As Calgarians gear up to beat the heat this summer, we’re looking at an age-old question: ice cream or gelato?
Ice cream has a richer, creamier texture, owing to its higher fat content and slower churning speed. Gelato has less fat and faster churn, making it smoother, denser, and more intensely flavored. The higher fat content in ice cream coats your tongue, muting the taste, while lighter gelato allows its flavours to shine.
In fact, gelato is renowned for its intense flavour profile! The richer, deeper, flavours are achieved with high quality ingredients like ripe strawberries, fresh pistachio, or Madagascar vanilla. Along with its rich taste, gelato comes with a history of ritual, craftsmanship, and community.
The first gelato traces its roots back to Renaissance Italy, but really took off in North America around the pandemic. Today, the global gelato market is valued at around $16.6 billion USD.
“When I first opened, nobody even knew what gelato was,” explains Dino, the founder of Calgary-based gelato chain Amato Gelato. “They thought I was selling Jell-O. I’ve used that line in a lot of interviews, but it’s true. The typical offerings were standard ice cream flavours. You couldn’t find traditional Italian flavours like pistachio, hazelnut, stracciatella, or amaretto. Nobody had that.”
To introduce gelato to the Calgary market, Dino offered a mix of familiar flavours—like cookies and cream, chocolate peanut butter, and white chocolate raspberry—in a gelato format, instead of traditional ice cream. Today, you will find 72 flavors of gelato, non-dairy sorbetto, and plant based and no sugar gelati.
“It added something for demographics looking for flavours that weren’t readily available. You’ve got Southeast Asian customers looking for durian or mango, South American customers looking for rum raisin, coconut mango, passion fruit—those weren’t available before,” Dino explains.
Today, Calgary’s ice cream and gelato industry has grown in a major way. There are 10–15 different locations from different brands in the city, and competition is high. But gelato is a global endeavor.
“Many operators didn’t grow up in this business,” Dino explains. “I’m fourth generation. We’ve been doing this in Canada for over 50 years and 97 years as a family. A lot of others came from corporate careers or dropped out of university to get into ice cream because it became fashionable. It says a lot about the business when people are willing to leave six-figure salaries or degrees to do this.”
For Dino, gelato is in his blood. His family has been producing gelato in their hometown of Amato in Calabria for generations, a small Italian town of about 500 people on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. When Dino’s uncle immigrated to Canada in the 1970s, he started Mario’s Gelati in Vancouver. Today, they supply thousands of restaurants across Canada, both national chains and independents.
“That’s what I’ve been doing in Calgary for the last 20 to 25 years,” Dino explains. “We’ve been distributing here for close to 30. When we built our factory in Vancouver in 1998, my uncle wanted to pay homage to our town and opened a gelato café inspired by what we had in Amato.”
Shifting consumer tastes, a more diverse population and increased interest in artisanal products have fuelled Calgarian’s taste for gelato. The dessert’s popularity is responsible for drawing new entrants, including professionals leaving other careers to enter into an increasingly competitive market.
It’s also a lucrative one: Amato Gelato is positioning itself for even more growth through a selective franchising model, with a third Calgary location (West Springs) almost finished construction and a fourth location secured. The company is focused on maintaining its quality and consistency through owner-operator partnerships, while scaling the concept of gelato in a full Italian café. This showcases both multi-generational roots in the business and evolving consumer demand for experiential food and beverage destinations.
He says the concept checks all the boxes for potential entrepreneurs who want to buy into the franchise model, or a burgeoning industry in the city – and gelato, with its distinct smoothness and rich flavour, won’t be going away any time soon.
