FROSTY BOY OUT TO LICK RIVALS IN FILIPINO MARKET
GOLD Coast exporter Frosty Boy is hoping to have the competition licked when it releases new products to the Philippines market, including cheese-flavoured soft serve.
The Yatala-based company is hoping to make further inroads into a country known for its love of food, and especially sweet food. It will shortly open its first remote office in Manila, with two sales staff and a research and development lab.
Frosty Boy, which has the slogan ‘Often licked, never beaten’, plans to rollout cheese, ube (purple yam) and buko pandan flavours to the Philippines in the next three months.
It already has a major presence in the market with Filipino fast-food chain Jollibee, which has 1000 outlets, a key customer.
Frosty Boy workers have been keenly developing new flavours to suit the palette of Filipino consumers for the past few months.
Procurement specialist Johanna Alfred, who hails from the Philippines, said the country’s food culture was unique because of its history as a Spanish and then American colony.
“The unique palette of Filipino flavours comes from the fusion of tropical, oriental and western flavours,” she said. “So we really do need to understand the market.”
Buko pandan, for example, refers to a range of desserts made using coconut (buko) combined with pandan leaves, which have a sweet taste and soft aroma.
Frosty Boy now exports its powder-based soft serve to more than 50 countries around world, recently entering the Italian, Jordanian and Liberian markets.
Managing director Dirk Pretorius said the company has to constantly innovate to keep up with consumers’ ever-evolving tastes. “It is one thing to manufacture a product but nowadays it is not enough, you have to innovate,” he said.
“Consumers are getting more demanding and want different products.”
Frosty Boy has recently developed a rose flavour for the Chinese market, melon for Malaysia, and butter pecan for the US.
Mr Pretorius said 70 per cent of the business came from exports.