Icy Hot

South America’s fastest-growing ice-cream brand was born in Serbia

- Javiera Quiroga

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, 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. 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.

The journey paid off. Tompkins loved the flavors, which ranged from vanilla, dark chocolate, and raspberry to orange-ginger, lemon-mint, and blackberry-lavender blends. The two agreed on a venture in which Fried would bring

the business to Chile, where Tompkins then lived. (He died in a 2015 kayaking accident.) It would be the first stage of an expansion into the Americas.