Ice cream today is more additives than food. This Bengaluru startup wants to change that

Ice cream was once milk, cream, sugar, and fruit. Now most tubs list polysorbates, carrageenan, CMC, mono and diglycerides, additives that extend shelf life and simplify manufacturing, but don't make the ice cream better.

ELVN-ELVN, founded in Bengaluru in 2024 by Barath Akkihebbal and Akash Narain Mittal, is built on the premise that none of that was ever necessary. The brand follows one rule: if it has an E number, it does not go into the ice cream. E numbers are codes assigned to chemical additives in food, covering preservatives, stabilisers, emulsifiers, and synthetic colourings. 

Akkihebbal has gluten intolerance and lactose sensitivity, and struggled to find something he could eat without affecting his health.

The co-founders bring decades of supply chain and distribution experience: Mittal through a distribution business serving Nestlé, ITC, and Parle; Akkihebbal through OfficeSmart, a corporate procurement business he founded in Bengaluru in 2013. Akkihebbal ran three ice cream parlour franchises, where his interest in the category began. That experience shaped how ELVN-ELVN was built.

The creations

The result is two ranges built on the same standard: the first, MILLET, is a vegan ice cream built on a blend of Indian millets, jowar, ragi, foxtail, and pearl, with coconut milk as a secondary ingredient, sweetened with whole dates, allulose, and monk fruit. Most monk fruit products use erythritol as a carrier; ELVN-ELVN's does not, citing emerging research linking the sugar alcohol to cardiovascular risk.

The MILLET range is dairy- and gluten-free, and comes in six flavours: Lush Litchi, Mango Tango, Coffee Scenes, Berry Me Up, Cosmic Coconut, and Blackout Fudge.

The second, SELECT, is a dairy ice cream made with A2 Desi cow milk and fresh cream, offered in flavours like Strawberry, Pink Guava, Choco Velvet, and Royal Alphonso. The founders say A2 milk is easier to digest than A1-dominant commercial dairy.

Both ranges sell in 125 ml cups at Rs 140 and 450 ml packs at Rs 400. Customers include those with lactose intolerance, gluten sensitivity, or diabetes, as well as anyone seeking cleaner ingredients. The ice cream's shelf life is capped at nine months. “A two-year ice cream tells you everything about what went into it,” Mittal says.

At a Soul Santé market in Bengaluru, a customer bought 14 cups, packed them in ice, and carried them 400 km to Tamil Nadu for their teacher, who was diabetic and had not been able to eat sweets in years. “We had a seven-or eight-year-old run up to us at a stall and ask, ‘Uncle, does this have sugar in it?’" Akkihebbal recalls. It is a question the founders say they are hearing more and more from all kinds of buyers.

Manufacturing is in-house at a South Bengaluru facility, where a proprietary millet-milk extraction process, developed with the National Institute of Food Technology Entrepreneurship and Management (NIFTEM-T), is kept closely guarded so the recipe isn't handed to an outside manufacturer. The plant's capacity exceeds 5,000 cups per day.

Millet is milled on-site from jowar sourced in Bijapur and ragi from Mandya. The A2 milk and fresh cream for SELECT come from indigenous-breed farms in Kabini. “We have tried to keep the entire raw material chain within Karnataka,” Mittal says. Cold-chain vehicles handle distribution from the same facility. 

Eleven months and 50 failed recipes

From February 2024 to January 2025, the founders chased one goal: ice cream that tasted right without added sugar, synthetic sweeteners, or industrial additives. Around 50 ingredient trials taught them why sugar matters: it alters freezing point, texture, and structure, swapping industrial stabilisers for natural alternatives added months to the process.

These tests were costly: every trial needed a minimum 90 kg run, failed batches were discarded, and early prototypes needed 45 minutes out of the freezer to soften. The effort produced results: ELVN-ELVN now has a 10-year MOU with NIFTEM-T for continued development. 

When natural replacements for traditional additives proved harder to find than expected, the founders turned to AI. They now run a ChatGPT instance trained on their recipe context. "ChatGPT gives a great answer, but you wish it could taste what came out," Akkihebbal says. Still, the tools kept progress moving.

AI supports much of the brand beyond R&D. The website was built on Claude; Instagram content and freezer branding use Claude for design, with brand guidelines from a human agency. “ChatGPT is my subconscious; Claude is my right-hand man,” Akkihebbal says.

Publishing full ingredient lists helped ELVN-ELVN appear in recommendations from large language models, including Gemini, an early sign that the market was finding them before they went looking for it.

Getting to market

ELVN-ELVN runs on a team of five: the two founders, a machinery operator, a delivery person, and an office manager, with logistics support from OfficeSmart. Commercial production began in January 2025. The company has sold out three batches, with a fourth in production, and is growing 50% month on month.

Distribution is currently through five Organic Mandya stores in Bengaluru, with two cafés recently added after customers asked for sugar-free options. The brand is also listed on Ownly, a zero-commission food delivery app by Rapido.

The broader market opportunity is significant: the Indian ice cream market was valued at Rs 243.50 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach Rs 639.41 billion by 2034, at a CAGR of 11.29%, according to IMARC Group. The clean-label segment includes Go Zero, NOTO, Get-A-Way, and The Brooklyn Creamery as its competitors.

Funding and future plans

ELVN-ELVN has raised a Rs 2 crore soft loan at around 6% interest under the Government of India’s PM FME (Pradhan Mantri Formalisation of Micro Food Processing Enterprises) scheme under the Aatmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan that provides financial, technical, and business support to unorganised micro food processing units, plus a Rs 15 lakh subsidy. The founders have invested Rs 70–80 lakh between them. No private investor funding has been raised.

The immediate priority is deepening distribution across Bengaluru, with a target of 300 supermarkets. Supermarket placement requires a dedicated freezer, which is capital-intensive. ELVN-ELVN has structured a micro-franchisee model: individuals buy freezers on behalf of the company and receive a monthly rental and a commission on sales. 

“We believe this is the first crowdfunded freezer model in the Indian ice cream category,” Akkihebbal says.

Expansion to Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi NCR, and Pune is in the pipeline. Dark stores across Bengaluru are also being built out to enable availability on Zomato and Swiggy. A D2C ordering system on the website is also in development.

“We started with ice cream, but the plan was always to build a clean-label food brand across multiple categories,” Mittal says. “The rule stays the same: if it has an E number, it does not go in.”