry of agriculture to look at all the various fruits that we have in Jamaica because we have become really big in terms of our fruit flavours.”

The ice cream entrepreneur was born in England, came to Jamaica at the age of 12, migrated at the age of 21 and made his living in different places overseas.