Paul Kali spun through a string of careers before he turned 25. He played professional football for Canada, competed in the taekwondo world championships, worked at UBS (“they used me as a ringer to bring in the deals”), moved into private equity (“it was still listening to other people’s pitchbooks and Excel, I wanted to do it myself”) and then ran a frozen yoghurt shop on Portobello Road.
“Life was too short to do deals for someone else,” Kali says. Initially, success flowed in froyo: “I pitched for everything I could, we catered for the Rolling Stones backstage, we sold frozen yoghurt at the London Olympics.”
But then a problem in his business fuelled a bigger business idea. “We were using soft-serve ice-cream machines, big and heavy like a dinosaur, dirty like a pig and they cost up to £15,000,” Kali, now 39, explains. “
They would break during peak times on a weekend, call-out charges were astronomical. One day at 4am when I was cleaning them, Thames Water turned off our water supply. I had to walk to the convenience store and buy hundreds of bottles of water to finish the job manually in time for opening. Who said all-nighters were only for bankers?”
So Kali came up with the idea for fwip, which he dubs the “world’s smallest gelateria” — a £2500 Portobello machine that, once filled with fwip’s proprietary capsules, can serve up six flavours of gelato, sorbets, frozen yogurt or vegan desserts seven seconds after pushing a button.
Funding came in tranches: Kali raised £250,000 from “friends, family and fools” in 2010 for initial work on his machine idea, then £1 million soon after from a Taiwanese angel investor — “they’ve all since left with profitable cash exits,” he reports. To date, the company has raised over £22 million, largely from Germany’s Hevella Capital.
It was years of slog from idea to creation: Kali enrolled in “ice cream university” at Penn State, with alumni including the founders of Ben & Jerry’s, learned basic Italian to speak to manufacturers and suppliers, and took 10 trips to China in one year to visit factories and find partners. “
I had a bedside reading list of mechanical and electrical engineer books to garner respect — you don’t need to know everything, but you also can’t be an amateur, and I read 260 patent applications as I couldn’t afford a lawyer. At the same time I was working on the design of the machine itself — the brief was: what if a SMEG fridge and a Vespa had a baby?”
Kali had his first fwip machine prototype by 2019, with full connectivity, giving its maker insight into how many ice creams are sold, when, where, and weather insight to help makers maximise revenues. “But the first 500 machines delivered from China were built upside down,” the charismatic entrepreneur recalls grimly.
“So I had to send them back; splitting the cost rather than losing our manufacturing partner.” Later designs worked, however, and one of fwip’s first customers was Hilton Hotel Group — “we catered the desserts at one of its annual conferences, and from there we started supplying many of its London hotels.”
Today the firm has sold 2500 fwip machines, which can now be found in convenience stores, cafés and restaurants, gyms, schools, hospitals, and offices — including Kali’s old spot, UBS, as well as Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and LinkedIn HQs. The firm opened a 30,000sq ft logistics hub in Poland — “a forced move to address Brexit complexity and China manufacturing logistical challenges,” Kali says.
Last year, turnover hit £3 million; this year Kali says the firm is forecasting triple that figure as it launches in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Ireland and the Netherlands. “This business is just at its infancy. It took Nespresso over 30 years — we still have a long way to go before George Clooney joins our team.”