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At a busy shopping centre in Sydney’s inner west, staff at a gelato bar are making a smooth, creamy iced treat with fresh ripe pomegranates.
The golden orbs filed with red seeds are a delicacy in Iran, often used at the traditional Yalda celebrations held at mid-winter in the northern hemisphere, on or around December 21st.
Business founder Kaveh Arfai explains:
“We use pomegranate as a symbolic fruit, especially for Yalda, always in all the Persian families. Yalda actually is one of the main celebrations that we have in Persian culture. I think the philosophy behind it is because it's the longest night of the year and they say it's the darkest night of the year. So people don't want to be lonely during this longest night. So they sit down together, they have family time, they spend family time together until the sun comes back.”
Mr Arfai migrated to Australia in 2008, from his home in Tehran, the capital of Iran and says his homeland has a long history with this frozen treat.
“Italian gelato is an Italian product. However, in Iran for many, many years we had a different type of gelato, which is made with saffron, pistachio and cream.”
Enjoying a pistachio scoop, customer Sara Naghizadeh who migrated from Iran, says as a child, pistachio nuts featured at many family celebrations.
“Having pistachio right now in a gelato really takes me back to the days where in Iran we used to have pistachios in every occasion, every tradition and every celebration. Mom used to pack me pistcahios in my lunch box.”
It’s among the top flavours favoured by customers from Iran, says Mr Arfai who trained as a software engineer in Tehran.
After arriving in Sydney he initially started an e-commerce business selling wrist watches, and later branched out with a colleague into this gelato venture.
Its annual output has since grown rapidly.
“We sell around 200,000 liters of gelato, which is quite a lot. The business name used to be Cloud nine Gelato. Cloud nine means that you enjoy. But people started calling us C nine, so we said okay, maybe that's the right name for us.”
C9 now caters to a diverse range of tastes – with flavours designed to appeal to European, Middle Eastern and Asian customers.
“Matcha, black sesame, taro, durian. Sometimes they are very popular in the Asian community. We are not just purely Italian gelato. We are not Asian kind of dessert or ice cream bar. We mix all the cultures.”
It’s a winning recipe for success that has led to rapid expansion - despite the challenging economic conditions.
“In last 12 months we had a great year. Everything was ready for explosion, which happened to our business and we opened 14 shops in 12 months. Now we have 23 shops across Australia. We've got shops in Melbourne, we've got shops in Sydney. obviously we would like to expand it to all Australia. We have more in Queensland coming, regional Victoria and let's see, maybe Perth!”
So far Mr Arfai says the vast majority of C9 franchises are owned by migrants.
“At the moment, yes, there are 80 per cent Persian people. It's word of mouth. We didn't want to make it exclusively for Persian people but it just happened - but we are open to all the other cultures and like to have other cultures in our group.”
However, having conquered the diverse tastes of Australia Mr Arfai now has his sights set on distant horizons.
“In five-year plan, we have the plan to go to New Zealand, east Asia, middle East, and US. We wanted to make something Australian to expand and export it to other countries as an Australian culture, which is a multiculture.”
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