A Train Ride Helped Turn This Ice Cream From Local Treat to Global Sensation
Ice cream flavors (from left): dulce de leche, maracuyá (also known as passion fruit), and raspberry.
Photographer: Nicolas Nadjar for Bloomberg Businessweek
Moritz Fried has gone many extra miles for his ice cream. In 2013, five months after he opened Moritz Eis, the first premium, all-natural ice-cream shop in Belgrade, Serbia, he stored six sample flavors in an insulated box filled with dry ice and carried it on his lap for a 16-hour train ride to Prague.
He was taking the samples to Douglas Tompkins, the conservationist and co-founder of North Face Inc. and Esprit Holdings Ltd. They’d been friends since 2006, when Fried met him in Transylvania with a group of organic agriculturists. Tompkins, a certified ice-cream fanatic, wanted to taste Fried’s creations.